NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 2 November
02-11-2009
by Emmet Ryan
New nanotech centre launched | UCD spin-out up for European award
Worm infections in business rose by almost 100 percent in the first six months of 2009 according to the seventh volume of the Microsoft Security Intelligence. Despite the rise in worms, the report found that 20 percent fewer Microsoft customers were affected by rogue infections during the period. The delightfully named Zlob family of Trojans, considered a top threat two years ago, have drastically declined, according to the study.
Staying with a security theme and a new guide entitled Be Aware, Beat Fraud was launched on Monday. The consumer guide was produced by the Irish Banking Federation, the Irish Payment Services Organisation, An Garda Siochana and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). The guide includes the key warning signs that consumers should be on the lookout for and the steps they should take to best protect themselves against fraudsters, including online, card-based, ATM and identity fraud. The guide is available in Garda and PSNI stations as well as in participating bank branches and online at www.ibf.ie/fraudprevention.asp.
Canon has launched the Easy-PhotoPrint for iPhone application (Canon iEPP). The free application prints photos from the iPhone or iPod touch wirelessly to Canon PIXMA MP990, PIXMA MP640 and PIXMA MP560 printers. Once the Canon iEPP application is installed from the iTunes App Store, it automatically detects printers on a WiFi connection. The Canon iEPP application will be available for download from early November.
In other product launch news, the first handset to feature the Vodafone 360 service will be available in Ireland from Tuesday. The Vodafone 360 Samsung H1 is available to bill-pay customers from EUR99.99.
The Tanaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mary Coughlan has officially opened the Government funded Tyndall National Institute's new Competence Centre for Applied Nanotechnology. The Enterprise Ireland-funded centre is an industry-led research initiative involving companies such as Intel and Seagate, and Irish companies Aerogen, Audit Diagnostics, Creganna and Proxy Biomedical, which is also supported by IDA Ireland. The centre will be hosted in Tyndall's new research building which accommodates research into advanced materials, device fabrication, packaging and integration and their translation into practical, industrially-relevant systems.
UCD spin-out company HeyStaks Technologies has been selected as one of three short listed finalists for the first, Europe-wide, UNICA Entrepreneurship Competition for Students and Young Researchers. UNICA, headquartered in Brussels, is a network of 42 universities, including University College Dublin, from the capital cities of Europe with a combined strength of over 120,000 staff and 1.5 million students. HeyStaks has developed a social web search platform that makes it easier for people to find and share relevant content on the internet. The platform enables searchers to better organise and easily share the resources they find while searching and browsing the web, providing more relevant search results. The overall winner of the competition will receive an award and a prize of EUR20,000. The other two finalists in the competition are Paraelectrics, Freie Universitat Berlin and UNIKI Intelligent Media Development, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Games retailer GameStop is opening its eighth Cork store at 47 Patrick Street this Thursday. The new store brings Gamestop's total number of employees in Cork up to 34 from 29. The Patrick Street store joins existing Cork stores in Ballincollig, Blackpool, Merchants Quay, Douglas, Mallow, Midleton and Wilton Shopping Centre. The retailer is giving its first 15 customers the opportunity to buy either a Xbox 360 Elite games console for EUR124.99, half the normal retail price or a PS3 Slim for EUR149.99.
Handset-maker Motorola will sell an international version of its Android-based smartphone, dubbed the Milestone, in Germany, Italy and Argentina. Motorola has not revealed what other markets the phone would be sold in beyond these three. A virtually identical device was launched in the US last week under the name of Droid last week. There is one notable difference between the two devices as the Milestone has a memory card of 8GB compared to the Droid's 16GB.
Microsoft's Bing made a minor recovery in the US in October according to research from StatCounter. The search engine rose to 8.86 percent, up from 8.51 percent the previous month. The gain came at Yahoo's expense, which dropped to 8.91 percent from 9.4 percent in September. Google meanwhile reined supreme both in the US and globally. The search giant's 80.39 percent share in the US was its best since November 2008, while it accounted for 90.81 percent of the global search market. Globally Yahoo and Bing combined for just 7.4 percent of the market.
Finally an online campaign is looking to give away EUR5,000 it has raised through donations on Twitter to a deserving Irish entrepreneur. Outvesting.org will gift the full amount to the winning start-up. Applications can be submitted to the Outvesting.org website until 21 November and the winner will be announced on 7 December. Those who donated to the fund will review applications and vote on the start-up with best potential.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 