NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 17 July
17-07-2009
by Emmet Cole
BiancaMed gets investment | Micro-hoo deal rumoured
Irish medical technology company BiancaMed has received an additional EUR6 million in funding, led by European venture capital firm Seventure Partners. Three of BiancaMed's existing investors -- ePlanet Ventures, Enterprise Ireland and ResMed -- also contributed to the round. The new capital will enable the company to continue the development of clinical products in areas such as sleep apnoea screening and disease management. BiancaMed is headquartered in NovaUCD, the Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre at University College Dublin.
A search and online advertising deal between Yahoo and Microsoft is expected to become a reality soon, according to US reports. Top executives at Microsoft have flown to Silicon Valley to work out the details of the deal, which sources at both companies have claimed could be announced as early as next week. While the details of the deal are not known, it is expected to see Microsoft paying Yahoo several billion dollars upfront to take over its search advertising business. There is also believed to be a display advertising element to the deal, which could see Yahoo take the lead in selling premium advertising for both companies.
An Taoiseach Brian Cowen attended the inaugural meeting of the Innovation Taskforce on Friday. Also present was Minister of State for Science, Technology and Innovation, Conor Lenihan. The taskforce was established to advise the Government on its strategy for positioning Ireland as an international 'innovation hub.' The Taoiseach invited the taskforce to examine how Ireland can increase rates of innovation and commercialisation and intensify foreign direct investment in high-value areas. The taskforce is expected to report to Government within six months.
Flexible working could save staff across Europe and Russia almost an hour and a quarter every day, through abandoning the daily commute, according to a report commissioned by IT communications company Avaya from research consultancy Dynamic Markets. The 'Flexible Working 2009' report found that 96 percent of flexible workers have more time because they no longer have to commute and that the average time saved by not commuting is 70 minutes. In effect, the authors claim, flexible working could save 39 working days each year for every worker. Twenty-one percent of remote workers said they use that free time to do more work while 56 percent spend it with their families. Only 9 percent of workers currently do not have to commute. The report reflects the experiences of more than 3,500 workers across France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Russia and the UK.
Mozilla released an upgrade to its Firefox browser in order to deal with a bug discovered earlier this week. The vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code. Exploit code was also posted Monday on exploit code-sharing site Milw0rm.com, forcing Mozilla to release an upgraded Firefox 3.5.1. The latest version is available for Windows, Mac and Linux users as a free download from firefox.com.
The not-for-profit Symbian Foundation is to launch a mobile application development service called Horizon in October -- a move that will undoubtedly lead to severe competition for Apple. Symbian is the operating system used in over half the world's mobile handsets. Apple's share of the worldwide smartphone market was 10.8 percent in Q1 2009. Apple's App Store, which offers third-party software for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, has sold more than 1.5 billion downloads since its launch last year.
Finally, sales of video game equipment and software fell 31 percent to USD1.17 billion in the US in June, the largest decline since 2000, according to research group NPD. Game software sales fell 29 percent to USD625.8 million and hardware sales dropped 38 percent to USD382.6 million. Sales of accessories declined 22 percent. Nintendo's Wii was the top-selling home console in June with 362,000 units, although sales were down about 45 percent from the same month last year. The top-selling game title in June was Activision Blizzard's 'Prototype', which sold approximately 600,000 units.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 