NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 23 January
23-01-2009
by Deirdre McArdle
IrelandOffline says NBS not up to speed | Mobile phone market declines in Q4
Minister for Labour Affairs Billy Kelleher has outlined details of discussions he's had with Vladimir Spidla, the European Commissioner responsible for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities. In particular, Minister Kelleher focused on requesting EU aid for workers in the Mid-West region where Dell recently cut 1,900 jobs as it moved its manufacturing facility from Limerick to Poland. "The scale of redundancies in Dell, and more widely in the Mid-West region, has brought such economic dislocation to that area, and particularly to Limerick," Minister Kelleher said, adding that while there is no guarantee that the application for aid will be successful, he had received an encouraging initial response from Spidla.
There has been more response to the official launch of the Government's National Broadband Scheme, with broadband lobby group IrelandOffline weighing in with its reaction. The group has termed the solution on offer 'midband' and has argued that the technology being used will not be able to support the "advertised headline speeds". "Because of many technical issues this scheme will never be suitable for gaming, VoIP, Skype and other typical broadband uses. Speeds will vary enormously. These headline speeds assume only one user will ever use the sector; the question is what happens when 40 people use it?" said IrelandOffline's interim spokesperson Eamonn Wallace. The group is in the process of publishing "a more comprehensive document outlining the technical issues".
During the fourth quarter of 2008, just 295 million mobile phones were shipped worldwide. This represents a drop of 10 percent from the 329 million units shipped in the year-ago quarter, and the market's weakest growth rate since 2001. That's according to research firm Strategy Analytics, which forecasts 1.08 billion handsets to be sold globally in the full year 2009, a 9 percent decline from 1.18 billion sold in 2008, making 2009 the weakest year since the modern mobile phone industry began in 1983. Of the top five vendors, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola all saw shipments decline year-on-year in the fourth quarter. Nokia shipped 113 million handsets, down 15 percent; Sony Ericsson sold 24.2 million phones, down 21 percent; while Motorola shipped just 19 million handsets, a drop of 53.6 percent year-on-year. Meanwhile, LG shipped 26 million mobile phones during the quarter, recording growth of 8 percent and Samsung also had a good quarter, selling 53 million handsets, up 14 percent over the year.
The Vatican has launched its own YouTube channel, which will broadcast short video news clips updated daily on what the Pope's up to and general happenings at the Vatican. The video clips will be up to two minutes long and will be produced every day, with footage provided by the Vatican Television Center in conjunction with journalists and the web team of Vatican Radio. Audio and text on the channel will be available in English, Spanish, German and Italian. The channel is available at www.youtube.com/vatican.
Also on YouTube, a video of a new musical instrument created by Peter Bennett, a PhD student at Queen's University Belfast, has attracted over 1 million hits on the video-sharing site. Bennett made the video to demonstrate the BeatBearing -- his electronic musical instrument that uses ball bearings to create different drum patterns. The BeatBearing was created as part of research into the use of 'tangible interfaces' for new musical instruments, led by Sile O'Modhrain from the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen's. The BeatBearing was created from chrome, transparent Perspex and computer graphics. Check it out on YouTube.
The Apple Macintosh is gearing up to celebrate its 25th birthday on 24 January. The machine was unveiled using a TV advert directed by film-maker Ridley Scott and shown during the US Superbowl in 1984. The Macintosh's graphical user interface set it apart from other computers at the time and made it much more user-friendly; people were able to simply click on a file to view it, rather than memorising text-based commands. The Macintosh also came with a mouse -- one of the first computers to have one – and sported a 9-inch screen in an upright beige case, 128k of RAM, an internal floppy drive, and a keyboard.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 