Sharp Corp says its Sharp Laboratories of Europe Ltd in Oxford, has developed prototype displays for three-dimensional moving images that could provide a viable basis for high quality television: the system uses two liquid crystal display panels at right angles with a half-silvered mirror at 45o between them to combine the images; it has done 14 and 8.6 versions.
Cray Research Inc reports that the US Department of Defense has ordered a C916 supercomputer system as part of its modernisation programme under a contract that, with related equipment, is valued at over $45m.
MFS Communications Co Inc has agreed a co-carrier pact with Nynex Corp that covers number portability, reciprocal compensation and other arrangements to open up local telephone competition, and says it is the first of its kind between a regional Bell operating company and a competitor; the deal means that New York residents have a choice of local operator, and MFS has now moved in on Bell Atlantic Corp in New Jersey, applying to the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities for a licence to provide basic local exchange services in New Jersey, focusing initially on northern New Jersey and the Delaware Valley.
Thrifty Tel Inc clearly wasn’t thrifty enough: the Garden Grove, California telecommunications reseller has discontinued operations and laid off all its employees after Pacific Bell Inc, one of its major telephone line suppliers, discontinued service so that Thrifty’s customers were not able to complete telephone calls; as reported, the company filed Chapter 11 papers at the end of last year.
Sunnyvale, California-based Telebit Corp cut prices of its NetBlazer modems by $200 to $600; price cuts apply to NetBlazer PN1, PN1 Hub, NetBlazer PN2 Hub, PN4 and PN4 Hub.
Digital Equipment Corp has tapped John McClelland from the IBM Personal Computer Co to be its vice-president, worldwide manufacturing and logistics for its Personal Computer Business Unit; he had been vice-president, worldwide manufacturing and logistics at the IBM arn.
France Telecom, having modified the code of ethics for providers of Teletel or Audiotel services, said last week it cancelled 74 services, bringing the total services cancelled since 1989 to 400: the operator eliminated services for various offences, including overcharging and operating those Santa Claus services aimed at luring children into spending all of their free time on the Minitel; it noted that the Minitel’s pornographic Rose services are no longer its principal worry as they now represent only 5% of all messaging on the system.
Taiwan’s unlisted Chung Hwa Picture Tubes Ltd, 88.5% owned by Tatung Co, says it will soon start building a $270m cathode ray tube plant in Taiwan with Toshiba Corp offering technology for 28 to 32 tubes; completion is seen in 1997.
French Geographical Information Systems company Apic Systemes SA has decided to use the object database from compatriot O2 Technology SA in Versailles, in developing a Unix version of its Apic geographic information system, saying that it decided that object technology is best adapted to managing the complex, voluminous geographical data.
Despite the slowing of growth in the fourth quarter, MCI Communications Corp chief financial officer Doug Maine told Reuters he believes MCI added a half point to its market share during 1994, but made no net gain in the fourth quarter – it began 1994 with 20%, analysts say.
The Honeywell Europe unit of Honeywell Inc acquired the ESS Group, a South African company specialising in energy and management control systems for commercial buildings.
Prodigy Services Co says it is now receiving more than 10,000 sign-ups a day for its World Wide Web link.
Daimler-Benz Aerospace AG’s Dornier unit had signed co-operation agreements with Orion Atlantic Inc in the field of satellite-based corporate networks: they plan to combine Orion’s satellite Orion 1 and Dornier’s experience in satellite networks to offer multinational organ
isations a flexible high performance and economical means for global multimedia communications.
Steria SA, one of France’s largest software and systems engineering companies, has bought out IBM Corp’s 49% of their Isthme joint venture: Isthme, with annual revenues of some $4m, publishes multimedia viewdata services, mainly in the banking and financial services markets in France; Steria said the company, which employs 25, would reinforce its Steria Banques multimedia systems integration division.
Powertrain Operations unit of Ford Motor Co has bought $2.1m of computer-aided design-automation and data management software products and services from Computervision Corp, of Bedford, Massachusetts.
Venezuala’s privatisation agency plans to sell more of the CANTV phone company in the third quarter, reducing the government’s stake to 17%: the first phase of the CANTV sell-off was completed in 1991, when a consortium led by GTE Corp bought 40% and employees took 11%.
