ROUNDUPS
For the record 02 May
02-05-2002
by Ralph Averbuch
Oftel says 500,000 UK homes are broadband enabled | Colt shares climb on encouraging figures
Oftel said on Thursday that there are now more than 500,000 UK home broadband users. The UK telecoms regulatory body said that over 20,000 people are signing up for broadband each week. The numbers from Oftel are generally in line with figures from providers such as BT, NTL, Telewest and Kingston, which say that there are at least 539,000 broadband end-users in the UK. There are 328,000 cable broadband users, while over 200,000 people have signed up for broadband from an Internet Service Provider.
As part of its Science, Research and the Information Society policy statement, Fianna Fail said on Wednesday that it plans to ensure that there is a reserved budget for on-line advertising as part of all major government advertising and public information campaigns. Responding to this campaign promise, the Interactive Advertising Bureau in Ireland said that it welcomed the initiative from Fianna Fail, and the new media advertising body would like to know the position of other Irish political parties on the issue. "We consider this to be due recognition for our medium," an IAB Ireland spokesperson said.
The on-line technology news site CNET Networks Inc. posted a first-quarter loss and lower revenues earlier this week, reflecting ongoing weakness in the Internet advertising market. CNET said it lost USD31.1 million, or USD0.22 per share, in the quarter, compared with a loss of USD316.6 million, or USD2.33 per share, the year before. On an operating basis, excluding unusual costs, it reported a loss of USD20.1 million, or USD0.14 per share. Analysts had been forecasting a loss of USD0.15 per share.
Colt Telecom said on Thursday that the company had increased turnover by 18 percent to STG246.8 million in Q1 2002. EBITDA increased by 111 percent to STG9.8 million compared to the first quarter of 2001. Colt shares were up over 40 percent in London in late trading on Thursday to STG0.47.
Worldwide sales of semiconductors reached USD10.75 billion in March. This is a 7.2 percent increase from the USD10.03 billion level reached in the previous month, and the highest monthly sequential increase since April 1986. The Semiconductor Industry Association president George Scalise said the numbers were led by strong DRAM sales. DRAM sales saw an 82.4 percent sales rise in the market.
NCR Corporation announced that supermarket operation Superquinn is to install NCR RealPrice electronic shelf labels (ESLs). These are digital tags that attach to shelves and will initially go into three of its shops in Ireland. This will allow Superquinn to replace approximately 10,000 paper labels per store with the ESLs from late June 2002. The store installations follow an initial trial of 1,200 labels in Superquinn's shop in Lucan.
IBM announced it gained 3.2 market share points in the storage management software market in 2001, according to a recently released report from Gartner Dataquest. Of the top three leaders in the storage software market, IBM had the largest year-on-year sales growth in 2001 of 32 percent.
Websense Inc., a provider of employee Internet management solutions, reports that the number of peer-to-peer file sharing and file transfer Web sites have increased by more than 535 percent in the last 12 months, now reaching nearly 38,000 Web pages. This reflects the fact that 30 percent of software listed on CNET's "Most Popular" downloads list are P2P applications.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 