There are 15 bidders lined up to pitch for a licence to operate Austria’s second private Groupe Speciale Mobile telephone network says WirtschaftsWoche: they are Vodafone Group Plc; the Austrocom consortium – including Mannesmann Mobilfunk GmbH and RWE Energie AG; BellSouth Corp, US West Inc, Ameritech Inc, Bell Atlantic Corp, Deutsche Telecom AG, Telecom Finland International, France Telecom and the United Telecom Austria alliance of regional electricity generators.
Sorry! is Sun Microsystems Inc’s dusty answer to those hopeful Sparcsystem builders that want access to its ZX and low-end 24-bit three-dimensional graphics drivers.
Pleasanton, California-based Documentum Inc, maker of document management software, has opened aFrench division, Documentum France.
Mercury One-2-One Ltd and E-Plus Mobilfunk GmbH have provided what they claim is the first public demonstration of international roaming between two commercial mobile phone networks employing DCS 1800 technology: the demonstration was a result of a project between the two to offer a Personal Communications Network service to some of the delegates attending the ISS ’95 World Telecommunication Congress in Berlin, at the end of which they all travelled to London for an event staged by Northern Telecom Ltd.
Oracle Corp spent $1m to have four consultants come up with 40 suggestions about how it could get its applications business on to the fast-track, claims Information Week: chief executive Larry Ellison reportedly rejected hiving off a separate applications business.
Tivoli Systems Inc is offering up a set of Applications Management Specification programming interfaces for integrating applications for use with its Tivoli Management System distributed management environment: Tivoli will deliver an Applications Management module later in the year for SAP AG which will cost $9,000 per R3 server; an implementation of PowerBuilder is also set; initial Applications Management Specification specs are due July.
Open Software Foundation chief scientist Ira Goldstein’s Research Institute is offering a bunch of World Wide Web technologies at http://www.osf.org/: Ariadne is a prototype browser with a back channel for remote control through TCP/IP and a graphical history tree; WebMail; DCE Web is for document distribution (which requires a DCE licence); OreO is for building Web-based transactions; and Group Server is a prototype Web server.
AT&T Corp has applied to Illinois and Michigan regulators for approval to offer local telephone service in Chicago and in Grand Rapids, Michigan: it wants to be certified as a provider of local service, both through its own facilities and through the resale of local service, in the Chicago metropolitan area and the western part of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, and promises to allow residents and businesses to keep their current phone number.
Milpitas, California-based Adaptec Inc has licensed Apple Computer Inc’s FireWire serial bus, which offers isochronous data transfer rates as fast as 400Mbps and also offers a common easy connection to consumer electronic and computer peripherals, including digital video cameras and optical disk drives.
Digital Equipment Corp has signed to put Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp’s Freedom Series graphics accelerators up on its Alphastations running Digital Unix and OpenGL.
Cambridge Technology Partners Inc’s office in the UK has moved to bigger premises in Richmond-upon-Thames, Surrey to be able to cope with its planned growth rate of 140%, resulting from major contract wins in the UK: plans are to increase the number of employees to 60 by year-end from the current 40.
The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority is migrating to a Microsoft Corp Windows NT system and is ditching the current provider of its financial software, Dun & Bradstreet Software, in favour of Platinum Software Corp, which will provide systems serving 400 users, based on Sequent Computer Corp Winservers.
ICL Plc will be the prime cont
ractor in a ú2m deal to provide Nottinghamshire Police with a command and control system that will help manage incidents, analyse crime and deploy resources: it will integrate a POLiS Command and Control system from Fortek Computers with a Geographical Information System from Genesys II Ltd; the system will reside on 24 TeamServers and 300 police will access it via Digital Equipment Corp personal computers.
National Australia Life Company Ltd, a life assurance provider with offices in the UK, has gone to ICL Plc and Intuitive Systems Ltd for a point of sale system for its UK life and pensions operations in a deal worth ú1.3m: Intuitive provides the software, ICL will manage the integration of the systems.
Concurrent Computer Corp reports sales to two of Europe’s defence research bodies: the Defence Research Agency in Farnborough, Hampshire and the Centre d’Essais des Propulseurs – Propulsion Test Centre – in Saclay, France; both have bought the Maxion multiprocessors.
Definitely one for the believe it or don’t category, and it gives a whole new meaning to the Star Wars concept: according to the Financial Times, the US Patent Office, which seems to have a way of granting patents in response to ludicrously inappropriate applications, has granted TRW Inc a patent on the concept of the Medium Earth Orbit satellite, which provides continuous global coverage if you put the birds into the right orbits between 5,600 and 10,000 nautical miles above the earth – and unfortunately, that is the configuration Inmarsat-P wants to use for its planned global phone system: no doubt if you choose an orbit at 5,599 miles the birds plunge to earth and burn up and at 10,001 miles, they shoot off into deep space, but it seems unlikely that any other country has granted such a patent, which suggests that TRW and its backers will have to try to shoot the birds down as they cross the US if Inmarsat does not want to pay up; alternatively, Inmarsat could try to patent the concept in another jurisdiction such as Russia and force TRW into a non-aggression pact and a cross-licence agreement.