The Chinese government will allow Prodigy to offer service in China, as the ChinaNet service from the Ministry of Posts & Telecommunications is having trouble keeping up with demand. ChinaNet has 100K subscribers, and Prodigy expects the same in 18 months. They will work with China North Industries, in a venture called Shanghai Prodigy Telecommunications Inc., to develop Chinese-language online content for the public and for guests in Shanghai hotels. [WSJ, 29Apr97. EP.] (Chinese-language content, with alphanumeric keyboards? This may be a big market for speech recognition.)

German and other European companies are increasingly willing to paying young UK programmers up to $3,200 a week for Java, database, or Internet skills. The programmers are hired for three-month projects. [Financial Times, 25Apr97. EP.]

Thailand is offering incentives for computer software investors. . [Network News, 08Mar97.]

Paragraph International has been hired to produce 3D content for Microsoft's Magic Resort. 12 locations are currently planned, including Moscow's Red Square. Virtual reality "visitors" will be able to interact with character actors (e.g., street artists) at the sites. Microsoft is also licensing Paragraph's VRML technology and the Digital Ink handwriting recognition that Paragraph developed for Apple's Newton. A free version of Digital Ink for Windows CE handhelds is offered at the Paragraph website. The company has about 50 employees in Cupertino and 120 in Moscow. "People just didn't realize the limits of technology. If Apple had had the MessagePad 2000 four years ago, the entire history of our company would have been different." [Tom Quinlan, SJM, 22Apr97, 1C.]

ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Laboratories (Kyoto) has been having success patching together phonemes from recorded speech to create new utterances in one's own voice. You can hear their Chatr system demo at . It still has a few problems with pacing and prosody. [NYT. SJM, 22Apr97, 1C.]

Jeffrey Morris is the inventor of a swivel device that keeps phone cords from tangling. It's not brain surgery, but his Telephone Products Inc. (Wheeling, IL) sells 3 million UnTanglers each year and now employs 40 people. Morris was a patent lawyer when he came up with the idea. [Chicago Tribune. SJM, 22Apr97, 2C.]

Sun is expanding, and wants to buy a historic Santa Clara campus for $51M. The facility would house 2K new hires and 2K other workers. [SJM, 22Apr97, 1C.]

It has been reported that Apple will not be renewing its 10-year lease on its luxurious campus at One Infinite Loop in Cupertino. [Bill Park , 25Apr97.]

Apple has made its Cyberdog 2.0 technology available, at . Cyberdog and OpenDoc are still very much in use, but Apple will no longer fund their development. [Patrick McKenna, NewsBytes, 28Apr97. Bill Park.]

Apple's "develop" magazine for Mac developers is shutting down, to become a section of MacTech magazine (and in MacTech Japan). MacTech offers industry news, columns, conference reports, product reviews, insider secrets, developer tools and ads, etc. No mention of develop's quarterly CD ROMs. MacTech sells its annual CD-ROM code compilation for about $99, but downloads are also available from their website. . [, 24Apr97. Bill Park.]

TidBITS, Adam C. Engst's free weekly Mac e-magazine, started in Apr90 -- a year before our Communique. Although TidBITS is free, it made $900M more than Apple last year. The English-language version went to 19K subscribers in 1995, 37K in 1996, and 46K (in 106 countries) in 1997. The number of readers may be much higher, due to redistribution on comp.sys.mac.digest and elsewhere. Current and back issues are also available at . Companies with lots of subscribers -- and thus a large Mac user base -- include Apple, Motorola, Hughes Aircraft, Microsoft, DuPont, McDonnell Douglas, and Schlumberger. The top seven schools are UMinnesota, Stanford, UMichigan, Cornell, UWashington, UTexas, and Harvard. You can subscribe via email to . Japanese, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, and Spanish versions are available, from . [, TidBITS, 14Apr97.] (TidBITS has been supported by a dozen sponsors, but never Apple or Claris. The computer "for the rest of us" turned its back for too long on those who were eager to develop for it. Not that Apple/Mac will fail, but there's no question now that Microsoft can buy whatever developer technology it wants.)

