INFORMATION AGENTS Available to Purchase

France Telecom, the owner of Questel ORBIT, has become the latest large company to invest in intelligent information agents which are promising to revolutionise the way online services are searched. In France Telecom's case, it has picked a business with some pedigree — General Magic, in which it has just taken a minority stake, was spun off from Apple and now numbers AT&T, Motorola and Sony among its investors. Based in California, it employs just 120 staff but is at the cutting edge in the race to develop information agents — software that can retrieve data intelligently from multiple information sources without any human intervention.