Weekly Digest
Weekly Digest Issue No 487
15-10-2009
by Deirdre McArdle
Good and bad news on jobs front | Intel offers some market cheer
Imagine WiMAX takes centre stage
The Irish broadband market jumped up a gear this week with the news that Imagine Communications is to roll out a next-generation wireless broadband network nationwide. The network, which is based on WiMAX technology, will be available by mid-November in 250,000 homes in Dublin, Wexford, Sligo, Tralee and Athlone. Imagine aims to provide coverage in an additional 15 towns and rural areas each month, and said it will have 90 percent coverage of the country by 2012. Imagine is investing some EUR100 million in the rollout of the network, with Motorola providing technical support. Intel, Google and Hewlett-Packard have all backed Imagine's efforts to offer WiMAX technology. Imagine will also be able to deliver a wholesale voice and data broadband service to other internet service providers, in effect ramping up competition against Eircom, which is coming under increasing pressure in the market. According to reports Imagine is to use Irish Broadband's network of high sites and towers as the base for its WiMAX network. The firm bought Irish Broadband in April 2008 in what seemed like an unusual purchase at the time. In welcome news, Imagine said it will create some 200 new jobs as part of the network rollout. Sean Bolger, founder of Imagine, said the jobs will primarily be in the area of technical engineering as the firm deploys the high-speed network nationwide.
Good and bad news on jobs front
In more jobs-related news, popular e-payments firm PayPal announced Monday that it was to create 100 new jobs at its Dublin facility. The firm, which currently employs 950 people at its European Centre of Excellence in Blanchardstown, is to expand its customer service operations, recruiting candidates with fluent English and a second European language. This latest recruitment round will bring to 1,050 the number of people working for the eBay subsidiary in Ireland. The Dublin centre manages all direct customer contact for PayPal's businesses across Europe. An Taoiseach Brian Cowen welcomed the new jobs, saying they represent "a major vote of confidence in Ireland as a location for investment". On Tuesday, infrastructure software firm Citrix said it would be creating over 20 positions at its Dublin office. The positions will be across a broad spread of the firm's Irish activities, from traditional technical support areas, to software engineering areas such as code modification. This recruitment round will bring to 120 the number of people Citrix employs in Ireland. Elsewhere, NaviNet, a US web-based healthcare communications group, said it plans to invest STG4.4 million in a new research and development centre in Belfast that will create 60 jobs. NaviNet's decision to set up a new software development centre in Belfast marks the first major expansion for the Boston-based group outside of the US. On the flip side of the coin, Harris Corporation in Cork announced on Wednesday that it was to close its operations, making 119 people redundant in the process. The US firm took over the security electronics operation from Tyco Electronics earlier this year.
Twitter explores its options
Reports surfaced this week that micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter was in advanced talks with both Microsoft and Google about the possibility of striking a licensing deal that would see tweets appear in search results. The AllThingsDigital blog cited unidentified sources who said the three companies had discussed a range of different scenarios, which could include Twitter receiving a payment of several million dollars and a number of revenue-sharing agreements that would see Twitter benefiting from Microsoft and Google's ad revenue. If a deal were to be struck the benefits to all parties would be significant: Microsoft and Google's search results would suddenly feature real-time information from the billions of tweets from Twitter's 54 million monthly users, while the micro-blogging site would see its footprint expand even more as well as identifying a potentially lucrative new revenue stream. It must be said though that neither Twitter, Microsoft nor Google have commented on these reports yet. In other Twitter news, the site could soon allow users to post live videos to their profile, expanding the way in which they can answer the question "what are you doing now?"
Intel offers some market cheer
In a welcome sign that the recovery of the tech sector is not far off, chip giant Intel has posted an impressive set of figures for its third quarter. Though profit and revenue were around 8 percent lower than the year-ago quarter, revenue jumped 17 percent from the second quarter to USD9.4 billion, while profit soared 77 percent sequentially to USD1.9 billion, or USD0.33 per share. The figures easily surpassed analysts' expectations of USD0.28 per share on sales of USD9 billion. Intel's guidance for the fourth quarter of USD9.7 billion to USD10.5 billion in sales also beat analysts' projections. Another key figure was Intel's gross profit margin. For the third quarter this was 57.6 percent of revenue, compared to 50.8 percent in the second quarter. Essentially, this signifies that Intel is producing its microprocessors at a lower cost. Shares in the chip firm jumped 4.8 percent to USD21.48 in extended trading following the release of its results. Intel is the first major tech company to release its quarterly figures and as such its results are regarded as somewhat of a bellwether for the tech sector. Intel has generally been more optimistic than other high-profile tech firms; in April CEO Paul Otellini remarked that the PC market had bottomed out. In September, he predicted that the PC market could in fact show some growth in 2009. With quarterly results due in from all the major tech firms within the next couple of weeks, we'll have to wait and see if this positive note continues.
Monster patches from Microsoft, Adobe
On Tuesday, Microsoft released its biggest software patch ever, featuring 13 patches to fix a whopping 34 vulnerabilities, including two zero-day flaws in its Server Message Block (SMB) protocol and FTP Service. The patches, eight of which were rated critical, will fix holes in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, Silverlight, Windows Kernel, Windows CrypotAPI and other products. Six of the patches, two of which were rated critical, affect the yet-to-be-released Windows 7. A critical rating is the highest for a Microsoft patch and generally includes the risk of having a PC taken over by a hacker. While industry commentators were shaking their heads at the record patch batch from Microsoft, software maker Adobe issued fixes for a grand total of 29 security vulnerabilities in just two programs -- Reader and Acrobat. Last week Adobe released a security advisory warning of attacks exploiting critical flaws that could cause the applications to crash and enable remote attackers to take control of machines and install malware. Nice timing from Adobe to slip its monster patch under the furore of Microsoft's bulletin.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 