NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 14 January
14-01-2009
by Emmet Cole
Mixed news for Seagate staff | Nortel files for bankruptcy protection in US
Mixed news for more than 450 employees at US-owned technology company Seagate in Derry on Wednesday as they avoided redundancy but saw pay cuts of 10 percent. The pay cut is for all management, sales and professional employees worldwide and affects about one-third of the 1,400 workers at Seagate's Springtown plant. Globally, senior management -- those holding positions of 'vice-president' and above -- will take pay cuts of between 15 percent and 25 percent, the company said. Last September, the company closed its plant at Limavady in Co Derry with the loss of more than 900 jobs. The actions announced Wednesday are expected to save the company approximately USD210 million annually worldwide.
The Government-led trade mission to Japan, which is currently ongoing, sent some positive news back home on Wednesday with the announcement that two Japanese firms were to create 150 new jobs in Dublin and Cork. The firms, online security firm Trend and online gaming firm Gala, will create 100 jobs in Cork and 50 jobs in Dublin, respectively. Find out more about the trade mission in ENN's Weekly Digest on Thursday.
Meanwhile, North America's largest maker of telephone equipment, Nortel Networks, filed for bankruptcy protection on Wednesday. The Chapter 11 filing comes just a day before the company was due to make an interest payment of about USD107 million. Read more about Nortel Networks in ENN's Weekly Digest on Thursday.
BT has won a STG1 million contract to provide data centre hosting services and 24x7 technical support to Consilium Technologies, an IT company based in Northern Ireland. The three-year deal will see BT provide a Tier 1 datacentre to Consilium customers. BT already operates a Class A datacentre and VPN for Consilium, supported by 24x7, on-site IT service operations personnel. Consilium supplies finance, works management and mobile technology solutions to the UK's public sector, including 21 councils in Northern Ireland. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
The third millionth dot-eu (.eu) domain name was registered on 11 January by a German citizen, some two and a half years after its launch. Dot-eu is now the fourth most popular European internet domain and the ninth most popular domain worldwide. Most dot-eu domains have been registered in EU countries with the largest populations and highest internet penetration. Germany continues to lead with 30 percent, followed by the Netherlands (14 percent), the United Kingdom (12 percent), France (8 percent) and Poland (6 percent).
IBM earned a record number of US patents in 2008, becoming the first company ever to earn more than 4,000 US patents in a single year, according to a statement from the company on Wednesday. IBM's 2008 patent issuances are nearly triple Hewlett-Packard's and exceed those of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Apple, EMC, Accenture and Google combined. Figures released by US patent research specialists IFI Patent Intelligence showed that IBM was issued with 4,186 patents in 2008, compared to 3,515 for Samsung (in second place) and 2,114 for Canon.
Meanwhile, McAfee has called for home users to install Microsoft’s most recent security patches as soon as possible, in a statement on Wednesday. Microsoft released a Security Bulletin on Tuesday to address three vulnerabilities in Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB) Protocol, a Microsoft network file sharing protocol used in Microsoft Windows. An attacker could try to exploit the vulnerability by sending a specially crafted network message to an affected system.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 