In the papers 1 August

01-08-2006

by Sylvia Leatham

Microsoft tries to avoid further European Commission fines | CA execs admit to backdating stock options

The Irish Times reports that Microsoft has submitted documents required by the European Commission in an effort to avoid further fines for breaching an antitrust ruling. The Commission said it was studying the files and that it was too early to tell whether the software giant would be subject to an additional non-compliance penalty. Microsoft said that it had made a final submission of 2,600 documents which "further demonstrates our ongoing commitment to reaching full compliance with the Commission's decision of March 2004".

The paper also says that Ireland's third-level colleges must provide increasingly specialised courses and become more responsive to the changing needs of industry if the State is to benefit from the global digital media industry, according to a new report. Read the full story as reported by ENN on Monday.

The Irish Independent notes that Ocuco, a Dublin-based optical software specialist, has reported profits of EUR816,555 for 2005 compared to EUR48,531 in the previous year.

The same paper says that seven defendants named in a federal indictment of online gambling company BetonSports have pleaded not guilty to federal racketeering and mail and wire fraud charges. Neil Kaplan and Lori Kaplan Multz, the brother and sister of BetonSports founder Gary Kaplan, were among those pleading not guilty to a 22-count indictment.

The paper also reports that urgent safeguards to protect children from the dangers of using the internet have been demanded in the wake of an alarming survey by the National Centre for Technology in Education. Read the full story on ENN.

According to the Wall Street Journal, IBM is expanding its use of AMD chips, a boon to AMD as rival Intel steps up a counterattack. IBM will announce on Tuesday five new servers for mainstream business applications that will use a new version of the Opteron microprocessor. The announcement follows Dell's decision in May to adopt Opteron for high-end systems.

The paper also says that the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the videogame industry's raucous annual conference, will be getting a lot quieter. Members of the game industry's main trade group, the Entertainment Software Association, voted to dramatically scale back the annual May conference amid growing disenchantment among exhibitors with the spiralling costs of the show. Instead of a big event that has traditionally attracted more than 60,000 attendees, the association plans to produce a much smaller event in July 2007, tentatively titled the E3 Media Festival.

The Financial Times reports that executives at CA have disclosed that they set stock options aside for up to two years before issuing them to employees in a way that produced large windfall gains. News of the compensation practices came as the software company joined the growing band of US technology companies to admit to "backdating" employee stock options. The practice -- which involves giving out options with exercise prices that were set at earlier, more favourable levels -- has drawn the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission and prompted a full-scale investigation by federal prosecutors.

The paper also says that Japanese electronics makers Toshiba and Hitachi have both posted better-than-expected quarterly profits, with Toshiba benefiting from strong demand for flash memory chips and Hitachi booking a smaller loss on hard disk drives. Toshiba, the world's second-biggest flash memory maker, posted a group operating profit of JPY20.84 billion (USD182 million) for the April to June period, compared with a JPY1.85 billion loss a year earlier. Hitachi posted an operating profit of JPY17.14 billion (USD149.7 million) for the same period, up from JPY1.29 billion a year earlier. Both Hitachi and Toshiba stuck by their full-year forecasts for double-digit gains in operating profit.