NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 4 March
04-03-2009
by Emmet Cole
Havok in line for multiple GAME Awards | Lobby group calls for net 'blackout'
Irish games physics engine developer Havok has received 27 nominations in 12 out of 14 categories for the upcoming BAFTA Video Games Awards (a.k.a. The GAME Awards). Ten different games were nominated, including Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia by Ubisoft, Fable II by Microsoft, Fallout 3 by Bethesda Softworks, Guitar Hero: World Tour by Activision Blizzard and Motorstorm: Pacific Rift by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. The GAME awards winners are decided by votes from British game journalists and industry figures. BAFTA will announce the winners on 10 March in London.
Blackout Ireland -- a group of Irish campaigners protesting against the recent court settlement between Eircom and the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) -- has called for a week-long protest, starting Thursday, 5 March. Blackout Ireland has called for Irish internet users to blacken out their profile images on social media sites such as Twitter, Bebo, Facebook and MySpace, and to e-mail their internet service provider to voice their opposition to the move. According to Blackout Ireland, the Eircom-IRMA deal could set a "dangerous precedent" of internet censorship by private companies, by allowing them "to ban someone's internet access without due legal process".
BT has won a EUR500,000 contract to create and manage a high-speed MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) infrastructure across 16 locations in Ireland, for concrete product company Kilsaran Concrete. The new service will enable Kilsaran Concrete to benefit from greater cost efficiency and control through the implementation of a "flexible communications infrastructure platform", according to a statement from BT.
Samsung Ireland and The Irish Times have teamed up to enable Samsung mobile users to access content from the Irishtimes.com and MyHome.ie websites on their mobile phone. Available on the recently-launched Samsung Pixon touchscreen phone, the new service will be rolled out to all future Samsung touchscreen phones. As part of the deal, The Irish Times and My Home sites will feature as branded 'widgets' on the home screen of the Pixon. The Pixon features an English-Irish dictionary widget that allows users to translate words back and forth between the two languages.
Meteor officially launched a new mobile broadband service on Wednesday. Available in "Pay As You Go" and Billpay options, 'Broadband to Go' is initially available to customers in Cork City and the larger Dublin regions. Meteor is expected to deploy its new, high-speed 14.4Mbps network to the remaining cities and major towns by the end of this year. Meteor already has plans to begin trialling its network at speeds of 21.1Mbps by the end of the year.
Just weeks after Google launched its Book Search facility on the iPhone, Amazon has released a version of its Kindle electronic reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The application, which is available free from the Apple App Store, includes the ability to access over 240,000 books online from the Amazon store.
Eighty percent of Irish and UK resellers expect the economic climate to deteriorate throughout 2009, although more than half (56 percent) think it will only get a little worse, according to research released today by CA Meanwhile, 51 percent expect spending on virtualisation management to increase, with 44 percent predicting growth for cloud computing and SaaS (software-as-a-service).
Meanwhile, research firm IDC continued to revise its projections downwards on Wednesday, lowering its European IT services forecast for 2009 by 2 percentage points, from 2.6 percent to 0.6 percent. According to a forthcoming IDC study, the analysts anticipate a slow recovery to start only in the second half of 2010, with sluggish 2.2 percent growth. In November, when IDC published its first "crisis response" forecast, the expected GDP for Western Europe for 2009 was roughly 0.5 percent. Only four months later, the GDP forecast for the region has fallen sharply to -2.5 percent, with all European economies expected to be in economic recession during 2009. Citing "market uncertainty" and the "expected softening in demand in consulting and systems integration", IDC is predicting a decline of -1.4 percent in project-oriented activities for 2009.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 