For the record 19 February

19-02-2008

by Stephen Errity

Havok launches new products | Atlantis' return to Earth to be screened live in Cork

The Emmy-winning Irish games technology company Havok has unveiled two new products at the 2008 Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. 'Havok Cloth' is a new performance-optimised development tool designed to minimise the time that game artists spend on animating the behaviour of characters' clothes and other environmental material in games. 'Havok Destruction', meanwhile, helps to reduce the time taken to develop realistic depictions of solid-body destruction in games. Both tools integrate with existing Havok animation and physics engine products.

Apple has announced the launch of a new 2GB version of its iPod Shuffle MP3 player. The new model will retail for EUR65, while the retail price of the existing 1GB model drops to EUR45. The 'Shuffle' model iPods have no user controls and simply play the songs that have been loaded on to them in random order. They are only half a cubic inch in volume and weigh just half an ounce.

The Blackrock Castle Observatory in Cork is set to screen a live feed of the return of the space shuttle Atlantis to Earth on Wednesday. One of the shuttle's crew, Dan Tani, is married to an Irish woman from the local area and several days ago he addressed his relatives and a group of local school children by live satellite link-up from the International Space Station. The observatory is also currently hosting a public exhibition about space travel and exploration called 'Cosmos at the Castle'.

Dermot Hore has been appointed the new Head of Project Management Practice at outsourcing firm I.T. Alliance. Hore has over 15 years' experience in project management for private and public sector organisations and currently lectures in the subject at the Dublin Institute of Technology. Prior to joining I.T. Alliance, Hore was a project manager for firms such as AIB, UCD, eircom and Bord na Mona.

In other appointments news, Norkom has confirmed Alain Tayenne in the role of General Manager for Europe. Tayenne joins Norkom following a successful assignment with Reuters Corporation, where he had commercial responsibility for the trade and risk management applications business area for Europe, UK and Latin America. Prior to this, Tayenne was Group General Manager for Financial Reporting Systems (FRS) Global.

Finally, web developer Parity has renewed its contract with An Bord Bia and will now re-develop and continue to maintain the organisation's website. The new site is expected to go live in spring of this year and aims to greatly increase the amount of information offered by the Board to the public.