=========================================================================== // Amiga Update - News and Rumors // \X/ (A Very Occasional Newsletter) \X/ =========================================================================== 950929 T H E L A T E S T P L A N S R E V E A L E D -------------------- Just picked this off the net last night (Sept. 28) and thought you would find it interesting. It was accompanied by three jpeg pictures, one each of what appear to be brochure covers for the new A1200, A4000T and Amiga monitor. If you want a copy of the pictures, send me either an 800K Amiga formatted floppy, or a 720K MS/DOS formatted floppy. Brad -------------------- This is the text of a speech given by Petro Tyschtschenko Senior Vice President Escom and General Manager of Production on September 21, 1995 at the SMAU computer fair in Milano (Italy). This text was supplied by Gilles Bourdin of Amiga Technologies. Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to be here in Milano, to have the opportunity to present you our new company Amiga Technologies. In April 1995, after one year of liquidation procedures, the rights and patents of the former Commodore Company could be acquired by ESCOM AG. This was indeed very good news for the Amiga community, who had been waiting anxiously for a rebirth of their computer of choice. The Amiga community, which consists not only of users, but also of developpers, dealers, distributors and third party manufacturers is very important for us. It represents a market and also a tremendous creative and productive potential that revolves around the Amiga platform. These people have made of the Amiga the most versatile and poweful Multimedia and video computer available. Our goal now that we are into business again, is to bring back the Amiga on the market, develop it further and enhance its presently excellent features. But what is Multimedia ? This word has been used intensively these last years by many manufacturers in the computer business. Some say that a PC with a CD ROM is a multimedia machine. Some say that you need a sound card, some other say that a video compatible card has to be installed. The results are various but not always satisfying. Indeed, what you see is what you get. We say : You need an Amiga. With this computer, what you WANT is what you get. The Amiga is the computer that invented multimedia ten years ago. At a time when PCs were only able to beep and display monochrome text, there was a computer that had stereo sound, fantastic coulour capacities and animation abilities never seen before, all this driven by a powerful multitasking operating system. These capacities have been enhanced over the years, making the Amiga a must for professional video and multimedia useage. For us, multimedia is not only looking at some boring still pictures on a CD ROM. We think that multimedia is an interactive experience where the user can unfold its creativity to easily produce good looking presentations with sound and animations. The Amiga hardware provides all what is needed right out of the box. And the software that is bundled with each Amiga provides the needed applications. We have a complete plug and play business and multimedia package called Amiga Magic, at a competitive price that includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, a database, an agenda, a paint program, a graphic processing program and a the SCALA multimedia authoring software. Ladies and gentlemen, the Amiga has been making multimedia for 10 years. This means 10 years of experience in that business for us. I will now talk about our operations and objectives for this year. Our first objective was to get Amiga products back on the market as fast as possible. To achieve this goal in an acceptable time, we decided to build the A1200 and A4000T without modifications. There is a big demand for these machines worldwide and it has to be fulfilled urgently. Please be aware : If we had decided to make enhancements immediately, there wouldn't have been machines on the market for the Christmas season. This decision does not mean in any way that we are going to stop research and development. Enhancements will be made on current machines for sure. I'll talk about this again later. But now I would like to present you the actual status of our operations. We are a german company located in Bensheim, 30 miles south of Frankfurt. Our production, assembling and material providers are located in Europe and the world is our market. Our team has grown tremendously to reach 39 people since May 31st, with the new addition of Virtual Products. We are a flexible, agressive, motivated, transparent and dynamic team. We can react very quickly to new situations, we take our strategic decisions faster than the competition does. Distribution organisation The Sino market, which includes mainland China, Hong-Kong, Macao and Taiwan is covered by our chinese joint-venture. In North America, we already have installed a dealer network but are still looking for a potential distributor. Somebody who is willing to support and invest in our product. We are actually looking for a partner more than just a distributor. Let me now present you our european organisation. Comment worldmap / Amiga responsibilities Production We are a young structure but there is already a date that will be written in the Amiga history : On monday, the 11th of September, the first Amiga built by Amiga Technologies came out of the production line. Delivery of the first machines will follow next week. To celebrate this event, we will hold a press conference on the 10th of October in Bordeaux at our Solectron plant. The Amiga 1200 is produced in Bordeaux, France. Our successful negotiations with Solectron, one of the world leader of sub-contract manufacturing, guarantees a european high quality standard. Quality is very important for us, we want to reduce defective returns to a minimum. That's why we focused on Europe rather than far-east. The Amiga 4000T motherboards will be produced in the United States, near Philadelphia. The units for Europe will then be assembled in the ESCOM facilities in Germany. The american units will be assembled in Philadelphia. We have made an agreement with a european monitor manufacturer. He will provide a monitor especially adapted to be used with the Amiga. The monitor is a high-quality multisync monitor that can scan all Amiga resolutions. As announced at our previous press conference, our plan is still to build 100 K A1200's and 20 K A4000T's until the end of this year. These figures are based on existing orders and on customer based forecasts. I'm quite sure that this gives us the assurance that the whole production will actually be sold. Servicing The repair and spare servicing will be centralized in our service-centre in Braunschweig, Germany, in coordination with the representation points in each country. The technical dealer support will also be handled here, as well as the distribution for computers and monitors in Germany. Our service plan is very simple : we don't repair, we only make components exchanges. Future plans, developments As I promised before, I will now tell you about our future plans for research & development. First, we plan to enhance current models. We are thinking of faster processors and chip integration for the beginning. We are going to integrate the 68060 chip for the A4000T this year. For the entry-level model, we are looking at an external CD ROM addition and more RAM onboard the bare units. We are also planning to use the CD 32 concept for developments of set-top-box systems. The set-top-boxes will open new markets for Amiga products. Set-top-Boxes could be produced in variants for cable-TV, satellite-TV and for telephone line communication and also be used for home-shopping and home-banking. I'm convinced that this market is tremendous and will push the Amiga technology into millions of households. Software publishers should be interested in writing software for such a widely spread platform. The Amiga architecture is optimaly suited for set-top-systems because of its low demand for ressources like RAM or processor power and because of its multitasking and realtime abilities, in summmary, the Amiga is the most cost effective platform for set-top-boxes. It is still under investigation which RISC platform will be used as basis for the Amiga of the future. At this point, we cannot say more about this issue, thank you for your understanding. FAIRS After the successful show at the IFA fair in Berlin, we continue our tour in Europe at the ORBIT fair in Basel. Amiga Technologies will be represented by Promigos, its distributor in Switzerland at the ORBIT consumer fair in Basel, from the 19th to the 23rd of September. The ORBIT is the biggest swiss computer show with an expected attendance of about 100.000 people. The ORBIT fair will be the rendez-vous of all computer users who are interested in online services, Internet, multimedia, animation and graphic applications. This is going to be the first official appearance of Amigas on a show in Switzerland since two years. Ladies an gentleman, I hope this event was informative and inspiring for you. I will be at your disposition if there are any questions you would like to ask us. There are Amigas on display for you in this room. Thank You for your attention. =========================================================================== || Brad Webb - available at: // Commodore has fallen || webb@malamute.med.ge.com \X/ and it can't get up || bandr@globaldialog.com (but ESCOM can - ?) || Portal -- XJumpdisk ===========================================================================