NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 30 June
30-06-2009
by Emmet Ryan
Ryan launches premium regulation bill | Ireland gets EUR107m in FP7 funding
Communications Minister Eamon Ryan presented a bill to the Government on Tuesday to regulate the premium rate telecommunication sector in Ireland. This refers to premium rate content such as ringtones, traffic news, sports results, competitions advice, entertainment and chat lines. The bill aims to put in place a regime of consumer protection for subscribers to premium rate services. It replaces the existing industry model of self-regulation overseen by RegTel and transfers regulatory functions to ComReg.
Irish researchers have won funding totalling EUR107 million in the first two years of the Seventh EU Framework (FP7). They are using the funding to engage in pan-European research projects to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the EU. Researchers have used FP7 funding to support projects in areas like ICT, health, nanotechnology and energy research.
Irish gaming software firm Havok is celebrating as six game titles created using its technology received a total of 26 nominations across 15 categories in the Games Critics Awards. Havok provides interactive software and services to games companies and the movie industry.
The ESB has agreed a three-year deal with workload automation specialist UC4. The new agreement aims to increase productivity and save time and money as the ESB extends its IT services to support the changes required to operate in the new wholesale electricity market. The renewal of the deal, first signed in 2005, will expand the role of UC4 into the ESB's wholesale IT systems.
Software firm Real Time has entered into a partnership with Northern Irish firm Singularity to deliver a Wholesale Line Rental 3 (WLR3) solution to the UK telecoms market. The new partnership will utilise Real Time's experience in the carrier market to integrate the WLR3 solution into customers' existing order, fulfilment and billing processes.
Mobile phones are becoming increasingly essential, according to a study released on Tuesday by Lightspeed Research. The study was carried out in the UK, France, Germany and the US. Lightspeed found that Americans and Britons were most likely to agree that their mobile phone was now an essential part of their daily life and they'd be lost without it. Almost half of people in Britain stated they carried their phones with them most of the time, with 55-64-year-olds most likely to do so.
Swedish software company Global Gaming Factory X has agreed to buy The Pirate Bay, a free file-sharing website. Global Gaming Factory X, which will pay USD7.7 million for the website, said it would find ways to compensate copyright owners for downloaded material. The four Swedish men behind the Pirate bay were sentenced in April to one year in jail and ordered to pay damages of USD3.6 million for running the site, which is one of the world's largest for downloading files on the internet. That decision is under appeal.
According to the Wall Street Journal, China's state media has said its government will postpone enforcement of a new rule mandating that all new computers be sold with internet-filtering software. The rule was due to go into effect from Wednesday 1 July, but the official Xinhua News Agency said on Tuesday that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology had decided to delay the plan. No other details behind the decision have been released. Authorities in China claim the filters are needed to shield children from online violence and pornography, but critics have claimed the software could also be used to filter out any content disapproved of by the Chinese government.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 