Daily Digest 19 August

19-08-2008

by Deirdre McArdle

Irish firms to increase IT spend | PopCap's Bejeweled hits 25m milestone

Nearly 40 percent of Irish businesses plan to increase their investment in IT in spite of a negative outlook for profits over the next six months, according to a KPMG/Sunday Times study. Forty-three percent of businesses said they intend to maintain their current levels of technology spend, while 38 percent plan to invest more this year. Nineteen percent of businesses indicated they would reduce their technology budgets this year. "It's encouraging to see Irish businesses maintaining their commitment to IT spend," said Paul Toner, business performance and IT advisory partner at KPMG. "When times are good, you need to spend on technology to stay with the pace and when times are not so good, you need technology to stay ahead of the competition by supporting efficiency and reducing operating costs." Toner noted that the ongoing investment in IT was largely due to companies spending less on hardware and large systems refreshes, but increasing their spend on technology to support improved customer service, process automation and effective decision-making in difficult economic times. The survey was conducted among 300 companies in Ireland, ranging from small and medium businesses to large companies.

Irish-based climate change champion Cara Augustenborg has just launched GreenDIY.ie, a website aimed at helping people do environmentally friendly DIY. Augustenborg is a research scientist at UCD, researching the environmental impact of potential biofuel productions in Ireland. Earlier this year she was chosen as the 'Ben & Jerry Climate Change College Ambassador' for Ireland. The 'college' was set up by ice-cream makers Ben & Jerry "to inspire 18-to-30-year-olds to deliver business-orientated solutions to climate change". The 'college' consisted of a nine-month business mentoring programme, a trip to the Arctic and a EUR7,000 grant to launch a project. Augustenborg's 'green DIY' project is now going live. She says she set it up to help Irish homeowners "do it themselves and go green" after becoming frustrated with her own eco-renovation project at home. The site catalogues environmentally friendly DIY solutions to household fix-it problems. It has been set up as a wiki, meaning that users can add their own content and edit others' contributions.

In more 'green' news, IBM has announced that its newly launched 'Green Sigma' consulting offering is based on Lean Six Sigma, a business strategy for analysing operations to improve overall efficiency, lower costs, increase quality, and add, change or eliminate activities and processes to improve overall performance. The offering applies these principles wherever energy and water are used throughout a client's operations -- transportation systems, datacentres and IT systems, manufacturing and distribution centres and office facilities.

Within the engineering sector in Ireland, recruitment firm Sigmar Recruitment has identified a noticeable shift from general manufacturing and production roles towards strategic and specialist positions. According to a survey conducted by Sigmar, SMEs have been recruiting senior managers from multinational companies in a bid to increase their technical expertise and knowledge of foreign markets. Conor McGennis, manager with Sigmar's engineering division, says that although the local market in Ireland is still strong, SMEs are recognising the importance of looking into export markets in Europe and further afield.

Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation, Dr Jimmy Devins, will on Wednesday award certificates to secondary school teachers who participated in Science Foundation Ireland's (SFI) 2008 Secondary Teacher Assistant Researchers (STARs) programme. The award ceremony will take place in the Science Gallery, Naughton Institute, Trinity College. The SFI-funded STARs programme involves teachers working with a researcher or research team over an eight-week period during the summer. It is designed to equip participants with new skills and knowledge, which in turn can be passed on to pupils, thereby encouraging an active interest in science.

PopCap Games, which has its European headquarters in Dublin, has announced it has reached a milestone of 25 million unit sales of its flagship franchise, Bejeweled (Bejeweled and Bejeweled 2 collectively). The figure is based on updated information from distribution partners across the web, mobile, retail, in-flight and other channels. PopCap says this figure equates to a Bejeweled game being sold every 10 seconds. PopCap's games are available over a wide range of platforms including the web, PCs and Macs, mobile phones, Xbox and PlayStation consoles, PDAs and Blackberrys, iPods and the iPhone.

Microsoft has announced new licensing and product support policies that it says will help its business customers create more dynamic datacentres and IT systems with virtualisation software. From 1 September, customers will be able to move any of 41 Microsoft server applications between servers within a server farm as often as necessary without paying additional licensing fees. Microsoft says the new licensing policy will reduce the number of licences customers need to support their IT systems as well as simplifying the tracking of application instances or processors, because customers will be able to count licences by server farm instead of by server. Microsoft says its new support policy means customers can get the same level of product support in a virtualised environment that they now get in non-virtual environments.

Google has announced it has invested over USD10 million in Enhanced Geothermal Systems (ESG) technologies. This amount includes funding for research on next-generation geothermal resource mapping, EGS information tools, and a policy agenda for geothermal energy. The conventional geothermal approach relies on finding naturally occurring pockets of steam or hot water. EGS, on the other hand, replicates these conditions by fracturing hot rock, circulating water through the system, and using the resulting steam to produce electricity in a conventional turbine. This current tranche of funding will be invested in Google's EGS partners -- AltaRock Energy, Potter Drilling and Southern Methodist University Geothermal Laboratory.