NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 14 July
14-07-2009
by Emmet Ryan
Eircom signs NGN deal with Croke Park | Havok partners with Trinigy
Eircom suffered its second significant outage this month on Monday. Service was completely down in the afternoon for some customers who were left without access to the internet while others experienced delays when browsing. The telco said it had fully restored services by 11.15pm on Monday night. Eircom said it could not yet confirm if foul play was involved but said that an unprecedented volume of traffic had been directed at its network in recent days. This incident follows a previous outage on 8 July.
In more news of Eircom, the telecoms firm has secured a EUR1.4 million contract to provide a next generation telecommunications network to Croke Park. The deal with the stadium, which will last three years, will see the addition of smart card ticketing services and video-on-demand in some areas of the stadium.
Vodafone Ireland has launched Vodafone Wireless Office Control, a new voice tariff. Wireless Office Control allows SME customers to use as many minutes as required for a fixed monthly fee, which the firm says enables predictability and cost control of mobile bills. The tariff has EUR250 fixed monthly charge, plus a EUR25 fee per employee. The tariff includes unlimited calls to all mobiles in Ireland, on any network, unlimited calls to all landlines in Ireland and unlimited calls to landlines in Northern Ireland.
O2 has launched BlackBerry Managed Service (BMS) in Ireland. BMS offers customers a broad range of BlackBerry support, maintenance and consultative services. Companies can outsource the complete end-to-end management of their BlackBerry service environment to O2, receiving support, infrastructure monitoring, regular service checks, and advice from consultants.
BT has saved more than STG4.5 million per annum since 2004 using CA's SiteMinder, according to a statement from CA. BT's use of the service has allowed it to decrease the amount spent on IT administration, application development, password reset requests and support of auditing and compliance. BT has centralised its user authentication and authorisation to key external and internal web applications using CA SiteMinder to perform 36 million transactions per day.
Irish gaming technology company Havok has formed a partnership with Trinigy, a 3D game engine provider with over 100 licensees and offices in Germany and Austin, Texas. This joint venture will focus on the integration of the two firms’ products. This marks the first partnership Havok has formed with a game engine developer for its current suite of middleware.
Maritime communications firm Blue Ocean Wireless (BOW) has successfully completed full testing of FleetBroadband, its maritime broadband service. Fleetbroadband is now fully operational and commercially available to existing and potential BOW customers. In addition, BOW is to receive an additional USD7.5 million cash injection from investors Smart Communications, NTT DoCoMo and Altobridge.
Apple has announced that users have downloaded more than 1.5 billion applications in just one year from its App Store. The store has more than 65,000 apps, developed by over 100,000 developers working in the iPhone Developer Program. "The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality," said Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive. "With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up."
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 