ROUNDUPS
For the record 02 January
02-01-2003
by Ralph Averbuch
O2 celebrates fivefold increase in messaging over New Year | European Commission gives Sony/Philips go-ahead on acquisition of Intertrust
O2 claims customers fired off 7 million text and picture messages of goodwill to friends and family during New Year's Eve. According to O2 this represents an increase of more than 250 percent on last year when 2.7 million messages were sent on New Year's Eve 2001.
The merger between Logica and CMG has been finalised. The new entity will be called LogicaCMG plc. Celebrating the news was Martin Read, Group Chief Executive of LogicaCMG who said: "I am delighted that the merger has completed as planned, establishing LogicaCMG as a major international force in IT services and wireless telecoms with a leading position in Europe. The shared ambitions of both organisations have driven the creation of LogicaCMG."
Even before 3G begins to make its mark, Korea and China have already agreed to set up a new research centre for 4G mobile networks. The countries are expected to hold bi-annual joint working committee meetings, with the next meeting set to be in Seoul, South Korea this April. It is widely expected that Japan will join the technology co-operation initiative.
A new computer virus, believed to be a variant of the Yaha virus, has proven to be quite contagious, infecting thousands of computers across the globe. E-mail management firm MessageLabs said the virus, which appears to have originated in the Middle East, may try to launch a denial of service attack against a Pakistani government Web site. On Tuesday the Web site, infopak.gov.pk, was unavailable and remains so Thursday.
Yahoo is set to acquire Inktomi, best known for its search technology, for a purchase price of USD1.65 per share in cash. The transaction reflects an aggregate purchase price of approximately USD235 million, adjusted for Inktomi's expected cash balance net of debt, as of 31 December 2002. Until recently Yahoo used Google as its default search engine of choice when surfers performed searches on any Yahoo Web sites.
In a further sign of the Internet's ubiquitous nature, figures just released by the London Internet Exchange (LINX), which handles up to 96 percent of the UK's Internet traffic, show traffic peaking at more than 17 Gbit/second in the evening of Boxing Day and at over 15 Gbit/second in the evening of Christmas Day. This is almost twice the level of traffic recorded on the same days last year when the Boxing Day peak was around 9 Gbit/second and Christmas Day traffic reached 8 Gbit/second. "It is impossible to tell from the traffic figures what exactly people were doing on the Internet," said LINX sales and marketing manager Vanessa Evans. "People may have been sending e-mails to relatives overseas or logging onto Web sites."
The European Commission has given regulatory approval to Philips and Sony for their proposed acquisition and joint control of Intertrust, a US company which developed patented technology covering the area of digital rights management.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 