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Several major US companies are using hand-held computers to reduce paper work and improve the productivity of their workers in the field. The little computers cost between $500 and $3,000, weigh one or two pounds and have cumbersome keyboards and small displays. Nevertheless many companies are finding them invaluable for inventory control, parcel tracking and communicating with repair personnel and sales people. IBM and Motorola will announce a cooperative venture likely to make the devices even more popular; they will make portables that can exchange information with home computers via radio waves, without the use of expensive modems. The venture could break open the portables market, which is currently growing at 20 percent a year on estimated sales of between $600 and $875 million annually.

Organizations are beginning to use electronic mail systems to replace paper with electronic forms. New software allows electronic forms to be sent between departments and stored on computer disks without ever having to be printed out. Jetform Corp, Delrina Technology Inc, Lotus Development Corp and Microsoft Corp all make electronic forms software. The savings over paper forms could be tremendous: organizations spend $6 billion annually on pre-printed forms, but one-third are thrown away unused, most often when they become obsolete. Sales of multipart forms are falling by about 9 percent per year. Some firms, such as Northstar Computer Forms Inc, are exiting the traditional business-forms market.

Medium-Resolution PostScript The medium-resolution printer market (400 dpi to 1,000 dpi on plain paper) is finally getting untracked. Varityper, which was first with its VT-600, continues to be a market […]

The year 1993 is shaping up to be a milestone year for the development of pen-based applications for publishing. Pen-based tools for writing, editing and document delivery are all progressing […]

FOR MORE THAN a year, we have been following in our Digital Media newsletter the converging forces in consumer electronics, entertainment, education, telecommunications and computers. Meanwhile, in this Desktop Publishing […]

THROUGHOUT THE LAST hundred years, beginning with the development of the hot-metal line-casting machine, the keyboard has dominated the world of publishing equipment. Since the 1980s, keyboards have increasingly had […]

A Fresh Look at SGML: The Conventional Wisdom Changes FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS, conventional market wisdom has been that the military is the driving force behind the general use […]

Mainframe Publishing In a special-interest session on mainframe-based publishing, P.C. McGrew of GenText presented a survey of the current state of the IBM/370 mainframe art. It was an eye-opener for […]

Visit to a North Atlantic User THE PREDEDING STORY may sound great in thory, but how does it work in practice? We always try to visit a customer site to […]

Computer Industry Megatrends: 1990 - 2000 We are currently undergoing a major paradigm shift guaranteed to change how we think about our world. It goes without saying that it is […]

WE HAVE BEEN tracking several ambitious projects around the world-installations that push the latest technology to its limits. In many cases the equipment itself is not as "leading edge" as […]

THE TECHNICAL documentation market has been swept by dramatic changes in the two years since the U.S. Department of Defense launched the Computer-aided Acquisition and Logistics Support (CALS) initiative. Two […]

Multi-Ad Services: From Clip Art To Display Ad Makeup MULTI-AD CREATOR, from Multi-Ad Services, Inc., is the latest of the Mac-based products designed for the professional ad makeup specialist. Unlike […]

In keeping with our premise about the shape of the electronic distribution marketplace, let's examine who the customers are. The first type of buyer is the information publisher looking for […]

Installations Bedford Computer has installed systems at the following sites: * Sormland Grafiskaab (Katrineholm, Sweden)--10 Meteor and 4 Target 68020-based workstations and three '386 PCs as an upgrade to an […]

Desktop Video Editing/Production NEC teams with Light Source NEC of Japan announced a frame-accurate VHS deck called the PC-VCR. (The name is somewhat of a misnomer, as it only computer […]

SAFEWAY INTROS AUTOMATED CHECK SYSTEM 07/15/91 COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO, U.S.A., 1991 JUL 15 (NB) -- Customers shopping in Colorado Safeway stores will no longer have to write out a check […]

IBM TO USE KODAK IMAGING SOFTWARE ROCHESTER, NEW YORK., U.S.A.,1990 MAR 27 (NB) -- Eastman Kodak Company will provide imaging application software for the new PS/2 offering in IBM's ImagePlus […]

EVERY SO OFTEN, you run across a project where you look at it and say, this is something really important. . . .IRIS's Intermedia is such a project." Speaking about […]

Sun revamps entire product line This, week, Sun Microsystems announced its new family of computers, which effectively replaces just about the entire Sun workstation product line. The centerpiece of the […]

Installations The National Sports Daily (also known as The National), the new U.S. newspaper (see Vol. 19, No. 11), has ordered a Flash electronic library system from Data Times. Information […]

100 ATTEND CHINESE AI SEMINAR WUHAN, HUBEI, CHINA, 1989 OCT 21 (NB) -- A recent international seminar on applications of artificial intelligence in Wuhan, China, recently drew about 100 attendees […]

Online densitometers for Macs or PCs measure monochrome, color output X-Rite introduced at Seybold San Francisco last month three automatic strip-reading densitometers that, according to marketing manager John Sweeney, make […]

Atex has reported these new sales: * Tidningen Land (Sweden, circ. 190,000)--PC Preference for Windows to produce its weekly tabloid for farmers. * Rana Blad (Norway, circ. 12,000)--PC Preference workstations […]

CText announced that its first classified advertising system running under OS/2 had gone live the day before America East opened. The site, the Mansfield (OH) News Journal (evening, circulation 40,000, […]

CD-ROM medium starts to mature Notes from CD-ROM Expo '89 We went to CD-ROM Expo as skeptics. What, we wondered, is the real market for CD-ROMs? How are they faring […]

Video in Conference Spotlight Although much attention over the last couple of years has been focused on graphics, the theme has generally been print graphics, not video graphics. But at […]