At the Multimedia ’94 show in held in London last week ICL Plc, based in Putney, attempted to bring together its strategy for implementing multimedia in the world of business. The company has been muttering about its intention to become a multimedia player, but little has been seen of its plans until now – and […]
At the Multimedia ’94 show in held in London last week ICL Plc, based in Putney, attempted to bring together its strategy for implementing multimedia in the world of business. The company has been muttering about its intention to become a multimedia player, but little has been seen of its plans until now – and needless to say, it is starting out by applying its skills to its number one chosen specialisation, the retail business. Philip Vanhouette, vice-president of marketing for ICL Client-Server Systems said that the company will be concentrating on four key market areas: firstly, multimedia products and services in the retail sector and the provision of information to consumsers and retailers. The company announced its new product called Interactive Shopper, which is a set of software tools for the development and implementation of retail multimedia applications. ICL expects it to be broadly used for two applications – as a Catalogue Shopper for selecting purchases from a list of products and as a Media Shopper for looking through larger databases of products and services which require more visual support and information including video and sound, for example. ICL will have more details about it when the tools are officially launched in a few weeks. Video and data conferencing is the second market area it will be targeting. The TeamVision product announced at the end of May will address this market. This is a personal computer-based desktop video and data conferencing system and ICL developed it with British Telecommunications Plc’s Visual and Broadcast Services division. It uses Fujitsu Ltd’s DeskTop Video Conferencing software that enables real-time application and data annotation, document sharing and remote interrogation and manipulation of applications and files on a linked personal computer. It also offers audio-visual communication from one computer to another using British Telecom’s Vision Technology VC8000 hardware. It will be out this quarter for #3,600 including the personal computer board, camera audio unit, cables and software. The third market area is retail banking and customer transaction systems and the fourth will be the education market in terms of both the management of educational establishments and the software that the children will use themselves in the classroom, such as its ClassICL package with interactive Periodic Table of Elements.
