NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 15 January
15-01-2009
by Deirdre McArdle
IDA Ireland to launch Google campaign | PC market growth declines
Finance Minister Brian Lenihan has announced a major Google Adwords campaign aimed at promoting Ireland as a location for foreign direct investment. Google worked with IDA Ireland to help build an ad campaign that targets potential investors. A key objective of the campaign will be to drive traffic to www.idaireland.com and www.theirishmind.ie. The campaign will kick off at the end of February when IDA Ireland launches its new online presence and will run in multiple languages targeting the USA, Canada, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and China.
Following six years of growth, the PC market in the fourth quarter of 2008 declined by 0.4 percent compared to the same period in 2007, according to research firm IDC. The weakening economic environment, including a fall-off in consumer spending, was the dominant factor limiting growth. Hewlett-Packard maintained its lead at the top of the vendor list, shipping just over 15 million units during the quarter, up 3.1 percent year-on-year. Meanwhile, Dell didn't perform quite as well, with shipment growth dropping 6.3 percent at just over 10 million units. Acer continued to enjoy solid growth; it shipped 9.1 million PCs during the quarter, and recorded year-on-year growth of 25.3 percent. Lenovo shipped 5.5 million units during the three-month period, down 4.8 percent on last year, while Toshiba shipments jumped 20.2 percent to 3.7 million. IDC isn't too optimistic for 2009, with report author Loren Loverde saying "I won't be surprised if recovery gets pushed further into 2010 as this crisis unfolds."
DSG International, parent company of Currys and PC World, has posted a 10 percent drop in quarterly sales in the 12-week period to 10 January. The group said consumers putting off making purchases until after Christmas affected its results, with the group's UK and Ireland electricals (sales down 12 percent) and computing (sales down 13 percent) businesses being hit particularly hard. DSG said it is embarking on a cost-cutting phase in order to brace itself for the year ahead. As part of the cutbacks it said it will not retain some of the temporary staff hired over the Christmas period.
A team from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, a web science research institute based in NUI Galway, has been named as one of four finalists in a prestigious international competition sponsored by publisher Elsevier. The aim of the competition is to come up with prototype tools to deal with the ever-increasing amount of online life sciences information. The Elsevier Grand Challenge finalists have been invited to present their 'vision paper' to the judges and the public in April at the Experimental Biology Conference in New Orleans. Their work will then be presented at a live webinar during which the winner will be chosen. The first place winner will receive a cash prize of USD35,000 and the runner-up will be awarded a USD15,000 prize.
Irish games developer Jolt Online Gaming has said it plans to revive the classic computer game series Zork as a web-based multiplayer online game. Dylan Collins, CEO of Jolt and DemonWare founder, explained that the game -- Legends of Zork -- is currently in development mode. Collins sold DemonWare two years ago to Activision for an estimated EUR15 million. He has been working on Legends of Zork since then and is confident that the game will attract millions of players worldwide on its release. The game will be published by Activision.
The Gaming and Leisure Association of Ireland (GLAI) has welcomed the news that Japanese online gaming firm Gala is to create 50 new jobs in the Digital Hub, Dublin. "[Ireland] is geographically and technologically at an advantage to offer online gaming companies the ideal base for their global enterprise. Ireland has a potential window to become an online global centre of excellence within the next decade," said David Hickson, director of the GLAI.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 