Michel Gofman, new technology manager for traditional book publisher Flammarion, told Computergram at Milia ’95 that it has not yet done any art books on CD-ROM because the screen resolution is just not good enough: one really shouldn’t mock people’s intelligence – let’s face it, a VGA screen just can’t do it and nobody has a 20 Macintosh screen with 8 Megabytes of memory.
NEC Corp has introduced the first Japanese-language models of Pentium processor-based colour notebook personal computers – up to now, if you wanted a Pentium, you had to put up with English-language models but the new PC-9821Nf comes in two models with 810Mb or 340Mb disks, at $7,900 and $6,900; NEC set its first-year sales target at 30,000; NEC sold 117,000 colour notebooks between October and December 1994, up 191% over a year earlier, and in total, sold 450,000 PC9800 series machines during the three months, an increase of 50% from a year ago; it had been planning to sell 1.7m machines in the fiscal year to March, 24% up on last fiscal, but now it expects growth to be 30%.
IBM France SA named Bernard Dufau, 53, as chairman to replace Claude Andreuzza, who died on January 10 after an illness: Dufau, who joined IBM France in 1966, rose to be managing director in December after implementing the new vertical market-oriented structure Europewide.
CellularVision Technology & Telecommunications LP, Freehold, New Jersey has granted Andrade Gutierrez Telecomunicacoes Ltda of Rio De Janeiro exclusive rights to use its patented CellularVision technology to provide a variety of broadband services throughout Brazil, where the government has granted initial licences to Andrade Gutierrez Telecomunicacoes to provide communications services in the cities of Sao Paulo, Rio De Janeiro and Brasilia.
Gemplus SA, the French manufacturer of Smart Cards, reported a 43.6% increase in its revenues last year, to approximately $200m: without divulging exact figures, the company said its net profit grew by a similar amount: three quarters of its business came from exports, totalling 140m cards; it invested $26m last year to achieve production capacity of 20m cards a month. – o – Aquazone, the Japanese program that caused such excitement last year – it turns a Macintosh into a tropical fish tank – is now available in the US at $50 from Tecsys Computer Inc of Newport Beach, California: you have to be diligent because an incorrect setting for the temperature or feeding schedule will kill the fish, each of which has a name, a pedigree and for which the company charges about $2 – but if a fish dies, you just go and get another one from the back-up disk.
Mitel Corp, Kanata, Ontario is preparing to announce alliances with major personal computer manufacturers that plan to embed Mitel telephone technology into their machines, Mitel president John Millard told Reuters: Millard traces Mitel’s success to a decision the company made a few years ago to transform its large PABX into a smaller modular unit – with a more modular design, the unit ca
n be broken up and dispersed throughout the company, with the modules connected with fibre optic cabling; the company reckons the monolithic PABX is the thing of the past, and is now planning to move to the desktop by getting manufacturers to build its telephone switching technology into the desktop computer; Mitel is now financially sound, and has some $70m in cash and no debt.
Gossip across the Atlantic has Walt Disney Co dumping much of the existing software on its substantial base of AS/400s and replacing it with the Business 400 suite of Birmingham-based JBA Holdings Plc.
AST Research Inc chairman and chief executive Safi Qureshey told Reuters that the big but overstretched personal computer company is targeting a return to profits by its fiscal fourth quarter, and will possibly break even in the current third quarter – AST aims at least to halve its second-quarter losses.
Raytheon Co has tapped Digital Equipment Corp to help out with the Mission Computer upgrade initiative on the US Navy’s E-2C Hawkeye carrier-based, all-weather surveillance aircraft: under terms of the multi-year multi-million dollar agreement, DEC will deliver the MLS+ secure Unix operating system running on a Raytheon-reengineered DEC AlphaServer 2100; the Mission Computer will feature Raytheon-reengineered Alpha-based embedded controllers that will perform communication and control functions.
Melville, New York-based Arrow Electronics Inc is still buying to expand its worldwide distribution empire, and its latest catch is Ally Inc, a Taiwanese distributor of electronic components in Taipei.
