IN ASSOCIATION WITH

For the record 7 May
07-05-2008
by Bryan Collins

CyberSource to create 56 jobs in Belfast | MP3 files used in massive malware attack

CyberSource, a US e-payment firm, is to create 56 new jobs over the next three years at a new software development facility in Belfast. In the first year the company said it plans to employ 20 engineers and support staff, increasing that figure to nearly 60 within three years. The expansion will be partly funded by Invest Northern Ireland, which is to provide STG840,000 in funding to the company.

The winners of the prestigious Webby awards have been announced in New York. Among those honoured are comedian Stephen Colbert, film-maker Michel Gondry and will.i.am, the Black Eyed Peas frontman. Colbert was named the Webby Person of the Year, while Gondry picked up the Webby Film and Video Person of the Year award in recognition of his 'Be Kind, Rewind' low-budget movie. Will.i.am picked up the award for Webby Artist of the Year for his pro-Obama internet videos. The awards will be given out at a ceremony in New York on 10 June.

Mobile operator Digicel has announced it has launched a service in Tonga in the South Pacific. Digicel Pacific now operates across Samoa, Papua New Guinea and Tonga with launches pending in Fiji and Vanuatu. Tonga has a population of 102,000 and a mobile penetration rate of 35 percent.

Attackers are using fake MP3 files and Mpeg files to launch a massive malware attack. After downloading the fake media file, the user is asked to launch an executable called 'play_mp3.exe'. This program then installs adware on the machines of users of the Firefox browser. McAfee has detected attacks on more than 360,000 machines, with more than 120,000 occurring in the past 24 hours. The IT security company has traced the attacks to the Fastmp3player.com domain.

Salesforce.com, a software and platform-as-a-service provider, says it signed up 7,000 customers and 14,000 subscribers across Europe, Middle East and Africa during the first quarter of 2008. These included the likes of Air Liquide, the Christie Group, CODA, COLT Telecom Group, and Rentokil Initial.

Canon has introduced two new printers to its Selphy compact photo printer line-up. The Selphy CP770 portable printer and its sister model, the Selphy CP760, are aimed at families looking for high-quality prints, the company says. The CP770 model features Bluetooth and wireless printing.

Sword, a risk management solution, has been named best oprisk software by risk industry publication Operational Risk and Compliance. This is the second successive year Sword has taken the top spot in the rankings.

Colt Telecom Ireland has just transferred all of Aon Corporation's communications requirements from three offices to Aon's new premises on James Joyce Street in Dublin. The overall value of the deal is EUR495,000 over a three-year period.

The European Commission is inviting feedback from industry, consumer and other interested stakeholders to review the functioning and effectiveness of the EU Roaming Regulation, which came into force on 30 June 2007. The public consultation process has a deadline of 2 July 2008 for submissions. The Commissions public consultation document can be found here.

ChangingWorlds, a media market intelligence company, has presented a paper to the Mobile Content World Asia conference in Singapore. It made the presentation about the importance of personalisation and content discovery for mobile internet growth and advertising success. "The ability to use granular subscriber intelligence is critical to delivering relevant, personalized mobile data services such as specific Walt Disney content or music content that matches an individual subscriber's profile," said Michael Breen, technical director for ChangingWorlds, at the conference.