Network Update

Hear the music, play the game The music industry is jumping on the multimedia bandwagon. ESP, a record label that is part of Chrysalis's Echo division, launches Sea of Tranquillity next Monday - a CD compilation of 12' singles by underground artists. The disc also contains a demo version of a Virgin computer video game. On 14 November, WEA brings out Mike Oldfield's The Songs of Distant Earth - a music CD inspired by Arthur C Clarke - accompanied by five minutes of CD-rom computer graphics.

All on the up and up for PC makers Making personal computers has once again become profitable. Apple's quarterly revenues were up 16 per cent, Microsoft's by 32 per cent and Compaq's by 63 per cent. Profitability figures were better still. This week Compaq launched a television campaign designed to promote sales of 'lifestyle PCs' for use at home in the run-up to Christmas.

Black box provides the fax This month, the Aldermaston company Electronic Frontier has launched a 'black box' that turns a fax machine into a PC scanner and printer. The size of a cigarette packet, FaxScanner costs from pounds 69; call 0173 481 0600.

Find out who's who in America Trying to reach the movers and shakers in the US? Chadwyck- Healey has just put Monitor Publishing's Leadership Directories on CD-rom. The discs, offering 'a complete Who's Who' of US business, professional organisations and government, starting from pounds 200 per quarterly update. Call 0223 215512.

Low-cost, hi-tech digital copiers Up to 9 per cent of paper copies in Europe are made on 'digital duplicators', according to a new market study from Christopher Paine Associates (0494 891614). These little-known machines are a hi-tech update of the old office duplicator, and cost less to run than photocopiers for runs of more than 20 copies.

Interactive junk mail comes cheap If you ask for a brochure and you receive a diskette through the post, it may be an iDisk from APMm Ltd This uses new compression techniques to store 100 megabytes of information on a single PC-compatible disk. The result can be interactive junk mail in full colour, costing only a few pence. Call 0428 751751.

How to make a photo snappy Having trouble sending electronic mail from your car? Vodafone, the mobile telephone company, launched the UK's first digital network combining data and speech on 19 October. In future, the GSM-based network will allow news photographers to send in their pictures while driving back to base, and fleet managers to send maps to lost drivers.

A system as elastic as plastic Salvation at last for when you want want to buy something costing more than your cheque card limit. Transax's new electronic telephone authorisation allows shops to guarantee payments on cheques as easily as on plastic. The system does not use private bank details, but compares the cheque with the writer's past behaviour. Shops pay just over 1 per cent in commission - less than credit card companies charge. Call 021 252 5000.

Casting the Net ever wider If you want to complain about a dud hamburger, don't try sending an e-mail to ronald@mcdonalds. com. The Internet address belongs to Josh Quittner, an American journalist, who registered the name of the world's most famous fast-food chain at the US government's Internet Network Information Center in Virginia to demonstrate the fact that no trademark checking is done. The exploding popularity of the Net is bringing in 2,000 new name requests a month.

A very male sort of network The average age of Internet users is almost 31, according to an e- mailed survey carried out by a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Men outnumbered women by more than six to one. Some 62 per cent of respondents came from the US, followed by Britain, Canada and Australia (all less than 7 per cent).

Last week's review of DragonDictate voice-recognition software failed to make clear that William de Marvell works for Responsive Systems, which is one of seven UK Dragon resellers.

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