Visiting three cities in one week, the Regional Roadshow Series will bring the latest in automation and control technology and training to key industrial centres, starting off in North Queensland in June.

Pavilion Technologies has been selected as an official supplier to Emirates Team New Zealand to help in the quest to bring the America's Cup back to New Zealand in 2007.

Schneider Electric and Citect will jointly promote, deliver and support automation solutions throughout Australia.

The number of broadband, but especially ADSL, connections has grown strongly in Australia over the past 12 months, greatly enhancing communications between businesses to create a proper platform for next-generation services such as VoIP to flourish.

In China, automation business is growing three times faster than the GDP. The Chinese economy is headed for a banner year despite the earlier disruption caused by SARS.

National Instruments announced the acquisition of Toronto, Canada-based Electronics Workbench, a supplier of electronics design automation software.

Intel Corporation has completed initial production runs of dual-core processors and provided further details about its multi-core plans to its customers, signalling the beginning of an era when PCs will have two or more 'brains' inside.

Texas Memory Systems has announced four significant interoperability certifications for its flagship RamSan-325 Fibre Channel solid-state disk. The certifications include Microsoft Designed for Windows Server 2003, Sun Solaris Ready, IBM TotalStorage Proven and McData OpenReady. Each of these certifications is awarded as a result of testing with the related platform.

Gartner Research expects overall global PC demand in 2005 to slow compared with last year.

AMD plans to port XenSource's Xen open source virtualisation package to its 64-bit processor technology.

The potential impact of Microsoft's broader move into security software has been noted by McAfee and other incumbents.

ABB has won contracts worth around $60 million to supply a 500 kV gas-insulated switchgear (GIS) and 12 sets of power transformers for the right-bank power plant of the Three Gorges dam project in China.

The Chairman of the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), John Price, and the President of the Australian Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers' Association (AEEMA), Christopher Janssen have announced that the Boards of both organisations had agreed to undertake a feasibility study of a proposal to merge and create a much larger industry grouping comprising the diverse technology-based and industry sectors which underpin Australia's economy.

Boeing has selected an NI LabVIEW and PXI-based solution for acquisition of vehicle launch environments on the ground-based midcourse defence system vehicle flight test program.

A full installation and commissioning contract has been awarded to Rockwell Automation Australia for an induced draft (ID) fan upgrade at the BlueScope Steel Port Kembla steelworks plant. Installed in December 2004, the first of three 3000 kW, 6600 V PowerFlex 7000 variable speed drives (VSD) is already operational. The entire upgrade is scheduled to be completed by June 2005.