NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 10 November
10-11-2009
by Emmet Ryan
Nanoweek: cloudy with a chance of ice-cream | LinkedIn links up with Twitter
Elderly residents of Dublin 8 have recorded their memories of growing up around St James's Gate, to coincide with the Guinness 250th celebrations. The 'Memoirs of Guinness' podcast project will be launched at the Guinness Storehouse at 11 November. The project was organised by Diageo and involved collaboration between four local history groups. The Digital Hub's 'learning team' helped train the history group members in how to make podcasts. The finished product is a series of recordings featuring local people sharing their memories of Guinness trains and boats; Guinness and the Grand Canal; and the role of women in the Guinness brewery, among other topics. Many of the people involved had family members or friends employed by Guinness. The podcasts will be made available to listen to on the Diageo website.
The University of Limerick Foundation has entered into a strategic partnership with one of Ireland's largest venture capital funds, Kernel Capital, along with Bank of Ireland and Enterprise Ireland to create a new EUR26 million venture fund. The Bank of Ireland Seed and Early Stage Equity fund will help Irish universities develop commercial opportunities from research ideas and intellectual property. The fund will invest in start-up and early stage companies, with a focus on high potential university spin-offs and export-oriented start-up companies that operate in the technology, food and financial services sectors.
Two Irish firms have been selected as finalists for the GSM Association's Mobile Innovation Grand Prix, Asia Pacific Tournament. Mobile security firm Sentry Wireless and wireless technology business Altobridge were among the five finalists in the international competition. "For two Irish companies to be represented in the final five demonstrates the pioneering breakthroughs both have made on the global mobile technologies stage," said Conor Lenihan, the Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation.
Minister Lenihan also announced that Professor Luke O'Neill of Trinity College Dublin has won Science Foundation Ireland's inaugural Researcher of the Year accolade. The announcement was made in an address to the SFI Science Summit, a two-day conference in Athlone attended by over 300 of Ireland's leading scientific researchers. O'Neill is Professor of Biochemistry based at TCD and his work in the areas of immunology and inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis has made him a world leader in his field.
ICT provider PFH has implemented a virtual server infrastructure solution across Postbank's Dun Laoghaire and Athlone facilities. PFH completed the virtualisation process within a two-month period, replacing a legacy server with a platform that is designed to provide in-built reliability and replication capability. In a statement PFH said the new server infrastructure will help Postbank realise greater cost and risk benefits over the next three years.
Irish compliance technology firm Norkom Technologies has posted a 2 percent year-on-year increase in revenue, to EUR24.6 million, in the six months to 30 September. EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) also rose, up 8 percent to EUR4.3 million. Existing client relationships accounted for 89 percent of total revenue during this period. The firm's recent expansion into the Middle East also contributed, with Norkom winning its second and third clients in the region during this period.
Tanaiste Mary Coughlan will launch Nanoweek at the Science Gallery on Thursday. The event runs from 30 November to 4 December and aims to raise awareness of the contribution that nanoscience makes to the Irish economy and society in general. Nanotechnology enabled EUR15 billion in exports last year. The event will include talks from representatives of firms such as Intel. Former Rose of Tralee and UCD science graduate Aoibheann Ni Shuilleabhain will be in the Nano Ice Cream Van, a mobile laboratory which uses nanoscience to produce clouds that rain ice cream.
Samsung is looking to raise its position in the handset market by working more with independent developers. The world's second-largest handset maker is due to unveil 'bada', the South Korean company's new mobile platform, later on Tuesday. Software developers will be able to produce applications for the platform, the first time that Samsung has provided developers with the tools to create applications that can run on the proprietary operating system that powers its handsets. The first bada smartphone is due to be released early next year, with at least 1,000 applications available upon release.
The Firefox web browser celebrated its fifth birthday on Monday. Mozilla logged 1 million downloads in the first four days of its first version of the browser, Firefox 1.0. On 31 July this year the company hit its 1 billionth download worldwide. Firefox 3.0 was released in June 2008 and the browser garnered 8 million downloads in 24 hours. Earlier this month a beta of Firefox 3.6 was made available.
LinkedIn has linked up with Twitter. Microblogging service Twitter works by allowing users to post short messages of up to 140 characters in length. LinkedIn, a professional social network, also has an update box with a 140 character limit. If a user has both a LinkedIn and Twitter account, they can now receive updates from both sites in both accounts.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 