NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 21 November
21-11-2008
by Deirdre McArdle
Google kills Lively | Yahoo reopens AOL talks: report
E-learning firm ASimil8 has won NovaUCD's 2008 start-up award after being named the overall winner of the NovaUCD Campus Company Development Programme. ASimil8 has developed a next-generation learning platform to provide immersive education for languages and other subjects using virtual world and gaming technologies. The company was founded earlier this year by Paul Groarke and Garrett Hussey, who will take home the EUR5,000 prize money. Two other projects participating in the NovaUCD programme, Flexitimers and Bioplastech, received runner-up awards and prizes of EUR3,000 and EUR2,000, respectively.
Google is to shut down its virtual world, Lively, by the end of this year, according to a blog post from the Lively team. "Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it's the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people's lives. But we've also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off," the blog said. In shutting down Lively, Google said it will now prioritise its resources and focus more on search, advertising and its apps business. Lively was originally launched as a competitor to the popular virtual world Second Life.
In more news of Google, the search giant has announced the launch of SearchWiki, a customisable search facility that will allow users to re-rank, delete, add and comment on search results. The facility will also allow users to write notes on particular search results and remove results that they don't consider relevant. "This new feature is an example of how search is becoming increasingly dynamic, giving people tools that make search even more useful to them in their daily lives," said Google in a blog posting.
In what will come as little surprise to industry analysts, Yahoo has reopened talks to buy Time Warner's AOL unit, reports Bloomberg. Quoting people familiar with the issue, Bloomberg said that Yahoo and Time Warner executives have met in the past few weeks and continue to negotiate over terms. In the event of a deal Time Warner would reportedly hand over AOL's advertising business to Yahoo in exchange for a stake in the combined company. Any such deal would likely strengthen Yahoo's dwindling prospects. With Jerry Yang stepping down as Yahoo's CEO earlier this week, commentators had suggested a deal with Microsoft would be on the cards again; however, Steve Ballmer knocked that idea on the head, saying on Thursday that a revised Microsoft bid for Yahoo would not happen.
Following an agreement with IBM, Nokia has announced that its S60 smartphone users will have access to Lotus e-mail. The deal, which will come into effect from December, will see S60 users being able to connect to their corporate e-mail accounts using Lotus Domino Server software called Lotus Notes Traveler. Nokia estimates there are 80 million S60 users worldwide.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 