NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 13 October
13-10-2008
by Deirdre McArdle
iPhone 3G available on pre-pay | YouTube adds full-length TV shows
Irish consumers will from Monday be able to buy a pre-pay version of Apple's iPhone 3G at O2 and Carphone Warehouse stores around the country. The 8GB model will cost EUR480, while the 16GB version will set consumers back EUR569. Internet browsing will cost EUR0.99 per day up to a daily limit of 50MB, and Wi-Fi access through Bitbuzz hotspots will be free for a period of 12 months.
High-end gaming PC maker Alienware has donated one of its latest gaming notebook models to the Department of Software Engineering at Athlone Institute of Technology. AIT will use the computer, an Area-51 m17x, for students of the institute's new honours degree in game development. The four-year programme started in Athlone in September and is already proving to be a popular engineering course at the institute. Lecturer on the course, Denis McCarthy, said that the Area-51 m17x would enable the academic team "to study and investigate the latest games with students and allow them showcase their own designs. Having a resource such as this will also assist with attracting students to study for the degree, which is a critical issue given Ireland’s desired position as a knowledge-based economy."
It's currently awards season in the Irish tech sector; the Irish Web Awards and the Inspired IT Awards both took place on Saturday night. The Inspired IT Project of the Year was named as AIB's Olympus project, while telecom firm Perlico took home the Inspired IT Team of the Year prize. For a full list of the winners for the Inspired IT Awards click here; a list of the Irish Web Awards winners is available here.
Tipperary Institute is to host SchoolBots, a competition aimed at transition-year students. The competition aims to promote the use of maths through gaming. SchoolBots, which is sponsored by Google and Lenovo, will see students use Java to program robot tanks for battle against each other. The virtual tanks need to be smart enough to hit and avoid being hit and to move around without any kind of manual control. Prizes include a Lenovo laptop for the winning school and MP3 players for the finalists and runners up. Students from schools across Ireland will compete in the regional final, which will take place on 13 January 2009 at Tipperary Institute, with the top eight teams competing against each other in the national final on 12 March 2009. Schools can register their teams on the SchoolBots website, www.schoolbots.ie. Closing date for entries is 12 December 2008.
YouTube has announced it is to begin showing full-length TV shows on its site. Through a deal with CBS, the video site will be able to show programmes such as 'Star Trek', 'Dexter' and 'MacGyver'. From Google's perspective, the key part in all this is that the TV shows will feature advertisements before, during and after each episode. This is an ideal way for Google to raise revenue from YouTube, which it bought for USD1.65 billion. Last week YouTube announced a 'click-to-buy' facility, another revenue-generating feature for Google.
Ninety-four percent of North American and Latin America respondents to an RSA survey say they are aware of their firm's IT security policies, yet 53 percent say they work around IT security policies in order to get their work done. In response to a separate question, 64 percent said they frequently or sometimes send work documents to their personal e-mail address in order to access and work on them from home. The survey also showed a somewhat worrying trend; one in 10 respondents said they have lost a laptop, smartphone and/or USB flash drive with corporate information on it. Meanwhile, 79 percent frequently or sometimes leave their workplace carrying a mobile device containing sensitive information related to their jobs. RSA, the security division of EMC, conducted the survey among attendees at industry events in North America and Latin America in the spring and summer of 2008.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 