NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 1 October
01-10-2008
by Emmet Cole
Digital switchover brings opportunity: Reding | HP acquires LeftHand Networks
In a statement to the press on Wednesday, Ruairi Quinn TD has called on Education Minister Batt O'Keeffe to fully roll out a forthcoming pilot scheme to protect government-owned portable computer devices. Quinn, the Labour Party spokesperson for education and science, also expressed surprise at figures that revealed a "high number of deficiencies in government departments' secure IT policy". According to information supplied by government departments to Quinn in response to a Dail question tabled by the TD last week, only three out of 15 government departments have fully encrypted their IT systems. This is despite the fact that 19 laptops, three desktops, at least nine Blackberry mobile phones and four portable storage devices have been lost across government departments in 2008. "It beggars belief that the Department of Communications, tasked with developing our country's IT infrastructure, has absolutely no policy on securing IT devices," said the statement. Ouch.
Ireland faces a 'once-in-a-lifetime opportunity' to take advantage of the changeover from analogue to digital broadcasting, according to a speech from the EU Commissioner for Information, Society and Media Viviane Reding. Speaking on Wednesday at the 'Digital Dividend' conference hosted by ComReg in the Conrad Hotel in Dublin, Reding identified the spread of rural broadband as a key positive impact of the switchover. The switch is expected to take place by 2012 and will free up spectrum capacity for use by television, mobile telephony and fixed broadband services.
The Small Firms Association and Vodafone Ireland have launched a set of guidelines for mobile workers. The 'm-Worker Guidelines' document is intended to assist small-to-medium size businesses with plans to embrace mobile working methods. The guide will be sent to the SFA's 4,000 direct members free of charge. The guidelines are based on Vodafone's "Meet the Irish m-Worker" research, which was published in March.
Dublin will host the inaugural "T44U: Global User Conference and Open Day" in November, TerminalFour, the Dublin-based content management company announced Wednesday. The conference will bring TerminalFour's Site Manager users from around the world together to showcase new products and initiatives. By some uncanny synchronicity, the conference coincides with the formal launch of the latest version of TerminalFour's Site Manager product and the unveiling of its customer and partner extranet.
Havok, the Irish company that provides physics engines to the game and movie industries, hopes to cause, well… havoc with the news that Havok 6.0 -- the latest version of its physics engines and animation software development kits -- is now available for licensing.
Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard (HP) has agreed to buy network storage provider LeftHand Networks, for USD360 million. The acquisition is expected to close in HP's fiscal first quarter of 2009, but is subject to purchase price adjustments, according to sources at HP. Boulder, Colorado-based LeftHand Networks is privately held, has 215 employees and presumably never knows what (the as yet non-existent) "RightHand Networks" is doing. When the deal is done, HP will add LeftHand Networks' storage software to its range of storage server offerings.
Those pesky spammers are now using "delivery receipt requests" to verify e-mail addresses, according to news from TrendLabs. Delivery receipts are sent to the original sender of an e-mail message to confirm that the sent message has been delivered to the intended recipient. Most webmail platforms automatically send a Delivery Receipt if the targeted account exists – making it difficult for people to avoid clicking through.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 