NEWS IN BRIEF
For the record 17 April
17-04-2008
by Charlie Taylor
EU approves Vivendi-Activision deal | Yahoo gains ground on Google
The majority of women working in IT in Britain are dissatisfied with their work/life balance and think that although employers say they support flexible working, the reality is often quite different. That's according to new research, carried out at the "Working Smarter, Not Harder", networking event which was recently hosted by womenintechnology.co.uk and Microsoft. It shows that while 55 percent of respondents claim they had found a balance between work and their personal lives, almost all felt that there was room for improvement. Close to 80 percent of respondents said their current organisation backed flexible working; however, many claimed that this was very limited and that while organisations professed to supporting flexible working arrangements, few offered it in practice.
The European Union has cleared the way for Vivendi to proceed with its planned acquisition of gaming firm Activision. The purchase, which will see the creation of a new company called Activision Blizzard, is worth around USD9.85 billion. The European Commission's examination of the proposed transaction showed that the overlaps between the activities of Vivendi and Activision in relation to game software publishing are limited and that, for all categories of game software, the combined firm would continue to face several strong, effective competitors, such as Electronic Arts, and the game console manufacturers, such as Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.
Mobile internet network operator, Truphone, has raised STG16.5 million of Series B venture capital funding from a number of private investors including Independent News & Media. Truphone is a global, mobile operator that enables free and low-cost mobile phone calls via the internet. Through its recent purchase of SIM4travel, the company has also completed its GSM core network, which will enable it to offer low-cost GSM calls worldwide via a travel SIM. Other investors to participate in the Series B funding included Eden Ventures, Burda Digital Ventures and Wellington Partners. All of the Series B investors are existing backers of the firm.
New research from web-search marketing firm, Search Ignite indicates that there was a 28 percent rise in spending on search marketing during the first quarter of 2008. The data indicates that Yahoo showed the greatest gains with a 57.6 percent increase in spending year-on-year. The report adds that Yahoo gained market share at the expense of Google. Yahoo's share of spend grew to 24.2 percent in March, while Google's declined to 70.4 percent, down from its peak market share of 77.5 percent in May 2007. MSN's share of search spend fell to 5.4 percent during the quarter.
A new social housing development in Belfast is one of the first parts of the UK where residents will be offered a choice of next-generation high-speed broadband services. This is the result of an initiative by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI). Following the trial, residents will be offered both high-speed copper-based broadband services and fibre-to-the-home. Virgin Media and Bytel, the service providers, are currently offering 20 megabits per second speeds. As a result of the trial both companies now plan to offer customers even faster connectivity in the future based on this technology being installed.
Around 93 percent of e-mail heading for Irish inboxes this week contained spam, according to new figures from security software firm, IT Force. Over 380,600 e-mails were received by the firm and its clients over the last week, of which over 353,100 were spam. The top spam relays geographically are China, Belarus and the US.
Sony Consumer Electronics Ireland has announced it is to cut the price of its BDP-S300 Blu-ray player from a recommended retail price of EUR499 to EUR399 from the beginning of May. According to Sushil Teji, General Manager from Sony Consumer Electronics, Ireland, the move will be a further boost to a format that Sony expects to account for 20 percent of Home Vision electronic sales in 2008. There are now over 500 titles available on Blu-ray and Blu-ray sales in Ireland have grown tenfold year on year, the firm said.
Both Mozilla and Apple have issued new security updates to plug newly-identified holes in Firefox and Safari. The Firefox patch fixes a critical vulnerability in JavaScript garbage collector and Mozilla warned that as Thunderbird shares the browser engine with Firefox it could be vulnerable if JavaScript were to be enabled in mail. Apple released patches to fix at least four vulnerabilities in the Windows version of Safari while there are patches for two flaws in the Mac version of the browser.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 