Faced with the threat of growing competition as a result of liberalisation of the Japanese telecommunications market, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp is shaking up its database services business. The phone company has hitherto acted as a database op-erator, taking the databases from information providers and marketing them itself from its Demos computer centre over […]
Faced with the threat of growing competition as a result of liberalisation of the Japanese telecommunications market, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp is shaking up its database services business. The phone company has hitherto acted as a database op-erator, taking the databases from information providers and marketing them itself from its Demos computer centre over NTT lines. It currently markets databases for 13 information providers in this way. Now however it is planning to build four or five new computer centres where it will provide the facilities for information providers to build and market their own databases – not necessarily over NTT lines, and they will be able to set their own prices. A couple of months back, NTT also began marketing a newly developed multi-media data base service, MI-Base1. The service supports multi-media input from optical character recognition equipment, and is based on NTT’s own DIPS-11 main-frames, backed up with optical as well as magnetic disks and communications facilities that enable output to be sent over the DDX packet or Internet data networks to facsimile machines. The input function permits automatic keyword indexing, and output uses a multi-window mode so that the user can see the search screen and the output result at the same time. The new MI-Base1 service also includes electronic mail and bulletin board services.