CNET reviewers were impressed by a beta of Microsoft's next Windows OS, planned for release next year. "Memphis isn't about cute new desktop features and icons; it's about making the underlying system stronger." . [Network News, 20Apr97.]

3Com founder Bob Metcalfe had predicted that the Internet would collapse in 1996. This year he ate his words, at the WWW6 conference. (The audience rejected a symbolic piece of cake, so he liquified his Dec95 InfoWorld column in a blender.) [Reuters. SJM, 12Apr97, 2C.]

Pitney Bowes, E-Stamp, and the US Postal Service plan to let you buy postage via the Web. You'd print a graphic code on your letter paper, to show through a window in special envelopes. Another window would show the delivery address. [Miami Herald, 24Apr97. EP.]

Fortune 1000 workers send about 43 paper-based messages or documents per day, on average, but only about 10 email messages. They receive 32 phone calls, 14 email message, 11 voice mail messages, 4 pager messages, 9 faxed documents, 5 telephone message slips, and 6 Post-It notes, for an average of 178 incoming and outgoing communications per day. People want access to coworkers, customers, and friends, but would like to limit access to themselves. "When I see I have 18 voice mail messages, I want to scream." [Pitney Bowes. Gannett. SJM, 18Apr97, 1C.]

Ticketmaster Group is suing Microsoft for linking from its Seattle Sidewalk entertainment site to Ticketmaster's website. Ticketmaster says "They want to suck up our content and keep the advertising revenue from it," and that Microsoft's link diminishes the value of their site to CitySearch, MasterCard, and other sponsors. [WSJ, 29Apr97. EP.]

A new report from the National Research Council supports "fair use" access to scientific databases worldwide, and warns against proposals currently under consideration by the World Intellectual Property Organization, the European Community, and the US House of Representatives. . [Chronicle of Higher Ed., 25Apr97. EP.]

All color photocopiers sold in Singapore must now have a counterfeit-prevention system. Owners must have a permit, submit a list of users, keep a detailed copy log, keep the machine locked, and notify authorities if the machine is moved. [WSJ, 11Apr97. EP.]

A European Union study (by Deloitte & Touche) says that cross-border fraud costs $77B/year. Internet fraud is becoming a serious threat, especially if encryption is weak. [Financial Times, 24Apr97. EP.]

Most major US banks use neural network software to help identify fraud. The most popular products are Falcon from HNC, Inc. ; PRISM from Nestor, Inc. ; and CRIS from Visa. These flag about 45%-50% of all fraudulent transactions Other banks use rule-based systems and achieve similar performance. [Rob Hughes , comp.ai.neural-nets, 25Apr97.]

A team working on RSA's DES Crypto Challenge needs your spare CPU cycles for a brute-force attack on a 56-bit (72,057,594,037,927,936-element) key space. RSA is offering $10K. Download the free client software from , for nearly any computer type. [Justin Dolske , comp.org.eff.talk, 24Apr97.]

ORIT++ 2.0: Visual C++ tools for rule-based modules.

C++ GA code library, from Arthur Rabatin.

Trajan 2.1: shareware and professional NN simulators.

AutoClass C 3.0: maximum posterior probability classifier.

PCx: interior-point code for linear programming.

Qhull 2.4: convex hull, halfspace intersection, Delaunay triangulation, and Voronoi vertices.

DelphiSim v.2.01: discrete event simulation library.

QuikCAT: image compression using celluar automata transforms.

SKEDEZY PRO 2.00: personal scheduler for Windows, with NL interface.

Recent Advances in Parsing Technology: speech recognition book ed. by Bunt.

Recent Developments in Japanese Robotics Research: report by Zimer, Christaller, and Webers.

Self-Organization, Computational Maps, and Motor Control: book ed. by Morasso and Sanguineti.

Fuzzy-Methoden: book (in German) on fuzzy methods and fuzzy programming languages.

