For the record 23 July

23-07-2008

by Sylvia Leatham

TES gets STG4.4 million investment | Nimble.ie grows Irish audience

Northern Ireland engineering firm TES has announced a STG4.4 million investment. The company, based in Cookstown, designs and builds electrical control panels for a range of applications, including state of the art water and waste water treatment facilities. The investment could double the company's workforce to 90 staff over the next three years, the firm said in a statement, and the funds will go toward the provision of new factory facilities, capital equipment and IT systems.

Data recovery organisation Kroll Ontrack has opened an office in Dublin. The company already has over 20 offices in Europe. The Dublin base will provide services such as data recovery and data management software to Irish organisations of all sizes. "Like previous launches in other markets, we are looking to grow the Dublin base as much as possible in the coming months and years," Ciaran Farrell, business development manager at Kroll, told ENN, although he did not indicate whether any jobs would be created in Dublin as a result of the move.

Irish social networking website Nimble.ie says it now has over 110,000 members in Ireland. Launched in February 2007, the site claims it now controls 20 percent of the Irish social networking market in the 16-to-24-year-old age bracket.

In other news of social networks, Facebook is now the most popular of such sites in the UK, according to June figures from online analyst Hitwise. Facebook accounted for 45.29 percent of UK visits to social networking sites last month, a 188 percent increase on the year-ago figure. Bebo is the second most popular networking site in the UK, with a market share of 25.04 percent, while MySpace ranks third with a market share of 14.75 percent. Hitwise also noted the growing popularity of 'micro-blogging' service Twitter: weekly UK visits to the site grew 631 percent in the 12 months ended 12 July 2008, with 485 percent of that growth coming this year.

Revenues from mobile data services are set to exceed USD200 billion this year for the first time, according to Informa Telecoms & Media's latest 'World Cellular Data Metrics' report. Total mobile data revenues were around USD157 billion last year. In the first quarter of 2008, mobile data service revenues surpassed USD49 billion, a 42.7 percent year-on-year increase. This figure means that mobile operators now generate approximately one-fifth of their revenue from data services. Informa estimates that non-SMS data contributed USD17.48 billion of revenue in Q1 2008, or 35.6 percent of total data revenues.

Irish-owned Saaspoint, an agent for Salesforce.com, says it has implemented Saaspoint TimeTrack for Massachusetts-based Arion Water Inc. The application, an on-demand time-tracking and expenses application, is provided on Salesforce.com's AppExchange platform. Arion Water specialises in the design and installation of high purity water systems for high-tech sectors such as semiconductor, biopharmaceutical and technical manufacturing industries.