WIRELESS ALLIANCE PREPARES TO OPPOSE MICROSOFT - An alliance was cemented that is intended to block the Microsoft Corporation from dominating new consumer communications markets. Motorola Inc. said yesterday that it had completed an investment in a European joint venture that is developing an operating system for a future generation of digital wireless phones. The alliance, known as Symbian, was originally announced in June. It already has the backing of the two largest European makers of wireless phones - Nokia of Finland and Ericsson A.B. of Sweden - as well as Psion P.L.C., a British maker of handheld digital devices. Symbian's purpose is to license and promote as an industry standard Psion's Epoc operating system, the basic software to run the microprocessors that will power the next generation of wireless phones. ( John Markoff, 29 Oct 98) For the full article see:
(http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/10/biztech/articles/29wireless.html)

THE FUTURE OF VIDEOCONFERENCING - appears to be assured with annual growth rates projected to be 44% over the period of 1998- 2002. Videoconferencing offers a wide variety of applications and benefits: improving business efficiency through reduced travel cost and time, creating equal educational opportunity via distance learning and saving lives via telemedicine. It will establish itself as a mainstream tool as the available offerings reach the necessary levels of quality and operating cost. The wide adoption of MPEG compression standards is one element of this progress. It brings broadcast quality into range. At the same time worldwide investment in network infrastructure is proceeding at a $60 billion-per-year rate and there is growing availability of ATM-based services in an increasing number of countries. The net effect will be to significantly reduce the cost of bandwidth needed for high-end services. The sum of these trends will have a decided growth effect on videoconferencing. (AV Video Multimedia Producer Oct 98, pp 15-16)