IN THE PAPERS
In the papers 29 November
29-11-2007
by Sylvia Leatham
Eircom settles dispute with Royal College of Surgeons | Adobe plans PDF ad service
The Irish Times reports that Eircom posted first-quarter group revenues of EUR514 million and a pretax profit of EUR173 million for the three months to the end of September. Read the details of Eircom's results on ENN.
In other news of Eircom, the paper says that a legal dispute between the telco and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) has been settled. The dispute centered on the refusal of the RCSI to agree to Eircom assigning its interest in RCSI-owned premises at St Stephen's Green in Dublin to Radora Developments Ltd. The case was due to open before Mr Justice Peter Kelly in the Commercial Court this week but after day-long talks between all sides, he was told the action had been settled.
The paper also notes that sales at Dixon's and PC World in Ireland and Britain came close to STG2 billion during the first six months of its financial year. Read more on DSG's results as reported by ENN on Wednesday.
The Irish Independent notes that education publisher HM Riverdeep has received regulatory approval for its planned USD4 billion acquisition of Reed Elsevier's Harcourt US education business. The green light from the US Department of Justice paves the way for the creation of a publishing giant with an enterprise value of EUR10 billion.
The Financial Times says that more than 100 countries are believed to be using the internet for espionage, according to security firm McAfee. "This is the rough consensus of the security experts we have spoken to, and a credible figure given how low the barriers to entry are. All you need is a few computer science graduates," said Ian Brown, lead researcher for McAfee and a security expert at Oxford University. The report found that the number of cyber-espionage incidents and computer attacks on critical national infrastructure are rapidly increasing around the world.
The paper also says that Vodafone has suffered a setback in its attempt to gain a leading presence in Africa. Telkom, South Africa's former telecoms monopoly, called off talks on a deal that could have given the UK mobile group control of Vodacom, the country's largest mobile operator. Vodafone wanted to use Vodacom as a springboard from which to expand further into Africa as part of its strategy of seeking growth in emerging markets. Vodafone's deal with Telkom was contingent on Telkom selling its fixed-line phone infrastructure to African mobile operator MTN, but on Wednesday Telkom terminated its talks with MTN, adding that it was also ending discussions with Vodafone.
In other news of Vodafone, the Wall Street Journal reports that the mobile giant is planning to create a joint venture to operate its networks in India. The move expands plans Vodafone laid out in February to share its network with India's largest mobile company, Bharti Airtel. Now Vodafone plans to operate those networks via a joint venture and could include other carriers. Chief Executive Arun Sarin declined to say which other companies could join and said it could be a couple of months before deals are finalised.
The paper also says that Adobe Systems, a maker of online-publishing software, plans to announce a programme in which publishers can get paid to run ads from Yahoo's ad service alongside PDF documents. Until now, publishers could place ads in PDFs on their own, charging advertisers for static blocks of text or graphics that they would place in the document. Now publishers will be able to show ads alongside their PDFs without selling and inserting the ads themselves, by uploading the PDF content to Adobe's website to ad-enable it, then distributing the PDFs as they previously did -- an easier and less costly option.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 