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IBM poised to tie up with Japan's NTT - report US-based computer giant IBM Corp. is expected to seal an alliance with a unit of Japanese telecom titan Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT) on Oct. 31. According to a Reuters report quoting sources, IBM will tie up with NTT Comware in a $12-14 billion 10-year arrangement to provide outsourced information technology services, consulting and systems integration to NTT. Such a deal would be by far IBM's largest outsourcing contract in Japan and a
significant entry into the telecom sector of the Asia Pacific outsourcing
market. Motorola and Telsim, Turkey's fastest-growing GSM operator, have signed a
Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) agreement for the supply and deployment of a
third generation (3G) mobile network capable of providing advanced multimedia
services. Motorola estimates that the potential value of the contract could be
in excess of $2 billion. The new function, available in the old US West Wireless territory, will provide voice-activated access to such information as news, traffic information, driving directions and weather over wireless phones. The move marks another critical endorsement for the young voice-portal business, which has attracted considerable attention from investors and Web companies, but has yet to filter into the mass-market consciousness. The voice-activated Net idea is gaining ground as companies look for an
alternative to wireless data. Bandwidth limitations and difficult-to-use
interfaces have kept consumer adoption of mobile data services slow, although
analysts say this will improve as new technologies bring faster download speeds
and more intuitive interfaces to phones. The software, CommerceSight 2.0, will be marketed to manufacturers of industrial equipment such as power plants or locomotives, as well as to companies that buy and operate such heavy equipment. Enigma said it will also announce agreements to sell the updated version of the software to two jet-engine makers: Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut, and a French-based affiliate of General Electric. CommerceSight resembles other content-management packages in enabling various computer users to access and share technical information quickly. The software is used to keep track of information stored on programs such as word processors or computer-aided design systems, and to send the information to separate organizations. For instance, an airline could use the program to access files created by aircraft makers.
Since the Net has been built largely on the model of television, where commercials are supposed to pay for all those free shows, the widespread spurning of ads is raising new concerns about the viability of many online enterprises. Whether it be the portal site Yahoo, online advertiser Doubleclick, or search engines like Ask Jeeves Inc., many tech stocks have fallen sharply in recent weeks because of concerns over the future of Internet advertising. Web surfers go to a site because there is something they want to see or do; if they click on a banner ad, they often are sent to a new site, redirected away from what brought them to their initial destination. Why would they want to do that? If you eliminate sweepstakes and similar ads, which reportedly have much higher click-throughs, analysts say that the average probably falls to only a handful of people out of every 10,000 who view an ad. But while experts may debate whether certain ad strategies are effective, few doubt that Net advertising overall will continue to grow. From a paltry $175 million in 1996 online, advertising rose to $3.6 billion last year and might do double that this year. By 2005, according to an estimate by the investment banking firm Lehman Brothers Inc., it will be $32.3 billion - almost as big as radio and magazines put together, and just shy of cable TV and direct mail.
Vendors are responding to the demand with bigger -- and what they claim are better -- SAN switches that move storage traffic between SAN servers and users at gigabit speeds. Hoping to join McData Corp. (Broomfield, Col.) at the market's very high end, Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (San Jose) last week took the wraps off a new 64-port switch and revealed a product roadmap squarely targeted at service providers and very large corporations looking to scale their storage capacity over time. Brocade's Silkworm 6400 is made up of six integrated switch modules which are compatible with existing Brocade products. The Silkworm 6400 also comes with Web-based SAN monitoring software developed by Veritas Software which integrates with SNMP management consoles. Beyond its cost and scalability, the Silkworm 6400 also includes two other crucial features--redundancy and high reliability. Redundancy is built into the switch fabric to remove any single point of failure. Brocade also claims 99.999 percent availability. The switch, which is part of Brocade's strategy to continue to rollout modular, high-port density products, will ship in March of 2001
The chip maker officially announced its 760 chip set, along with three new high-end Athlon processors, running at 1GHz, 1.13GHz and 1.2GHz. Company officials say the upshot will be improvements in the performance of PCs based on the new Athlon chip set over current models based on the Athlon chip. The first PCs based on its 760 chip set should begin shipping in late November, according to Tim Wright, who directs product marketing at AMD. AMD claims the machines will match PCs built with Intel's
forthcoming Pentium 4 processor in performance. U.N. panel
slaps cybersquatter in AltaVista case
The World Intellectual Property Organization ruled Monday that a company based
in Panama and Latvia must turn over 43 domain names to Web portal AltaVista
Co. The domains, which included alsavista.com, altavifta.com, and
altadista.com, were found to be a violation of trademarks and registered in
bad faith, violations of the terms of service under which domains are
registered.
It was only the latest in a string of cases in which the U.N. copyright and intellectual property agency ruled against cybersquatters. It has ruled on about 1,400 of these cases since January, when it became one of four arbitration bodies charged with settling domain-name disputes. Decisions by the panel may be appealed in court, but the system provides a quick and cheap alternative for clear-cut cases of cybersquatting.
AMD ups Athlon ante with high-speed memory support TVs will carry bulk of broadband’s services According to a report from
Forrester Research, Inc., that giant screen TV is still going to be the focus of
a lot of living rooms in the near future. Forrester said that by 2003 broadband
content will be divided sharply by device— PCs will comprise one-half of all
broadband devices, while TVs and game consoles will dominate the other half.
Multimedia-focused entertainment will gravitate toward TVs and gaming consoles,
while streaming interactive content and software updates will flow to PCs. In 2005, 191 million devices will connect by broadband. PCs will constitute only one-third (36 percent) of these devices, but 70 million high-speed-enabled computers will still need their own content. As other devices siphon away multimedia content, consumers will use PCs only for complex, highly interactive tasks and software downloads.
The number of high-speed Internet hookups in the US rose 57 percent in the first six months of the year and the rural subscriber rate is rising rapidly, the Federal Communications Commission reported today. By June 30, about 4.3 million homes and small businesses subscribed to
high-speed Internet service, up from 2.8 million at the end of 1999. About 2.8
million of the lines packed speeds in excess of 200 kilobits per second (kbps)
in both directions, meeting the FCC's definition of advanced services, compared
to 2 million at the end of last year. Entertainment titan Bertelsmann AG and rogue music site Napster have agreed to compose a membership-based file-sharing service and invited other music industry heavyweights to join them, the companies announced today. Once Napster gets the service up and running, Bertelsmann's music division, BMG, will drop its copyright infringement lawsuit against Napster and make its music catalogue available, the alliance says. BMG is among five major recording labels that have sued Napster. The companies urged other labels to accept Napster as a widely accepted member service and asked for their participation in the process. The service will retain the Napster experience, but will compensate artists, songwriters, recording companies and music publishers. The pricing model has yet to be worked out, but Napster CEO Hank Barry said
payments to rights holders would be "large." Whether Napster plans to
charge users to download music files or how that would be carried out was not
spelled out, so for now users continue to get music for free. Internet capacity will hit
bottleneck International Internet capacity will hit a bottleneck in as little as two
years. The root of the problem is technical. On domestic cables, which run
across land, carriers can put as many as 432 optical fibre pairs inside one
insulated cable — a very large amount of bandwidth. However, when it comes to
cables that run under the sea, protection from the water, shielding and other
limitations mean a maximum of six fiber pairs can be built into each cable.
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