Daily Digest 7 October

07-10-2008

by Deirdre McArdle

Celtic Catalysts secures funding | Google helps mail users see clearly

Nova UCD-based life sciences company Celtic Catalysts has received funding of EUR500,000. The funding has come from existing investors 4th Level Ventures and private investors. Celtic Catalysts will use the money to close some near-term opportunities, according to Dr Brian Kelly, CEO of the firm, who said the company would also try to raise additional capital "to enable it to develop scale-up production facilities to manufacture bulk quantities of its products and to address additional high-value opportunities". Celtic Catalysts specialises in the area of 'P-chiral' technology, which enables global pharmaceutical companies to manufacture drugs, particularly those in anti-viral and anti-cancer therapeutic areas, more cost effectively. The company was founded in 2000 and currently employs 17 people.

Almost three-quarters (70 percent) of IT managers in the UK say the increasing prevalence of consumer technologies such as MP3 players and instant messenger in the workplace is creating complicated business challenges for their organisations. That's according to a survey commissioned by enterprise systems management vendor Quest Software, which also revealed that despite the IT managers' concerns, half of those organisations either allow employees to store company data on personal devices, or lack formal policies intended to deter this practice.

Consumer electronics giant Samsung Electronics has announced it is launching a USD10 million global B2B advertising campaign to promote its printing division. Samsung's 'Ctrl+P' advertising campaign will run in 16 global markets, including 11 European countries: UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Finland and Poland. The company has also announced that it has expanded its printing unit across Europe and has made some 'significant' new hires during 2008 to support growth in the division. "Samsung has ambitious plans to become a top tier printing business over the next five years and these significant structural changes will lay the foundations for us to do just that..." said Peter McParland, Samsung Ireland, IT country manager.

CA has announced the launch of Data Center Automation Manager, which allows companies to manage both physical and virtualised data centre resources and systems. It combines a rules-based policy engine and IT performance management and configuration data from systems and applications, which means it can power "intelligent" and "informed" automation decisions, according to CA. The firm claims the Data Center Automation Manager boosts service delivery, supports application configuration and availability and supports green IT initiatives.

Dublin-based enterprise content management software developer pTools has completed the rollout of its Content Management Software (CMS) for the new 'Transparency Initiative' at the Irish Stock Exchange (ISE). This latest project builds on an existing pTools implementation for the ISE of a multi-dimensional website using pTools CMS software and aims to increase the level of data and documentation transparency in the asset backed securities markets. pTools' remit was to work with the ISE's IT department to extend back-office systems to deliver financial product documentation to the ISE's website. The aim of the 'Transparency Initiative' is to bring thousands of documents online that would otherwise have been locked inside in-house systems and unavailable to the market.

In a bid to save users from themselves, Google has unveiled a program called Mail Goggles. The aim of this quirky program is to prevent you from sending a late night mail you may live to regret. Once Mail Goggles is enabled it will check to make sure you definitely want to send that mail by making you solve a few simple maths problems after you click send. Gmail engineer Jon Perlow, who developed the program, says this exercise should confirm you're in the right state of mind to prevent you from sending a mail begging your boyfriend or girlfriend to take you back. By default, Mail Goggles is only active late at night on the weekend, otherwise known as the 'danger zone'. Once you've enabled Mail Goggles though, you can make a few adjustments in General Settings to make sure it's active during your own personal danger zone. Hopefully Google will consider creating a version for mobile phones too.