IN THE PAPERS
In the papers 11 January
11-01-2008
by Sylvia Leatham
Nimble set to recruit 100,000th member | New York opens antitrust case against Intel
The Irish Times reports that social networking site Nimble.ie expects to enrol its 100,000th member this week. Tim Bourke, sales and marketing director for the start-up that launched last March, said fresh private investment aims to make the site a significant home-grown competitor to international favourites like Bebo.
The paper also says that Sligo-based electronic marketing provider Infacta has spun out its PollDaddy product into a separate company. PollDaddy Ltd came into being at the start of the year to manage Infacta's online polling and survey tool, which has attracted 135,000 registered users and is seen by about 80 million web users a month. Using the popular widget model, PollDaddy provides free tools that enable web users to create a survey or poll on any topic.
The Irish Independent says that Horizon Technologies has revealed lower-than-expected revenues for December. Read more on this story on ENN.
According to the Financial Times, UK telco BT will not be forced to invest billions of pounds in a national, superfast broadband network, ministers said on Thursday night. The government's move is likely to be greeted with relief by investors, who feared it had been pressing BT to spend STG15 billion or more on a fibre-optic network connecting all homes. "It is not for government to tell business how much and where to invest in next-generation broadband," the Department for Business said.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Intel's troubles with antitrust authorities have spread to the US, as New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo has announced an investigation into the chip giant's tactics against rival AMD. The state's investigators have served Intel with a "wide-ranging" subpoena for documents and information to determine whether the company had coerced customers to refrain from buying AMD chips.
The paper also notes that Sony BMG Music Entertainment has said Amazon's digital-music store will start carrying songs by its artists later this month. Sony was the last major music label holding out against selling music online without digital rights management (DRM) copy protection. Amazon's store sells songs only in the MP3 format, which can be burned onto CDs, copied to multiple PCs and played on digital-media players.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 