NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 27 October
27-10-2009
by Emmet Ryan
Facebook to expand Irish workforce | Golden Spiders shortlist announced
Facebook is to double the number of employees at its Irish operations over the next year. The firm made the announcement as it officially opened its EMEA headquarters in Dublin on Tuesday. Facebook currently employs 70 people in Ireland, with that figure likely to shoot up to 140 within the next year. The firm is currently hiring across several functions including user operations, online operations, advertising sales, advertising campaign delivery and engineering. The news is a real coup for the Government, which has been putting a lot of effort into positioning Ireland as a location for high-profile multinationals such as Facebook. "This is an exciting investment for our country, hosting the leader in social networking. Facebook has fast become a worldwide name, and it is a fabulous endorsement that Ireland can satisfy the needs of such highly innovative and technologically advanced companies as they make critical investments," said the Tanaiste Mary Coughlan.
Cork-based data storage firm MPSTOR has raised EUR1.5 million in new investment, led by the Bank of Ireland Kernel Capital Fund and Asian investment firm Winning Tack. The new round of funding will help boost the firm's international sales and marketing activity. The company, which is supported by Enterprise Ireland, has also announced the appointment of Kevin Haverty as its new chief executive.
In other Leeside news Loopthing, a Cork-based social business network, has launched a new performance monitoring application for social media. OpenScore, enables businesses to analyse their performance on the internet, from a social media perspective. The firm said that since its launch in April, more than 24,000 companies across the globe have profiles on its social business network.
Irish IT consulting firm Version 1 had two of its staff selected as part of an international team of 20 consultants seconded to Microsoft's global headquarters to work on the product development programme for SharePoint 2010. "Our participation in this programme is extremely important for Version 1 because it gives us access to resources, support and knowledge that helps us to align our customers' SharePoint deployments to the very latest product releases," said Aidan Mullen, Version 1 Microsoft development practice manager.
O2 Ireland has announced that visitors to its official website, o2.ie, can now avail of a new accessibility tool called BrowseAloud. The free tool enables users with literacy difficulties, dyslexia and mild visual impairments to listen to the website content which is read aloud. Users can personalise the product to suit their own individual needs. Colours, text size and speed of voice can all be altered as required.
Many Irish organisations are creating unnecessary levels of risk and cost by failing to implement end-to-end testing of software and systems, according to Fran O'Hara, practice manager with software testing firm Sogeti Ireland. He made to the claim at the launch of a new book by Sogeti entitled 'End-to-end testing with TMap NEXT'. "Any IT application must support the business process and actual business user which is why end-to-end testing has become one of the most complex situations facing test professionals today," said O'Hara.
Internet users and social networking sites visitors should brace themselves for a spike of attacks around Halloween with an aim to monetise vulnerabilities, according to Irish security firm ESET. The firm said attackers are known to take advantage of the increase in traffic around holidays when people exchange online greetings to try and steal personal content or infect computers with malware.
The shortlist for the 2009 Eircom Golden Spiders has been announced. Muzu.tv, which won the Grand Prix award at the NetVisionary awards earlier this year, has been nominated in the Best Entertainment and Games category. RTE.ie, which took home top honours at the recent Irish Web Awards has five nominations, two in the Entertainment and Games category, two more in Digital Media category and one in the Sports and Leisure category. The winners will be announced at a ceremony on 19 November in the Burlington Hotel. The full shortlist can be viewed at www.goldenspiders.ie.
Google has released a beta version of Google Social Search, a search tool aimed at users of social networking sites. The move follows an announcement last week where Google said it planned to develop the tool which would provide users with the ability to search Twitter feeds. The speed of the deployment comes as a surprise as Google had initially indicated it would take a few months before the service was made available. Through the new service, Google users can create a profile and add links to social networks they want covered.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 