The IBM Personal Computer Co says it recorded its second consecutive year of 400% growth in unit personal computer sales in China and says it can grow even faster this year: according to Reuter, official Chinese media have said the market is growing 30% a year and hit an estimated 600,000 units in 1994.
AirTouch Communications Inc is aghast to discover that although it wasn’t even born when the AT&T Corp anti-trust consent decree came into effect, and despite the fact that, having been spun off by Pacific Telesis Group Inc, it now has no connection with any Baby Bell, it is still subject to the modified consent decree according to the US Justice Department: that means that it cannot manufacture or offer long-distance service, and it is urgently appealing to Judge Harold Greene to say that Justice has got it wrong; one of the reasons AirTouch was spun off from Pacific Telesis was so it could have the flexibility needed to compete in the global marketplace; if Judge Greene decides Justice is right, AirTouch will have to close down its fledgling long-distance and satellite services businesses, and curtail its design and development efforts on wireless technology. – o – Bennett LeBow’s Brooke Group Ltd has given up on its ill-fated MAI Basic Four adventure and is to cut the company loose: it says it plans to spin off its 65% stake in MAI Systems Corp through a special dividend to Brooke shareholders.
Microsoft Corp has signalled no change in the product strategy of its multimedia authoring of SoftImage Inc now that the Canadian company is owned by Microsoft: it has joined the Silicon Graphics Inc Silicon Studio Keystone initiative to support the Mountain View workstation builder’s integrated-development environment for content creation, and says that it plans Keystone-compatible releases of Softimage 3D animation software, Softimage Toonz two-dimensional cel-animation software, and Softimage Eddie paint and compositing software.
Belgacom NV says that its Proximus cellular unit exceeded its 1994 subscriber targets and should make a profit this year: during 1994 it signed up 67,000 subscribers, 10% ahead of the company’s forecasts.
Apple Computer Inc is to host its first technology conference for Asian developers in Singapore on March 28 and 29: the conference is intended to complement Apple’s new strategy of licensing Mac OS.
Hewlett-Packard Co’s board authorissed
additional expenditure of $750m for open-market repurchases of its shares, bringing the current authorised total to about $840m.
FiveCom Inc, Waltham, Massachusetts is building NEON, the New England Optical Network by installing fibre optic lines along the electric distribution and transmission routes of the three operating companies of Northeast Utilities – Connecticut Light & Power Co, Western Massachusetts Electric Co and Public Service Co of New Hampshire, and plans to sell capacity on the network wholesale: the NEON backbone runs from Stamford, Connecticut to Sanford, Maine and all points in between, including New Haven, Hartford, Springfield, Keene, Manchester, Nashua, and Portsmouth; and separate loops will be built as links into New London, Danbury, Waterbury, Lee and Pittsfield.
Hong Kong Telecommunications Ltd denied a South China Morning Post report that it would miss its profit targets and that a recent internal document sent to staff called for cost-cutting to address the problem: What was meant by targets in the article was part of a continuing process to address the cost base and the mechanism for controlling expenditure to strengthen competitiveness, the company said, telling Reuters it did not think it was missing its profit targets.
Philips Electronics NV’s Philips Telecom unit is cutting 200 jobs at its plant in Cambridge, which makes mobile radio and paging equipment.
Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG began its $16-per-share tender offer for Pyramid Technology Corp.
A Lebanese mission to the US this week will investigate ways of establishing a mini-Silicon Valley in the war-ravaged country and hopes to persuade US-based Lebanese expatriates to return home and help with the effort, Reuter reports.
So farewell then, Telecomputing – Gresham Telecomputing Plc – results report in page five – is to change its name to Gresham Computing Plc.
The top brass does not visit computer shows just to press the flesh – they can be a crucial source of competitive analysis, reports the Wall Street Journal: two years ago, Michael Dell learned when he visited Comdex that the notebooks Dell had on the drawing board weren’t competitive with products already available, which led to that big hiatus in the company’s business – and Rod Canion lost his job running Compaq Computer Corp in 1991 after chairman Ben Rosen secretly sent two middle managers to investigate why upstarts were undercutting Compaq’s prices so drastically and after studying the competition, the pair was able to buy parts on the floor and assemble two complete machines in a hotel room for just a fraction of what it cost Compaq…
