For the record 3 July

03-07-2008

by Deirdre McArdle

New Currys store to create 20 jobs | Firefox 3 claims Guinness World Record

ICT Ireland has launched its annual Graduate Placement Programme, offering graduates hands-on experience of working in the tech sector. Supported by Engineers Ireland, the programme provides six-to-twelve month placements in tech firms such as Intel to over 100 graduates every year. "The prospects for graduates participating in the programme are excellent. In Intel alone, 80 percent of ICT graduates on placement have been placed in permanent positions," said Kathryn Raleigh, director, ICT Ireland. Details of the programme are available at www.ictireland.ie.

Web hosting provider Blacknight Solutions says it is now accredited to sell .co.nl domain names. The company says the domain can give registrants the opportunity to reach a wider audience, particularly in the Netherlands, and notes that .co.nl domains can be registered by anyone anywhere, unlike the .nl country code, which requires a contact point in the Netherlands. The .co.nl domain name extension was recently launched by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the not-for-profit organisation that oversees the naming scheme for websites.

Electrical retailer DSG Retail Ireland will open a new Currys store in Dundalk on Friday, creating 20 new jobs. This will bring the number of staff employed by DSG Ireland throughout the country to 820, and the number of outlets operated by DSG Retail Ireland to 31.

Insurance firm Quinn Insurance has rolled out SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell in order to cater for an increasing number of customers through its website. The insurance company said its internet sales channel is growing quickly and it needed to upgrade its web-serving platform to handle that growing demand. The SUSE Linux Enterprise Server can handle over 85,000 insurance quotes on a daily basis, according to Quinn, which cited a lower support burden for its IT personnel as another key driver for the deployment.

Troubled e-payments firm Payzone has signed a deal with UK-based wholesale cash and carry operator Bestway Direct Limited (Bestway), which will see the payment firm offer its full range of prepayment services including utility bill payment, mobile top up and gift cards to Bestway's retail brands. Payzone claims the agreement makes it the market leader in the UK's cash and carry prepayments sector.

Business communications firm Damovo has partnered with Aastra, a provider of enterprise communications products, to target the business market in Ireland. Aastra said it considers Ireland a key area for growth and has joined forces with Damovo, which is a premium partner of Aastra's in Ireland, to roll out a major sales and marketing campaign across the country. The partnership with Damovo follows Aastra's recent acquisition of Ericsson's Enterprise Communications Business. Headquartered in Canada, Aastra develops a range of open-standard VoIP products, telephony systems, mobility solutions and unified communications applications.

Mozilla's Firefox 3 has officially claimed the Guinness World Record for the most downloads in one day, with a total of 8,002,530 people downloading the browser from 6pm on 17 June to 6pm on 18 June. To date Firefox 3 has been downloaded 28 million times by users around the world.