NEWS IN BRIEF
For the record 18 May
18-05-2007
by Emmet Ryan
TIF urges committment to broadband roll out | Traffic to ireland.com surges
The Telecommunications and Internet Federation (TIF) has called on the winners of the General Election to push forward with efforts to have all of Ireland connected to high quality broadband services. "All parties recognise that there was always going to be a portion, of the population, approximately 10 to 15 percent, mainly in rural areas, where it was going to be uneconomic to roll out broadband, be it wireless or fixed," said Gerry Fahy, TIF chairman and strategy director for Vodafone. "Already significant funding for this has been allocated and a tendering process has been initiated to meet the needs of these disadvantaged areas. It is vital that the next government is committed to fully implementing the National Broadband Scheme and momentum is not lost on this critical issue."
Dell, Microsoft, Xerox, Eircom and Oracle have been named amongst the 50 winners of the O2 Ability Awards 2007. The companies were recognised for best practice from six categories: Retention & Wellbeing, Recruitment & Selection, Leadership, Customer Service, Learning, Development & Progression and Environmental Accessibility. The awards, now in their third year, encourage Irish employers to recognise the contribution people with diverse needs make to business. The winners will attend a special gala evening in Dublin Castle on 13 June where the two overall winners, six category winners and a new award for the Best Small Company will be announced. The awards will be televised on 14 June at 10.45pm on RTE One.
Online revision website skoool.ie is offering access to its exam centre free of charge to students ahead of the Leaving and Junior Certificate exams in June. The centre offers resources such as study notes, revision checklists, past paper analysis and exam guides. The site also offers podcasts to provide support for students with aural exams in French and Irish.
Traffic on the Irish Times website ireland.com has risen substantially according to figures published by ABC Electronic. Traffic to the site is up 32 percent since the last ABC audit and now stands at 17.2 million page impression per month. The number of unique users accessing the site in March increased by 38 percent to 1,185,069.
Nokia Siemens Networks informed attendees at the AnglaCable conference in Cologne on Friday about multi-facetted unified communications systems available to cable operators. These systems offer an opportunity to unify services such as cable television, broadband, voice telephony, and fixed-mobile services on one system.
A report by research firm Gartner has named IBM the leading enterprise content management (ECM) vendor worldwide for 2006. Enterprise content management covers areas such as integrated document management, web content management, records management and document-based collaboration. The Gartner report said the ECM market worldwide grew by 12 percent in 2006.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 