Insignia joins forces with HP

Insignia is set to announce a deal with Hewlett Packard in which both companies will co-operate on future PC connectivity issues. HP is expected to drop the Omnibook range shortly.

Fujitsu will expand its storage portfolio by introducing a 230Mb magneto-optical subsystem based on the PCMCIA interface. The unit weighs 420 grams and can be attached to Type II PCMCIA slots.

Hard drive on a chip? That's the claim of Sandisk Corporation, which said its Flash Chip product, using now inexpensive flash memory, will be used in a variety of products including PDAs and cellular phones.

IO has introduced a Web product which it claims will collect data from real-time sources over the Web. Contact site www.io-ltd.co.uk for more information.

Spyglass and Microware have formed an alliance to bring the world of the Web to non-computer appliances. They will develop software for mobile phones, set-top boxes, linked by Java software.

Unify vision has no need for Java.

Java is one of three things, or possibly more. It's a part of the Indonesian archipelago, a type of coffee linked to it, or a software language.

This is where Unify comes into the picture. The company has just demonstrated Vision Web, an environment which it claims saves the effort of training C++ programmers to learn Java.

The product takes a radical approach to Web browsers, treating them as simply another client platform, said Lew Tucker, director of corporate marketing for Sun's Java Soft business unit.

Vision Web generates support for standard enterprise client and server platforms, the company claimed. Servers include Unix, NT and OS/2; clients include Windows 95, Windows 3.1 and Macintosh.

Object-oriented programming is always hard to understand, even for top-level developers. But Jeremy Jackson, marketing director of Unify EMEA, said the latest software product will support the Internet Interorb Protocol (IIOP), multi-tier partitioning, integrated application management and automated native data-base access.

Jackson said Vision Web was likely to go into beta in September. 'Our intention was to give additional choice for customers to deploy onto the Web and we had to match it to Java.'