Daily Digest 19 September

19-09-2008

by Emmet Cole

eBay.ie appoints new MD | Cisco swallows Jabber

eBay has announced the appointment of Gareth Davis as managing director of its Irish operation, eBay.ie. Davis joins eBay from McKinsey & Co, New Jersey, bringing over 12 years of experience to the company. Davis now has responsibility for the ongoing development of eBay.ie, including operations, marketing and building the eBay brand and community in Ireland. Founded in June 2005, eBay.ie has over 500,000 certified registered users and, together with PayPal, eBay's online payment system, employs 1,200 staff in Ireland.

Amazon has revealed a new service to help companies ship MP3s and software packages to people scattered around the globe. The company's content delivery service is an add-on to Amazon's existing storage, software and database services where customers can store their data and code at Amazon's data centres. Amazon will charge on a per-use basis, so customers can pay for the amount of disk space consumed instead of purchasing an entire storage system.

Nvidia announced Friday that it is expected to reduce its workforce by 360 jobs. The company has almost 5,000 employees worldwide. The reduction in its workforce is expected to be completed by the end of October. Nvidia said that it would offer redundant employees severance packages, counselling and job placement services.

Networking equipment giant Cisco has announced that it has purchased Jabber, an open source instant messaging (IM) and presence tool. The terms of the deal were not undisclosed. Cisco said it would try to use Jabber as a means of improving its messaging services for business users. Jabber enables collaboration across a range of presence systems such as Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Sametime, AOL AIM, and Google Talk.

Japanese electronics firm Toshiba is expecting to go into the red within the first half of the financial year as its computer chip business suffers the effects of weak demand. Toshiba is forecasting a net loss of JPY50 billion (USD8 million) in the six months to the end of September, compared with previous projections of a JPY15 billion profit.

Finally, Electronic Arts is responding to complaints about copy-protection limits in its new "Spore" games by increasing the number of times the software can be installed. The game went on sale on 7 September to rave reviews and has sold well, but Electronic Arts was criticised for enforcing rules that kept the game from being illegally copied and limited it to being activated on no more than three computers at a time.