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Technology Stocks : 3Com Corporation (COMS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kim Johnson who wrote (9723)	11/6/1997 8:38:00 PM
From: laleh	Respond to of 45548

It's a repackage: BN 11/5 3Com to Sell $449 'Bigpicture' Videophone From 8x8 (Update1) 3Com to Sell $449 'Bigpicture' Videophone From 8x8 (Update1) (Adds 3Com product manager projecting unit sales in 5th paragraph.) Santa Clara, California, Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) -- 3Com Corp. introduced its first low-cost consumer videophone, a $449 device designed and built by 8x8 Inc. The Bigpicture videophone works with a television and a touch-tone phone, and uses ordinary analog telephone lines. It will compete with the $500 ViaTV unit introduced by Santa Clara, California-based 8x8 in February, and the $650 C-Phone Home sold by C-Phone Corp. All three companies are targeting consumers who want to make video calls using their product with an ordinary television. Both 3Com and 8x8 use video microchips made by 8x8, which said today it recently sold its 500,000th video microchip. C-Phone uses a video chip made by Lucent Technologies Inc. ''The Bigpicture TV phone establishes 3Com as one of the first companies to provide a family of mass market videophone products that bridge the PC and non-PC worlds of visual communications,'' said Neil Clemmons, vice president of marketing for Santa Clara, California-based 3Com's Personal Communications Division. 3Com expects to sell more than 10,000 videophones this year, and ''hundreds of thousands'' next year, said Rob Hudson, the product line manager, in an interview. He said the Bigpicture is already being discounted to under $400. It will drop to less than $300 within a year, and to less than $200 by 2000, he predicted. U.S. Robotics paid $5.25 million to 8x8 in the second quarter to license its videophone technology. 3Com since acquired U.S. Robotics, and will pay additional license fees on each phone sold to 8x8. Lower cost video conferencing is available for personal computer owners. For example, Intel Corp.'s $199 Create & Share Camera Pack can be used with a Pentium PC. H.324 Standard Used Because all the video conferencing products use the same H.324 video telephony standard, owners of one product can make video calls to users of a competitor's product. The Bigpicture phone comes with a color camera equipped with an electronic zoom, allowing wide angle and telephoto views. It also has electronic pan and tilt features, allowing the user to move the image from side to side and up and down. Another feature lets the user call home and turn on the camera remotely, for use as a security camera or baby monitor. 3Com shares fell 3/16 to 43 7/16. 8x8 rose 5/16 to 14 5/16 and C-Phone gained 5/16 to 9 1/2. C-Phone has sold about 90 percent of its videophones under an option allowing consumers to pay $299.95 if they agree to pay a fee of $9.95 a month, and 29 cents a minute for all their video calls. The $299 price is below C-Phone's cost of production. Yesterday, it said it agreed to sell $1 million of C-Phone Homes to its new distributor in India, Videocon International Ltd. It said the sale is subject to the Indian government approving the C-Phones' modem. The sale would exceed C-Phone's revenue of $760,949 for the first six months of the year. ''We look forward to making this new-age telephone consumer durable a must for every house in India having telephone access,'' said Naveen Mandhana, president of Videocon's India OA Systems Ltd. unit. He projected sales of up to 6,500 units in the first year. Executives for 8x8 and C-Phone weren't immediately available. --David Evans in San Diego through the New York newsroom (212) 318-2300.ltk/cms