ROUNDUPS
For the record 10 February
10-02-2003
by Ralph Averbuch
Investment in 3G phones will be paid for in 10 years | Music industry launches electronic identity tags to track Internet sales
eSpatial, developers of Online Spatial Processing systems, and Artech Consulting Group have entered into partnership, aimed at providing customers with integrated spatial solutions. The partnership will help organisations that rely on spatial data to build solutions that integrate into their enterprise IT infrastructure.
European investment in 3G phones will be paid back within 10 years, claims the chairman of industry association UMTS Forum. Speaking at a Berlin event to showcase mobile services just weeks before the UK's first 3G service '3' is set for launch, Dr Bernd Eylert suggested that mobile customers in Europe are already on an evolutionary path to UMTS. "While voice will continue to dominate usage patterns for many years to come, 3G comes into its own as customers demand high bandwidth services like video conferencing, multiplayer gaming and high-speed Internet access," he said.
Recruitment website Monster.ie has been conducting a poll asking visitors their views on office romance. The figures revealed that the Irish are apparently an amorous lot with about half admitting to mixing business with pleasure. Almost 10 percent are currently romantically involved with someone from the office, with 47 percent having had an office romance.
A group of newspaper publishers has reached a legal settlement with Gator over the uninvited display of its Web advertisements over their Web sites' pages. Seven publishers including The Washington Post, The New York Times and Dow Jones reached a settlement with the Internet software company though the terms of the agreement remain strictly confidential.
Music industry trade bodies the International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have launched electronic identity tags to keep track of Internet music sales in an effort to pay song writers as their works increasingly become available on-line. The Global Release Indentifier, or GRid for short, is much like a digital barcode found on CD cases in shops. Its objective is to track each time a record label, on-line retailer or distributor sells a song as a Web stream or download. Sales tracking initiatives such as GRid are considered vital for an industry that claims to be suffering lost sales from on-line music piracy.
Media company Vivendi Universal says its revenue rose 1 percent in the fourth quarter and 6.3 percent for the whole of 2002, driven mostly by growth in its telecomms business.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 