First

By Staff -- Modern Materials Handling, 9/1/2000

The changing face of automatic data capture

Two years after Symbol Technology Inc.'s (Holtsville, N.Y.) highly publicized bid to buy Telxon Corp. (Akron, Ohio) was rejected by Telxon management, the two companies have announced a merger.

Under the agreement, Telxon shareholders will receive 0.50 of a Symbol share for each Telxon share. The transaction has a value of approximately $465 million, based on Symbol's closing share price of $49.88 when the deal was announced.

All aspects of Telxon's business will be fully integrated into Symbol, saving as much as $75 million in annual costs. The deal is expected to be complete in the fourth quarter of 2000, creating a $1.8 billion company.

Elsewhere, the planned merger between Hand Held Products, an affiliate of privately held Welch Allyn Data Collection, and PSC, announced 2 months ago, has been terminated.

Both companies have mutually agreed to the move due to "unforeseen circumstances in the financing markets which make it impracticable to obtain financing."

Bringing you up to speed on RFID

A new book, "Understanding RFID - A guide to radio frequency identification technologies and applications ," is now available through AIM, Inc.

The 48-page, magazine-style book, written by Professor Anthony Furness, with an introduction by Alan Haberman, is sure to bring you up to speed on RFID.

Sections include: Technologies, devices and systems; RFID applications and products; Standards; Getting started in RFID; Case studies; Glossary of terms; and Sources of further information.

The book is $30 and can be ordered from the AIM Web site, www.aimglobal.org .

B2B snoozers will end up losers

By 2005, it is expected that almost half (42%) of business-to-business (B2B) activity outside the service sector in the U.S. will be in the form of online trades, says a new report from Jupiter Communications.

That's a dramatic increase from this year with the Internet accounting for only about 3% of all B2B trades. Jupiter's research says that a shift to online B2B business models is what's driving this shift. The report advises that companies should "resist hesitation and start building their online B2B infrastructure now."

New equipment, software spending increases 20%+

Investments in information technology have continued to be the major driver of the extraordinary quarterly growth numbers (20.6% annualized increase) for business capital spending.

Between the second quarter of last year and the April-June period of 2000, U.S. businesses increased investment in information technology by 25.2%, with spending for new computers and other hardware rising by 23.1%, and spending for software and applications-specific business solutions increasing by an estimated 30.9%.