NetNews Offline 1/NetNews Offline Volume 1.iso/news/fido/ger/amiga/1232

Internet Message Format | 1996-03-16 | 21KB

From: [e-mail] (Robert Wahnsiedler)
Organization: AMIGA OS/3.1 - Wer's drin hat, hat mehr drauf!
Path: f1416.n246.z2.fidonet.org!not-for-mail
Newsgroups: fido.ger.amiga
Subject: Amiga is back
Message-ID: <MSGID_2=3A246=[e-mail]>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 1995 14:57:10 +0200


Hi Leute, hab hier was nettes gefunden...

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Press kit London

Amiga Technologies will hold a press confence, a dealer meeting and a developer
meeting on the 16th and 17th of August, 1995. The Amiga press as
well as the national press will attend the first event organized by the new
Amiga Technologies GmbH. Dealers and developers will be able to hear current
status, plans and projects from Amiga executives.

The conference will take place at the Sheraton Heathrow Hotel,

The occasion will be used the introduce the virtual I-Glasses in the UK for
the first time.



Agenda Press, Dealer and Developer meeting, London, 16-17/08/95

16/08/95        Press meeting. Moderated by Jonathan Anderson

        15:30 - 16:00           Registration & Demo I-Glasses
        16:00 - 16.05           Greetings Petro Tyschtschenko
        16:05 - 16:25           Amiga distribution UK (J. Smith)
        16:25 - 16:45           Virtual I-Glasses presentation (Premiski)
        16:45 - 17:05           Break I-Glasses demo to the attendance
        17:05 - 17:35           Presentation Amiga Technologies (PTY)
        17:35 - open end        Questions & Answers.

17/08/95 AM     Dealer meeting Moderated by John Smith

        08:30 - 09:00           Registration & Demo I-Glasses
        09:00 - 09:05           Greetings Petro Tyschtschenko
        09:05 - 09:25           Amiga distribution UK (J. Smith)
        09:25 - 09:45           Virtual I-Glasses presentation (Premiski)
        09:45 - 10:05           Break - I-Glasses demo to the attendance
        10:05 - 10:35           Presentation Amiga Technologies (PTY)
        10:35 - 12:00           Questions & Answers. Demo Glasses

17/08/95 PM     Developper meeting Moderated by Jonathan Anderson

        14:00 - 14:30           Registration & Demo I-Glasses
        14:30 - 14.35           Greetings Petro Tyschtschenko
        14:35 - 14:55           Amiga distribution UK (J. Smith)
        14:55 - 15:15           Virtual I-Glasses presentation (Premiski)
        15:15 - 15:35           Break I-Glasses demo to the attendance
        15:35 - 16:05           Presentation Amiga Technologies (PTY)
        16:05 - open end        Questions & Answers.



"The spoken word applies"


Speech Petro Tyschtschenko



We are pleased to be here in the UK, one of our most important markets, to have
the opportunity to talk directly to the Amiga press. We will talk to our dealers
and the developers tomorrow. We know that this press meeting
should have taken place earlier. Please understand that we were very busy. We
have set up the operations and the material for production. During this time, we
have achieved many things. Let's talk about this now.

Some of you surely know how long and difficult the takeover of Commodore was and
how much this one year of latency hurt the Amiga market. Building up everything
again was also a difficult task for us. Especially the financial and logistic
situation. Without the support from our mothercompany ESCOM AG, nothing would
have been possible. We actually revived the Amiga in two important steps: First
by acquiring the assets of the former Commodore for more than 10 million Dollars
secondly by starting it up again, which requested again several times the
initial investment. Other main difficulties we encountered were to get specific
parts and components for production. D-RAMs are on allocation, Amiga keyboards,
floppies and SCSI harddrives have long lead times. Tailor made parts are
difficult to get and they cost more than in the old Commodore times.

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. We have however included the
new version 3.1 of the Operating System for the A1200.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please be aware that the A4000T allready is a complete new
product. There have only been produced 200 units worldwide by former Commodore.
There will not be modifications on the casing for this
year. The design proposals that were presented in Frankfurt are only a
possibility for the models coming later. 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 but 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.

What is our team doing on distribution ?

Distribution

John Smith already told you about the UK distribution. One piece of information
you will surely be interested in is that ESCOM shops will carry Amiga Computers
in the United Kingdom.

The employees in these shops used to sell Amigas and we want to use their store
traffic again. This will be an excellent additional sales tool to spread Amigas
in the UK.

We will also support the Amiga dealers who have the best knowledge of the
platform and who can provide excellent service to customers.

Distribution outside the UK.

The Sino market, which includes mainland China, Hong-Kong, Macao and Ta∩wan 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.

Production

GOOD NEWS : We are still on schedule to produce Amigas for availability in
September.

And even better news, we will have a real european manufactured product.

The Amiga 1200 will be 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 horizontal frequencies from 15 to
38 KiloHertz. The plug of that monitor is also adapted to the video output
connector of the A1200 and A4000T. I think this
is exactly what is needed for 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. A large
percentage of our A1200 production will be sold alone in the UK.