"The Elements of Business Communication: How to Get Along Until You Hire Specialists": telecom book with sample chapter and online support.

The week-long, best-of-six rematch of Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov will begin 03May97 in New York. Tickets for the video/analysis section are $25. Details at . [Kirt Undercoffer , comp.ai 24Apr7. David Joslin.] IBM will pay Kasparov $400K if he loses, $700K if he wins. Deep Blue, a $3M+ parallel supercomputer, can examine 200M moves/second, or 50B in three minutes -- twice what it could do in the Feb96 match. The heuristics have also been improved. [Gannett. SJM, 29Apr97, 1C.] (200M x 180 = 36B. ??)

ThinkQuest, a national high school web page design contest, has put up web pages introducing the history, applications, methods, and people of artificial intelligence. There's a C++ heuristic search program and other AI code for PCs. . [, k12opps, 16Apr97. net-hap.] (This appears to be one of 301 contest entries, competing for as much as $25K per student. I don't know if the site is permanent.)

The FIPA 97 agent language specification, version 1.0 (Reston meeting), can be found at . Comments are invited. France Telecom has released copyright of the ARCOL language component. [, DAI-List, 26Apr97.]

Interest is growing in interactive "robot" programs that lurk in chat rooms until they hear their trigger keywords. Sites using Black Sun Interactive's servers have hosted Dusty, an avatar that looks like a dustbuster with eyeballs. When he hears "messy" or "clean," he may say "Hi, I'm Dusty -- would you like to know more about Black & Decker's Dustbuster?" [WSJ, 24Apr97. EP.] (Yuck! But how about a "docent" that offers help to people who seem to be lost?)

Silicon Graphics hosts a page with up-to-date VRML information, news, and software. The VRML 2.0 gallery includes authoring notes, 3D authoring tools, plug-ins, etc. . [Network News, 26Apr97.]

VR fans should check out The Brandenburger Gate by Virtual Reality Technologies GmbH. Download from World of the Week at . [Worldman , alt.comp.freeware, 20Mar97.]

Kodak has introduced a $1K digital camera with 1280 x 960 resolution, for about 1/4 of what similar cameras have sold for. [NYT, 15Apr97. EP.]

Don M. Kueffler wants to sell two arcade-quality virtual reality pod sets; $20K each in 1995, now $3,500 each. . [comp.multimedia, 15Apr97.]

LiveStyles is a new real-time QuickDraw 3D plug-in that draws the key strokes of a 3D object in user-fine-art styles (Picasso, Klee, etc.) or cartoon styles. The artistic style of an image can be changed as easily as a font in a text document. Available 2nd Qtr of 1997, and later to be built into QD3D. ThinkFish Productions, Inc. (San Francisco) has also licensed the technology to Fractal Design Corp. (Aptos, CA), the leading Mac developer for advanced painting apps. Development of 3D content requires the ThinkFish Authoring Engine. [Bill Park , 18Mar97.] ("Another successful member of the Entrepreneur's Group of the MIT Alumni Club of Northern California!" Worth joining, if you're a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. ThinkFish was founded in 1994 by computer scientists from MIT and CalTech and artists from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).)

Eurocinema, Inc. (Boston) has launched Eurocinema Interactive Theater, offering selected European short-film titles by 28kbps streaming video over the Internet. The initial offering is four animated short films. . You can fast forward, rewind, stop, or pause the films, or can access any portion directly. Synchronized English subtitles are available for some of the films. The player was developed by VXtreme, Inc. (Sunnyvale). Some of the design work is from Argus Visual Communications (Boston), with Internet payment capability from Dr. William Bender's Online Development Corp. (Waltham, MA). Some of the Internet video technology is from Integrated Computing Engines, Inc. (Waltham, MA). [URLwire, 28Apr97.] (Improvement in video and audio quality is expected over the next year. It's interesting to see the parts from various companies being put together this way, like a main program calling subroutines.)

-- Ken