The final Hipparcos Catalogue results have been available from a few months to Hipparcos Consortia members and to astronomers who submitted observing programmes to ESA in 1982. Preliminary results were presented during the Hipparcos Venice '97 Symposium, held in Venice, 13-16 May 1997. The proceedings (ESA SP-402) are in press. In addition a few papers have already been published or are available as preprints. This review presents the results obtained on distance and age scale determinations from Hipparcos data presented at Venice or available to the authors up until June 1997.
The publication of the Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues (ESA 1997) is under way: the data files are available from the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg, while Volumes 1 (Introduction and Guide to the Data) and 17 (the ASCII CD-ROMs) have been sent from ESA in the second half of June 1997.