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.

IFA Berlin

From the 26th of August to the 3rd of September, we will be present at the IFA,
one of the biggest consumer fairs in Germany for TV, communications and
multimedia. 500 000 visitors are expected this year and we use the occasion to
make our comeback with the Amiga in Europe. Virtual Products I-Glasses and
Commodore will also be presented to our visitors. May I point out that the Amiga
version of the I-Glasses will be much cheaper than the PC version because it
doesn't require the VGA-to-composite
conversion box, since the Amiga 1200 already has a composite output.

Ladies an gentleman, I hope this event was informative and I hope inspiring for
you. We are now at your disposition if there are any questions you would like to
ask us. Thank You for your attention.



Amiga Technologies
Speech by John Smith


I Would like to add my welcome to everyone here today which of course is the
first public conference in the UK.

For those of you who possibly do not know me I am John Smith and I have been
appointed the UK Sales Manager for Amiga Technologies UK.

I was previously with Commodore for 7 years, the last 2_ years of them as
National Sales Manager.

You will observe from the Agenda that I will explain briefly about the product
we will be selling and through which channels we will be selling them..

I am obviously biased towards the Amiga - very happy to be selling it again, and
look forward to It's re-emergence and it gaining the recognition
it richly deserves.

However, I am fortunate in being able to sell other products along side the
Amiga that come from both inside and outside the Commodore branding.

The first of these, which is outside the Commodore brand, is Virtual Reality
product in the form of I-Glasses. There will be two versions available. The
first we can term the video version. This type will
work with anything that has a composite video output - so it will obviously
work with Amiga but also Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation - your VHS video player
etc.

They act as a personal display screen and display the image equivalent to that
of an 80" screen in which you can be totally immersed. In fact your very own
cinema! You can see your games in 2D or 3D with games that have support for I
Glasses . Films like Tommy from the WHO are currently being produced especially
in this 3D format.

The second version, the PC version has the additional head tracking system with
it and will therefore display not only in 3D but will allow you
to immerse yourself in your own virtual world. It also gives surround sound
and these glasses weigh from only 8oz in total. Very light and have been
ergonomically designed with members from the university of Edinburgh to help
avoid eye strain etc. They are the only glasses we know of in fact that are
designed with spectacle wearers in mind.

The pack will come complete with games and be available during  September .

We have Denis Premiski of Virtual Products  with us today who will explain more
about the product and prospective market for I Glasses shortly. Under the
Commodore Brand we will have available MS DOS PCs. There
will be an initial special limited offering of a Pentium 60 mini tower
multimedia at a very competitive price. It will come complete with Hard Drive,
CD ROM, 8 megabytes of memory and software.

We will then launch the Commodore Golf series. "GOLF" is a name that is
understood throughout Europe so we feel is a very acceptable name. Our minimum
entry level will be the Pentium 75 and again will be a full multimedia product
including a quad CD ROM drive- sound card etc. There will also be a Pentium 100
version. This product has been designed exclusively for Commodore by Frog design
and will be of top quality and build.

It will be supported with 12 months on site warranty.

There will also be a full compliment of Commodore branded peripherals like quad
speed CD drives - loud speakers -mice etc. all colourfully packed
and competitively priced.

Back to Amigas

I will have available an excellent Amiga 1200 pack with software for the end of
September as the entry level machine and also a higher but very competitively
priced 170MB hard disk drive pack.

It will include productivity  software like Database -Spreadsheet- Word
processing package- Paint package and games.

We will of course box it in our usual eye catching manner .

There will be the Amiga 4000/040 pack with a 1 Gigabyte hard drive and 6
megabytes of memory and later, during November a 4000/060 pack. Top quality
software again will be included.

All Amigas will have the latest version of the operating system,version 3.1,
which has been optimised to improve system performance..

I will also have a new Amiga multisync monitor that vertically scans from 15 to
38 Khz which will avail itself to all Amigas from A500 upwards that have a RGB
port..

Where will I sell them?

These products have various routes to market not least being through the
independent via the distributor.

Whilst we still have to dot Is and cross the T's we will have 2 distributors
this side of Christmas . Negotiations are almost complete. Looking to 1996 I
propose one or possibly even up to two more distributors around the main
Christmas period. These distributors obviously will support
the full range of our products and be cognisant of the Independents
requirements. A higher percentage of the product available this Christmas will
go through the Independent channel. As again we maintain support for the loyalty
they have shown throughout the ten years of Amiga.

It is my responsibility to sell our products here in the UK and also in
Australia, India, Malta and Israel.

High Street

The High street is of course also important to aiding our success and once again
we are very close to finalising contracts but expect to see our product there
through people like Comet and Tandy. The high street has changed somewhat since
Amigas were last freely available because we do not have Rumbelows anymore and
have seen them replaced by Escom stores who specialise in PC's and communication
products. It is envisaged that they will sell our Amiga brand.

