Amiga RoundTable Category 15, Topic 5 Message 6 Tue Aug 22, 1995 M.BARLOW1 [] Mike [] at 07:38 EDT Here is a recent post to the Internet which spells out Escom's current marketing plans. <>MLB<> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Fri, 18 Aug 1995 05:53:46 comp.sys.amiga.misc Thread 199 of 229 Lines 475 PR release London No responses ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ gbo@ramses.fdn.org Gilles Bourdin at RAMSES BBS (France:1- 45845623/53791199/12 * This message forwarded from area 'Courrier Worldnet' (NET_2_999_99_9) * Original message dated 18 Aug 95, from Gilles Bourdin * This message forwarded from area 'Courrier Worldnet' (NET_2_999_99_9) * Original message dated 18 Aug 95, from Gilles Bourdin 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 Taowan 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 +49 6252 709 195 Fax +49 6252 709 520 email gbo@amiga-tech.de 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 +49 6252 709 195 Fax +49 6252 709 520 email gbo@amiga-tech.de Regards, Gilles Bourdin Public Relations Tel +49 6252 709 195 Fax +49 6252 709 520 -- Amiga Technologies GmbH Berliner Ring 89 D-64625 Bensheim Germany -- ----------