Daily Digest 2 October

02-10-2008

by Deirdre McArdle

ICT Ireland welcomes Facebook news | Google updates blog search facility

ICT Ireland, the IBEC unit that represents the high tech sector, has welcomed the news that Facebook is to establish its international headquarters in Dublin. "This is an exciting development and is a strong endorsement of Ireland as a centre of excellence for the high tech sector. Facebook is a highly innovative company and will have many positions available for highly-skilled graduates of engineering and computer science, as well as in sales and support," said director ICT Ireland Kathryn Raleigh. She went on to say that Ireland must capitalise on this latest development and work to promote science and engineering in schools.

Property firm Jones Lang LaSalle has launched an online property channel – www.jlltv.ie -- that uses digital video brochures (DVBs) to promote client properties. These digital brochures will have footage of the property, interviews with the client, photographs of the property, voiceover comments and on-screen text. The property firm said it is trying to cut costs for its clients as well as trying to speed up the sales process.

Mobile operator Digicel Pacific, a subsidiary of the Denis O'Brien owned Digicel, has announced its launch in Fiji. The operator has invested USD70 million in its network on Fiji, opening 14 stores and more than 25,000 top-up locations across the country. Digicel Pacific's launch in Fiji follows launches in Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Vanuatu.

The University of Limerick has secured a EUR5 million technology research contract aimed at reducing MRSA infection rates in hospitals across the world. The pan-European project team plans to use nanotechnology to develop MRSA-resistant textiles to be used in hospital gowns and beddings, which can kill bacteria and be self-sterilising. Project partners include NUI Galway and Irish companies BeoCare and Cook Medical. The project has been funded by the European Commission under its Framework Programme 7 (Nanotechnology, Materials and Production).

Spam accounted for 90 percent of all e-mails heading for Irish inboxes this week, according to the latest figures from IT Force. The company analysed over 1,114,856 e-mails received by its clients during September and established that over 999,486 of them were unsolicited. This is down slightly on the 92 percent spam rate recorded in August. The most prevalent viruses during the month were: Trojan.Fakealert-532, Trojan.Delf-5385, Trojan.Zbot-2114, Worm.SomeFool.D and Trojan.Agent-49372.

Google has updated the search technology used in its Google Blog Search facility. It will now run on the same technology used in the Google News feature. Like in Google News, the technology will track and organise the approximately 900,000 new blog posts added to the web every day. Previously, the tool only allowed users to type queries to search blogs. Categories on Google Blog Search include politics, technology, business, science, entertainment, movies, television and sports.

Microsoft is to open three web search R&D centres in Europe. The centres will be based in Paris, London and Munich. "We are the challenger, not the leader, in search, but we believe strongly that search is in its infancy and there is so much room for innovation," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a news conference in Paris. "For companies like Microsoft search is the key for unlocking huge new opportunities in advertising." Ballmer is currently on a European tour to visit governments, customers, partners and employees.