The war of words between Harris Computer Systems Inc and Concurrent Computer Corp is becoming a case of who did what to whom, because Concurrent is now claiming that it was Concurrent, not Harris that would have been the acquiring company in any deal; meantime Harris wants to woo Concurrent shareholders over to the idea of combining the firms.
Millicom International Cellular SA’s Liberty Communications Ltd on Friday won a UK government licence to provide fixed telephone and multimedia services and has been awarded 168MHz of radio spectrum: Liberty says it plans to offer telephone services with Centrex, data communications and call management features; it will also offer colour facsimile and video telephony, and entertainment services such as video-on-demand, using broadband Code Division Multiple Access digital cellular technology, enabling it to share spectrum with other radio operators; the Liberty system will use a small antenna at the customer’s premises, which will send and receive signals from base stations.
Unisource Mobile, part of Unisource BV, has teamed with Motorola Inc and local cellular telephone distributor Sigma Wireless Ltd to form the equally-owned Persona consortium to bid for the second digital cellular licence on offer in Eire.
You can’t keep these things quiet when they get to Brussels, and the European Commission has revealed that Dassault Electronique SA and IBM France SA’s Compagnie Generale d’Informatique SA plan to put CGI’s CR2A-DI computerised defence systems company into a joint venture.
Deutsche Telekom AG is to allow competitors access to its Intelsat satellite communications network.
Shares in British Telecommunications Plc were off on Friday after Nynex Cablecomms UK Ltd announced it was cutting local call charges to 25% below British Telecom tariffs – but things are not always as they seem, and attrition of cable phone customers has been high because of the poor service for which US cable operators are notorious – another UK cable operator reportedly lost 17% of its phone subscribers last year; BT cannot compete with Nynex by adjusting its tariffs as it would have to do that nationwide, James Golob, analyst at S G Warburg – by coincidence the bank bringing Nynex CableComms to market – its hands are tied and the market can see that, he declared.
AST Research Inc remained the top personal computer vendor in China in 1994, Dataquest says: it reckons AST sold about 140,000 machines in 1994 representing a 21.5% share, ahead of Compaq Computer Corp with 113,000 units or 17.4% of the market, which overall grew about 66.7% to 650,000 units; IBM Corp took fourth place with a 7% share, up from just 1.4% in 1993, and China’s Legend Co was above it at three.
Intuit Inc is offering free updated versions of its TurboTax and MacInTax programs to correct flaws that cause errors when they are used to calculate customers’ income taxes: it says all MacInTax users that import data from other applications, such as Quicken, should obtain the new software, and the bug will affect any user of MacInTax or TurboTax that has only disability income; is taking a section 179 deduction for a car; is estimating payments for the 1995 tax year; or is depreciating an asset in the final year of its depreciable life. – o – Intuit Inc chairman Scott Cook said the company let its customers down when it failed to act quickly to notify purchasers of its Turbotax and MacInTax software that a bug was causing problems in tax calculations: the firm apologised and will pay any penalties and interest due the Internal Revenue Service.
PhoneLink Plc announced that it is in discussions for British Telecommunications Plc to include PhoneLink’s Tel-Me software in its line.
IBM Credit Corp has turned the convertible subordinated promissory note it received from Comdisco Inc as part of their legal settlement into 1m new Comdisco common shares and these were immediately bought back by the Rosemont, Illinois leaser for $25m, for cancellation.
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>Nq Motorola Inc’s total investments in China will reach $1,500m by 2000, China Daily quotes the company’s chief executive Gary Tooker saying.
X terminal specialist Human Designed Systems Inc, King of Prussia, Pennsylvania is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of quoted Information Systems Acquisition Corp, which is promising plenty of confusion by changing its name to HDS Network Systems Inc; it was formed for the purpose of buying a computer company, and all its officers have resigned apart from chairman Arthur Spector who will retain that post.
Why are American lawyers so widely reviled and detested? We have frequently fulminated against parasitic shareholder lawsuits brought against high-technology companies and their officers just trying to run their businesses the best way they can, and now the American Electronics Association has come up with some numbers to back up the unanswerable case against what it estimates is a $2,400m annual industry effectively representing an enormous hidden tax on doing business as a publically-traded company: its survey of the top 100 high-growth Silicon Valley companies found that one in two had been blackmailed with a securities class action lawsuit, that there are on average 300 such suits filed each year, and that nearly 93% are settled out of court to avoid endless diversion of management time and effort, the average settlement being for $8.6m, a third of which goes to the lawyers; the suits suffered by the companies in the survey had alone cost nearly $500.
Tektronix Inc is ready with a new colour desktop printer that it claims is faster and cheaper than competing technologies: the new Phaser 340, to be available from today at $5,000, prints four pages per minute on ordinary office paper, colour paper or transparency film for overhead projection, and uses colour ink sticks; there is an optional $1,700 scanner that turns the printer into a colour copier.
UK cable and local telephony operator Bell Cablemedia Plc says net losses for 1994 were ú26.4m, up from ú5.5m in 1993; the company, 44.2% owned by Bell Canada Inc, says that by the end of the year it had laid cable past 26% of the 2.1m homes within its franchise areas, and has 89,500 equity cable television subscribers by the end of the year and 65,200 equity phone lines.
Dell Computer Corp appointed Klaus Luft, owner and president of German company Match GmbH, to its board: Luft took over at Nixdorf Computer AG when founder Heinz Nixdorf died, but left after the company went into a tailspin as changes in the market ravaged its main business.
IBM Japan Ltd introduced six models of the Aptiva home computers: the cheapest costs $1,890 mail order. – o – Apropos the drainage works that cut three British Telecommunications Plc fibre optic cables near Banbury, Oxfordshire on Thursday, disrupting calls between London and the North, knocking out the universities’ high-speed Janet network, people recalling that the Internet, on which Janet is modelled, was designed to withstand a nuclear war are being being advised that this was the wrong kind of nuclear war.
