NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 30 October
30-10-2009
by Deirdre McArdle
ICANN okays non-Latin domain names | Nokia pulls plugs on N-Gage
Hewlett-Packard is to invest EUR11 million in its Galway operations, creating 50 new highly-skilled positions in the process. The PC giant is using the money to fund two new projects: one is the establishment of HP Galway as a Centre of Expertise for Cloud Computing Services in product track, trace and authentication, and the other is the establishment of an RD&I Group focused on process innovation to develop a standard set of best-in-class customer support tools, processes, metrics and reports. HP currently employs over 4,000 people in Ireland across its locations in Dublin, Galway and Belfast.
Continuing the good news for Galway, online marketplace Buy.com announced its plans to locate its European Operations Centre in Galway. The move will create 40 highly skilled positions over the next four years. Recruitment is currently underway for positions in multilingual customer support, online sales and marketing, finance, and software design and development. The investment from US firm Buy.com is its first international investment, according to the Tanaiste Mary Coughlan, who said the announcement "further reinforces Ireland's profile as a leading location for global internet service companies in Europe".
The number of mobile phones shipped worldwide during the third quarter came to 291 million, down 4 percent on the year-ago figure of 304 million according to Strategy Analytics. By its standards Nokia had a poor quarter, shipping 117.8 million phones, down 8 percent on the same quarter last year. Nokia's growth rate for the quarter underperformed on the industry average for a record fifth quarter in a row and left it with market share of just 37.3 percent, its lowest rate since the first quarter of 2007. Meanwhile, South Korean firm Samsung shipped a record 60.2 million handsets, up an above-average 16 percent on last year's tally. Samsung's market share breached the 20 percent mark to hit 20.7 percent, and cemented its position as a solid challenger to Nokia. LG, in third place, saw shipments grow 37 percent year-on-year. Both Sony Ericsson and Motorola had a pretty disastrous quarter with shipments declining by 45 percent and 46 percent, respectively.
Separately, IDC also reported on the global mobile phone market. The figures were by and large the same; however IDC recorded global shipments of 287.1 million during the quarter, down 6 percent on the year-ago figure of 305.4 million. It has Nokia shipping 108.5 million units globally, with a market share of 37.8 percent, while it has the same figures of 60.2 million units shipped for Samsung, on market share of 21 percent. LG, Sony Ericsson and Motorola figures were also broadly in line with Strategy Analytics' report.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved what's being called the web's "biggest technical change" since its inception some 40 years ago. The organisation has given the green light to the use of non-Latin characters from languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew and Hindi in web addresses. From 16 November, countries and territories will be able to apply for internet address endings using their national language, when ICANN's Internationalised Domain Name (IDN) fast-track process begins. The move will see around 100,000 new characters available for use in IDNs.
Facebook has been awarded USD711.2 million in damages relating to an anti-spam case against Sanford Wallace, the self-proclaimed 'Spam King', according to a filing in a San Jose, California federal court. "While we don't expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent," Facebook said in a blog post. The social networking site filed an anti-spamming case against 'Spamford' Wallace in February for accessing Facebook users' accounts without their permission and sending fake mail and posts to the individuals' public message wall, the company said in a blog post.
In a (some might say long overdue) acknowledgement of failure, Nokia has said it will wind down its N-Gage operations by the end of 2010. N-Gage was Nokia's push into the mobile gaming market, but despite re-launching the service online last year, it failed to capture user attention. "We will no longer publish new games for the N-Gage platform," Nokia said on its N-Gage blog. The Finnish firm said that existing N-Gage games can be purchased until the end of September 2010, and the community site will remain in operation throughout 2010. It will continue to sell mobile games through its recently launched Ovi Store.
In the lead-up to the Halloween weekend, the first ever Twitter séance (Tweance, if you will) took place on Thursday night. The event was essentially a publicity stunt for a London-based fancy dress shop, who roped in UK psychic Jayne Wallace to 'make contact' with the top four voted dead celebrities as selected by 'twits' taking part in the event. The celebrities were: Michael Jackson, William Shakespeare, River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain. Through Wallace, the celebrities apparently took time out to tweet, although Shakespeare failed to put in an appearance [perhaps he couldn't get to grips with the new-fangled technology].
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 