Monday, September 4, 2000		Latest in IT world

Dell plans service centre in India

Dell Computers of the USA is planning to open its service centre in India, which will cater to Indian clientele as well as from other English-speaking countries. The call centre is to be set up at Bangalore. During the initial phase, the services would be available to Indian customers, which would be later extended to other countries. Dell Computers created its Indian subsidiary a month ago with an initial investment of $ 2.5 million, mainly in the sales and support infrastructure, to promote Dell's product in the Indian market directly, which were earlier sold through distributors. It currently has an arrangement with Tata InfoTech for providing service and support to its customers. The company also has plans to use India as a base for manufacturing its computers.

Via Technologies of Taiwan, the world's top chipset designer and 3Com of the USA, are planning to create a new product that will make networking an easy affair and also lower networking costs. Via Technologies will include 3Com's networking technology in a set of three chips that would control the flow of information between a processor and other parts of a computer such as the memory, hard disk, or the monitor. By making one chipset instead of one highly integrated chip, production costs can be kept to a minimum.

IBM is reported to have cut the price of its basic voice-recognition software to almost half in order to increase the sales for home PC users. The IBM's popular voice recognition ViaVoice software would now cost $ 30 and would be available for sale from the first week of September. Using this software, a person can dictate text to a word processor by using a microphone, which is attached to the sound card of the computer. This software is especially useful for doctors, lawyers and authors. As per the company estimates, more than 10 million persons use ViaVoice worldwide, which is sold in English, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.

Intel has cut its chip prices by as much as 34 per cent after the company pushed its faster processor in the market. Intel has dropped the prices of 933 MHz Pentium III Xeons used in server computers to $ 558 from $ 719 each, in volume purchases, after introducing a speedier, 1 GHz Xeon last week. The prices: 1 GHz Pentium III found in desktop computers will also now cost $ 669, down from $ 990. The price of 933 MHz Pentium III processor has been reduced from $ 669 to $ 508, and 866 MHz chips has been reduced from $ 465 to $ 358. The Celeron processor with a clock speed of 700 MHz will now cost $ 138, down from $192, and the 667 MHz chips prices were reduced to $112 from $170, earlier. The price of 750 MHz Pentium III processor used for laptops was lowered to $ 401 from $562.