NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 26 January
26-01-2009
by Bryan Collins
Philips Ireland escapes staff cutbacks | Global internet users top 1 billion
A new EUR840,000 research centre for diseases officially opened in St. James's Hospital on Monday. The facility forms part of Trinity College Dublin's Institute of Molecular Medicine and was funded partly through a EUR755,000 grant from Science Foundation Ireland. The technology at the facility will enable precision analysis and isolation of cell samples towards the development of treatments and cures for a range of conditions. It will be used by clinician scientists in St. James's and associated hospital as well as external academics, industrial scientists and other researchers involved in analysing disease processes. The facility will be managed by Ann Atzberger who was recruited from the University of Oxford. Speaking at the opening, Professor Padraic Fallon from the Institute of Molecular Medicine, Trinity Centre for Health Sciences, said: "This new facility will greatly assist in increasing our understanding of diseases such as cancer, inflammatory bowel disease and asthma."
Philips Ireland staff will not be affected by the firm's plans to cut 6,000 jobs worldwide in order to cope with the global downturn, according to reports. The Dutch firm employs 110 sales and marketing and distribution staff in the Republic of Ireland and 50 in Northern Ireland. Philips suffered a full-year net loss of EUR186 million for 2008 after a worse-than-expected fourth quarter loss of EUR1.47 billion, following a revaluation of its Lumileds diode light unit. Philips is now seeking savings of some EUR400 million on an annual basis by the second quarter of this year.
Vodafone Ireland and Foras na Gaeilge have linked up to launch a free service that allows customers to use predictive texting as Gaeilge. The Teacs application contains over 25,000 of the most commonly used Irish language words, phrases, names, counties, towns etc. It also provides full grammatical support for common Irish words including those with apostrophes such as verbs in the past tense as well as words including hyphens. All mobile users can download and install Teacs onto their devices by visiting wap.teacs.ie and following the step-by-step instructions provided.
Over 1 billion people around the world used the internet in December 2008, according to digital research firm ComScore. Some 180 million of these users were located in a country with one of the strictest web-censorship policies in the world -- China. Around 163 million people in the US logged on in December, followed by 60 million in Japan, 37 million each for Germany and Britain, and 34 million in France. The actual number of web surfers is believed to be higher though as ComScore based its figures on internet users aged over 15 and did not take into account traffic from public computers, such as internet cafes, or from mobile devices. ComScore's report also found Google was the most frequently visited web property in December with 777.9 million visitors, followed by Microsoft with 647.9 million visitors, Yahoo with 562.6 million visitors and Wikimedia, which covers a range of sites including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikiversity, with 273 million.
Northern Irish firm Singularity has signed a contract with Tokio Marine Global (TMG) to streamline and automate some of its key insurance business processes. This deal is Singularity's first in the London insurance market and will see the Japanese subsidiary of the Tokio Marine and Nichido Fire Insurance use Singularity's software to automate underwriting processes before writing or renewing insurance business. Singularity's product, the Singularity Process Platform, enables organisations to automate, streamline and track the movement of tasks through a work process which the firm claims reduces paperwork and manual steps while improving efficiency. TMG chose Singularity over several other firms including Global 360, K2 and Ultimus and intends to roll out the system over the next 18 months. Financial details of the deal were not revealed.
Irish marketing software provider CustomerMinds has opened a new sales office in the United Kingdom. Three staff will be initially employed at the Manchester-based office and it follows on from the firm acquiring significant business customers in the UK with the likes of Leeds Rhinos, Burnley FC, Stoke City FC and sk:n beauty clinics. CustomerMinds provides an online, self-service marketing platform for marketers who work across multiple channels. The system tracks response activity across various channels and generates reports about the recipients. The Irish firm has also been shortlisted as a finalist in the Digital Media Awards 2009 under the 'Best Newcomer with International Potential' category. The awards will take place in Dublin on 13 February 2009.
IBM is helping several universities around the world develop cloud computing to speed up projects and research initiatives. Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar; the University of Pretoria in South Africa; Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan; and the Higher Education Alliance for Leadership through Health in East Africa are all using IBM Blue Cloud solutions for their projects. Some of the areas of research include: seismic modeling, data mining, medical research cloud computing, and an Arabic language search engine. IBM is also helping the Health Alliance in East Africa to create a solution that will run a cloud computing centre without the Alliance having to actually house the centre by themselves. The computer giant claims that its partners have already seen their research times reduced from weeks to days as a result of its solution.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 