NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 19 February
19-02-2009
by Emmet Cole
Ryanair launches in-flight telecoms | It's official: women use phone more often than men
Cable & Wireless' datacentres in Dublin and Munich will manage a global communications infrastructure for Zegna -- the luxury men's clothing company, following news on Thursday that Cable & Wireless has won a multimillion euro contract to provide and manage Zegna's entire network infrastructure. As part of the deal, Cable&Wireless is currently migrating all of Zegna's retail branches on to its global Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network (IP VPN). Zegna has over 7,000 staff and outlets in 93 countries worldwide. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
Budget airline Ryanair has launched an in-flight mobile phone service available on 20 (primarily Dublin-based) planes. Provided by in-flight communications company OnAir, the service will initially be available to customers of more than 50 mobile operators in Europe, including O2. Vodafone Ireland is waiting to determine demand for the product before participating in the service. According to Ryanair, voice calls will cost between EUR2 and EUR3 a minute, with text messages costing EUR.50 and e-mail costing between EUR1 and EUR2. The company added that prices will vary from operator to operator. Knowing Ryanair, the number of letters in your first name, your body weight and the number of words spoken per minute, could also be factors in the pricing.
New survey results from BT into the habits of Irish telephone users has found that 80 percent of us still use our landline on a daily basis, with 41 percent claiming to use it up to five times per day. News about friends and family makes up 51 percent of our daily conversations throughout the country while 14 percent of us gossip everyday on the phone. On average, 7 percent of the Irish population claim to talk about "nothing much", with that figure rising to 16 percent and 11 percent respectively in the enigmatic counties of Waterford and Cork. While 87 percent of the population are clear about how much they spend on their phone bills every month, 13 percent claim not to have any idea how much they spend. In news that will surely cause sociologists and gender studies professors to fall to the floor, it was also found that Irish women use the phone more than Irish men, with 68 percent of telephone calls being made by females.
Meanwhile, research from Parks Associates has found that the vast majority of European broadband users prefer watching videos away from their computer. The paper, entitled 'The Impact of Online Video in Europe', examines the impact of consumer preferences on future services found that broadband has changed video viewing habits in Western Europe, with over 20 percent of broadband-ready households watching a film or TV program online in the past six months. Despite this figure however, the researchers found considerable reluctance to embrace online video-watching with over 80 percent of broadband-ready households preferring to watch video the old-fashioned way on television, DVD, or in the cinema.
SEAM, the South Eastern Applied Materials Research Centre at Waterford Institute of Technology, was officially opened on Thursday by Jimmy Devins, Minister for Science, Technology & Innovation. SEAM's activities will focus on x-ray microtomography, microwave processing and magnetically-targeted nano-particles in biomedicine. Researchers at the facility work with companies in sectors such as pharmaceutical, biomedical, electronics and aerospace.
Digiweb has launched a new e-commerce solution aimed at small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). An extension of Digiweb's existing MyWeb software -- which provides web design, website hosting and e-mail for home and business users -- MyWeb Shop is intended to get companies selling online even if they have no prior knowledge of e-commerce. Priced at between EUR100 and EUR220 a year, the package offers instant integration with PayPal and contains 20GB of hosting space, including hundreds of e-mail addresses, a domain name and free phone and e-mail support, according to the company.
An analysis of 28,000 real world passwords by Information Week and Cyber-Ark reveals that a sizeable minority of IT users are "seriously naïve" when it comes to setting their passwords. The analysis found that 14 percent of people were using sequential password combinations such as 1234, 123456789 and QWERTY. Meanwhile, a further 16 percent used their first name as a password and 5 percent chose the names of popular TV shows or singers.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 