By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Gustav Holst’s The Planets:
Japan’s Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. today
announced the expansion of the mobile
Centrex system delivered to Itoki Corporation. The system, based on Oki’s
IP Convergence Server SS9100, provided to Itoki’s Tokyo headquarters since
2005, has been expanded to the Osaka area.
Both the Tokyo and Osaka headquarters also function as a showroom
for the general public, where visitors can see what Itoki officials are calling
the “non-territorial office,” the “next generation office environment, allowing
employees to pick their own desk every day.”
I guess First CoffeeSM’s question is, why is it
necessary to open up another whole avenue of conflict in the work place? Pick a
new desk every day? What about those of us who have enough trouble simply
making it to the same old one every day?
What is the possible business benefit to have people scheming
and scrapping over the fact that two people in the Munich office would like the
desk next to the heater, one got there and put her bagel and coffee on it while
she went to hang up her coat and “fix her makeup,” and while she was gone
someone else claimed it in the rather more dynamic fashion of actually
occupying the chair?
Woman #1 comes back, “That’s my desk.”
Woman #2, plugging in laptop: “Sorry, I’m
sitting here today. You should really be more non-territorial, Helga.”
Woman #1: “But I put
my bagel and coffee on it.”
Woman #2: “Oh, were
those yours? I didn’t know if you’d just put them down for a minute or what,
but there wasn’t anybody sitting here, no laptop or anything. But as you can see I’m all plugged in now.”
Woman #1: (Angrily
taking up coffee and bagel) “Just wait until your first bathroom break, sister.”
And of course production suffers because Helga spends all
morning surveilling Rickie’s desk, and misses the Marrakech call, and of course
the more and more Rickie needs that bathroom break she dare not take her
production suffers. “Territorial” office workers don’t have that problem.
The expansion of the mobile Centrex system was deployed at
the Osaka New Office Gallery, Itoki’s Osaka headquarters, which functions as a
business hub in Kansai and a showroom, where visitors can see how this system
is operated. It includes 35 FOMA Wireless LAN Dual Network Handsets
controlled by the SS9100 installed in the Tokyo Showroom. SS9100 is connected
with Presence Management System developed by Itoki, which lets users indicate
their presence status on the screen whether they are in or out of the office.
Users can use the handset as a mobile phone when outdoors,
and a wireless extension handset within the offices. In addition, Itoki
installs 170 units of “eSound” (excellent sound) technology IP phone, Oki’s
multimedia IP telephony that ensures high voice quality, enabling a comfortable
voice communication between Tokyo and other offices.
With this expansion, Itoki will have a total of 200 sets of
FOMA Wireless LAN Dual Network Handsets, 1000 fixed IP telephones, becoming a
large-scale mobile Centrex system. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East
Corporation will be in charge of system construction.
…
PacificNet Inc., a CRM vendor as well as
merchant of call center, Interactive Voice Response services and Value-Added
Services in China, announced today that it has
completed the acquisition of a majority interest in Guangzhou Wanrong
Information Technology Co., Ltd., a value-added telecom service provider in
China.
The acquisition is expected to be accretive to the Company’s
earnings in 2006.
Since its inception in 2003, Guangzhou Wanrong has sold its
VAS including SMS, WAP, JAVA, MMS, IVR, multimedia entertainment download
services, media interactive products, mobile email services, life, sports,
entertainment, and business information services.
Guangzhou Wanrong was granted nationwide SMS service numbers
“2388” for China Mobile and “9928” for China Unicom. Wanrong’s integrated
value-added mobile services system can be used for PacificNet’s “iPACT”
program, a standard service-mark for PacificNet’s VAS profit-sharing alliance
partnership program.
The purchase consideration for 51 percent of the equity interest of Guangzhou
Wanrong is approximately $1.4 million, which represents about five times the
anticipated future annual net income of Guangzhou Wanrong. The purchase
consideration is payable entirely in restricted shares of PACT valued at $8 per
share, or about 173,000 restricted shares.
Under the purchase agreement, Guangzhou Wanrong has made a
guarantee to generate $500,000 in annual net income. In the event of a
shortfall, the purchase price will be adjusted accordingly. PacificNet will
also invest approximately $370,000 in Guangzhou Wanrong for general corporate
purposes. The purchase price is payable upon achievement of certain quarterly
earn-out targets based on net income.
Han Zhixin, CEO of Guangzhou Wanrong said with China being “the
largest and fastest growing telecom market in the world, with over 400 million
mobile subscribers, 75 million wireless XiaoLingTong subscribers, and over 350
million fixed-line phone subscribers, we believe our services will help China’s
telecom operators improve their Average Revenue Per User based on VAS product
offerings, while contributing positively to PacificNet’s bottom line.”
…
The GlobeTel watch continues, as GlobeTel
Communications Corp. today announced that it has extended by 30 days the payment deadline for LLC Internafta to
present its first payment “so that lawyers and bankers for the parties may
continue to work on structuring the payment to be in compliance with banking
and currency transfer regulations in the United States and Europe.”
GlobeTel CEO Timothy Huff released an official statement
saying “This is a highly complex international transaction on which all sides
continue to work together in good faith. There are numerous legal and
regulatory issues that must be resolved and those steps require time and
specialized expertise.”
GlobeTel has retained the law firm of Cleary Gottlieb Steen
& Hamilton LLP to represent it in Moscow.
Just for the record, First CoffeeSM has requested
an interview with Huff, who has yet to respond.
…
Dicom Group plc today announced several installations of Topcall International
AG's (Dicom Group's wholly-owned Austrian subsidiary) enterprise software MFPConnect,
which Dicom officials claim have generated “significant return on investment for
the company's customers.”
MFPConnect is designed to let multifunctional peripherals send
and receive business-related documents, and maintain a complete audit trail of
all organizational communications. MFPs -- products that combine printers,
copiers, scanners and fax machines -- are usually not included in an organization’s
communications infrastructure and, therefore, the information that passes
through them is not secured. This makes compliance with regulatory requirements
such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Basel II tricky.
MFPConnect, along with the TOPCALL Communication platform, guarantees the
central archiving, monitoring and recording of all document transmission from
an organization’s MFPs. It works with VoIP as well.
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