Qualcomm Enters Agreement for CDMA
Test Equipment
The influence of Sunnyvale city hall drops off at the borders of Cupertino, Santa Clara and other Silicon Valley towns. But now the far-off city hall and a San Diego company are in each other’s orbits.
Sunnyvale city information technology staffers have developed a suite of municipal government software that San Diego-based Berryman & Henigar, Inc. will relicense and provide to other local governments, under an exclusive agreement finalized in late September.
One software title helps people obtain building permits from city hall. Another assists them with parks reservations. There is also planning and code enforcement software.
Sunnyvale’s city manager, Robert S. LaSala, said he was aware of other cities’ demand for the software, and that his city had been looking for “an appropriate way to make the software available.”
The City Council decided to make it available through Berryman & Henigar, which will deliver the software through its e-Government affiliate, GovPartner. In return, the city will get a percentage of Berryman & Henigar’s gross revenues from the product.
Sunnyvale, incidentally, assembled the software with the help of a $250,000 grant from Microsoft Corp. Microsoft has been informed of the deal and will not receive any payment from it, said a Berryman & Henigar spokeswoman.
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CDMA Test Deal: Agilent Technologies Inc. will make test equipment for Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) wireless devices after reaching an agreement with San Diego-based Qualcomm Inc. In a joint statement issued Sept. 27, the companies said they reached a multimillion-dollar deal that also involves the purchase of advanced chipsets and system software. Agilent, based in Palo Alto, will make test equipment for current- and third-generation CDMA technology, as well as high data rate technology.
Missives With A Message: More than 1 million E-mail users are using a version of Eudora software that displays advertising. That is according to its creator, Qualcomm, which formally introduced Eudora with ads seven months ago and offered it for free.
The company is now touting the desirability of those million people to potential advertisers, saying among other things that it can zap commercial messages to specific demographic groups.
Eudora, less the ads, goes for $39.95 after a $10 mail-in rebate. The ad-less mode is one of the choices a person makes when downloading the software. Qualcomm is also offering a “light” mode without advertising and with fewer features.
Qualcomm introduced version 5.0 of Eudora in September. It’s available via download and should appear in stores soon, said a company spokesman. The ads started appearing on a Eudora 4.3 beta version in December. Version 4.3 was formally released in February.
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Spotted Doing Good: Gateway, Inc., the personal computer maker with its headquarters in San Diego, is No. 10 on Fortune Magazine’s global list of most admired companies in the hardware and software industry.
Executives and analysts ranked the companies for the national magazine according to nine criteria: quality of management, quality of products and services, innovativeness, long-term investment value, financial soundness, community responsibility, use of corporate assets, global business acumen, plus the ability to attract, develop and retain talent.
The rankings appear in the magazine’s Oct. 2 issue.
Items for this column may be sent via E-mail to bgraves@sdbj.com.