VAR

Value added resellers who specialise in the Audio visual arena and who give us
access to TV production companies and other niche markets are obviously
important for the Amiga 4000 product. We will look to top companies like Premier
Vision, Scala, Pentre Technologies etc. to fulfil this sector of the market.

Corporates

The corporate sector is an area that will be looked at with regards to MS DOS
product. Personally, I only had a small contact with the PC arena
during my time at Commodore and I am of course aware of how quickly this changes
especially as Commodore has not sold PC's for over 3 years. This market will be
addressed and we will probably look towards some kind of joint support with the
VAR,S to take this sector in hand.

We have already sold the majority of our production, it is now a question of
allocation and that transfers the pressure back to Petro. Please ensure we get
all our product and importantly when we want it.

To summarise - Amiga is back, along with other new exciting products available
from the end of September. We look forward to the Xmas period and believe that
between all of us we can make it a pleasurable and profitable market once
again.

On behalf of Amiga Technologies UK, Thank you for your attention!


JOHN SMITH
AMIGA TECHNOLOGIES UK


Amiga Technologies at the IFA fair in Berlin



Bensheim, 15/08/95

From the 26th of August to the 3rd of September 1995, Amiga Technologies,
together with Virtual Products and Commodore, will be represented by a booth
(hall 26.A, booth 11) at the "Internationale Funkausstellung" (IFA) fair in
Berlin. This will be the first time since the liquidation of Commodore that
Amigas will be presented officially to the public at a fair.

The Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000T as well as the CD32 products will be displayed in
different configurations and running several applications. Amiga Technologies
will be happy to accomodate third party developpers and manufacturers at its
booth to show the wide range of professional solutions
available for the Amiga computer.

The Amiga 1200 is the entry-level computer of the Amiga productline. It features
2 Megabyte of RAM, within which the Amiga operating System fully multitasks. The
smart design of this computer allows
animations and sound in a perfect quality at a price never seen before. Another
advantage of the Amiga 1200 is its expandability. The user can gradually upgrade
to faster processors, more memory or larger harddrives. The software bundle
included provides standard software needed for most tasks like Multimedia,
Wordprocessing, Spreadsheet, database and even the game players haven't been
forgotten with two excellent entertainment titles.

The Amiga 4000 T is the high-end model of the Amiga Line. It features 6
megabytes of Memory with can be expanded to 18 megabytes onboard with standard
SIMMs and more using expansion cards. It is fitted with a 540 Mb or 1 Gb SCSI
harddrive and has six 32 bit Expansion slots, inlined with four ISA and two
video slots. Thanks to the wide choice of expansion cards available on the
market like 64 bit graphic boards, emulation boards, multi-serial expansions or
MPEG boards, the possibilities of the Amiga 4000
T are nearly unlimited. The onboard SCSI interface allows the use of popular
standard SCSI devices like streamers, scanners, CD-ROM drives etc. There is also
a processor slot that can hold CPU accelerator cards for more
powerful processors like the new Motorola 68060. Such a processor card will
be available for the Amiga 4000 T in November 1995. The SCALA multimedia
authoring software will be shipped with every Amiga 4000T. Together with this
software, the Amiga 4000 T enables the user to do professional multimedia
presentations out of the box.

The CD 32 console, based on the AMIGA 1200 technology, is fitted with a
double-speed CD ROM drive. The storage capacity of this media, combined to the
graphics and sound abilities of the Amiga gives an unmatched quality
for games and multimedia applications.

Contact :
Gilles Bourdin
Amiga Technologies
Berliner Ring 89
D-64625 Bensheim

Tel [phone]
Fax [phone]
email [e-mail]


Productivity, multimedia and entertainment Software to be bundled with Amiga
computers


Bensheim, 15/08/95


The Amiga 1200, fitted with a 170 Mb harddrive and two megabytes of RAM will
be
bundled with the SCALA MM 300 Multimedia authoring software. With this
combination, the user will be able to do high quality multimedia presentations
out of the box at the advantageous price of 499 UKP. Some well known Amiga
productivity software packages will also be part of this offer.

The A1200 is also available without harddrive but bundled with the productivity
software, except for SCALA at a price of 399 UKP.


The Amiga 4000T, fitted with a SCSI harddrive of 540MB or 1GB and 6 MB of RAM
will be available with SCALA MM 300. This is the perfect package for
those who want to make professional-looking presentations in a quality
unmatched
on any other system at that price.


Contact :
Gilles Bourdin
Amiga Technologies
Berliner Ring 89
D-64625 Bensheim

Tel [phone]
Fax [phone]
email [e-mail]


Regards,

Gilles Bourdin               Public Relations Tel [phone]         Fax
[phone]
--
Amiga Technologies GmbH
Berliner Ring 89
D-64625 Bensheim
Germany
--
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cu! Robert                                    AmiMAC4ooo/3o/14MB/1.2GB-AT/CV64