APPLE BUNDLES MICROSOFT SUITE FOR EUROPE, CONSIDERS BE BUYOUT
Apple Computer and Microsoft Corp. have formed a partnership to market
Apple's Power Macintosh 7600 and 8200 machines equipped with Microsoft's
Office suite software. "We have to grow together in an industry which is
maturing," says Apple Europe's VP of sales. (Investor's Business Daily 29
Aug 96 A5) Meanwhile, Apple is negotiating the possible purchase of Be
Inc., an innovative desktop computer manufacturer headed by former Apple
research director Jean-Louis Gassee. The Be system is considered by experts
to be a "boutique" item -- a cutting-edge but robust and reliable system
built to handle advanced multimedia and graphics functions. (Wall Street
Journal 29 Aug 96 B3)
NAVIGATOR SETS SAIL ON OS/2
A new version of Netscape's Navigator software for browsing the World Wide
Web will run on IBM's OS/2 operating system, which now has built-in
speech-recognition capabilities that will allow users to call up sites on
the Internet with voice commands. (New York Times 29 Aug 96 C6)
NBA SUES AOL
The National Basketball Association has sued America Online over its use of
game scores and statistics from NBA games in progress. The lawsuit, which
also names Stats Inc. as a co-defendant, contends that AOL supplied
real-time, play-by-play information without the league's permission. The
legal issue at stake is whether game information constitutes intellectual
property owned by the sports league involved. Broadcast rights to that
information are sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, but online
providers maintain such information constitutes news, which is free to
disseminate. (Wall Street Journal 29 Aug 96 B3)
SONY DELAYS DVD ROLLOUT
Sony Corp. will not introduce its digital video disc players until next
spring, citing a lack of software for the new machines. DVDs, which
eventually will replace CDs and videotape, are capable of storing seven to
14 times as much information as those media. Disputes over copyright
protection have been blamed for the software delays. "I always doubted
whether bringing it out before Christmas was that crucial," says an analyst
at Goldman Sachs. "It's going to take five years for it to grow into a
major product." (Investor's Business Daily 29 Aug 96 A5)
THE ONE SEARCH
Inference Find's parallel search engine simultaneously searches all the
major search engines, including Yahoo!, Lycos and InfoSeek, and eliminates
the duplicate findings, clustering the information into content type and
organizing it according to user preferences. Check out <
http://www.inference.com/ > and click on "InFind." (Information Week 19 Aug
96 p12)
BELLSOUTH TO OFFER INTERNET ACCESS
BellSouth will join several of its RBOC siblings in offering Internet access
to business and residential customers in its service region. The new
BellSouth.net service is immediately available in Atlanta and New Orleans,
and will be expanded to eight other regions in October. The company will
charge $19.95 a month for unlimited usage, or $9.95 for 10 hours with each
additional hour costing $1. (Wall Street Journal 28 Aug 96 B3)
Edupage is written by John Gehl <gehl@educom.edu> & Suzanne Douglas
<douglas@educom.edu>. Voice: 404-371-1853, Fax: 404-371-8057.