NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 17 November
17-11-2009
by Emmet Ryan
YouTube launches news gathering service | AOL spin off imminent
Norkom Technologies has closed a deal with Al-Hilal bank, a government owned Islamic bank, based in the United Arab Emirates. Al-Hilal will use Norkom's financial crime and compliance software. This is Norkom's fourth major deal in the Middle East region over the last 12 months. The contract was signed during the Enterprise Ireland Trade Mission to the United Arab Emirates led by the Irish Minister for Trade Billy Kelleher. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
Marking International Project Management Day, Clarion Consulting has released a survey which reveals that 33 percent of organisations rate their project delivery capability as satisfactory or poor, while 37 percent admit that up to half of all projects are delivered late. In general, the report highlighted a reduced focus on improving project management capabilities with Irish firms ranking it last in a list of top 10 IT priorities. On the plus side, the report shows an increase in dedicated project management offices, which has grown to 63 percent from 46 percent in 2007. In addition, it looks like Irish firms are reducing their dependency on contract staff to manage projects, with the use of internal project managers rising to 46 percent from 29 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, there has been a steady increase in the number of Irish firms using Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software. This figure jumped from 12 percent in 2007 to 29 percent in 2009. However, 37 percent of organisations said that they have no plans to introduce PPM in the short term while 50 percent were unsure of their plans.
The next six months should see revenues and profits begin to stabilise and recover, according to a Deloitte study of Irish chief financial officers (CFOs). The report found that 73 percent are adopting a positive outlook for their companies' future and 55 percent see profits rising over the next half-year. Despite the confident outlook, 89 percent of CFOs surveyed are dissatisfied with the measures the Government has taken to date to resolve the crisis in the public finances.
Meteor's customer care team scooped two awards at the Irish Contact Centre Awards. The mobile operator received the Best Customer Retention Programme award and also walked away with the top-prize on the night, being crowned Contact Centre of the Year.
A total of nine new jobs have been created at a new digital agency called FuriousTribe.com, which was launched on Tuesday. The business is a merger of digital market agency Digital Ambition and internet technology business Web Splash. The firm is based at the Media Cube facility on the campus of the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. FuriousTribe.com aims to help Irish businesses promote new revenue streams online on an international level covering every aspect of digital marketing.
Video-sharing site YouTube has launched YouTube Direct, a new tool targeted at the media. The application, which was launched on Tuesday, essentially allows YouTube users to submit clips to news media companies, who can then chose to solicit and show these user videos on their own websites. The YouTube Direct tool can be tweaked to fit each news outlet's needs. For instance, editors may request the phone numbers of YouTube users submitting the clips so they could be contacted for more information. "We're trying to connect media organisations with citizen reporters on YouTube," said Steve Grove, YouTube's head of news and politics. So far YouTube has signed up NPR, Politico, The Huffington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle for the service.
Staying with social media and 'unfriend' has been named the word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. The term was chosen from a list of finalists with a tech-savvy bent. Unfriend was defined as a verb that means to remove someone as a friend on a social networking site. Other finalists included 'hashtag', which is a way of tagging a word on Twitter, and 'intexticated' for when people are distracted by texting while driving.
Media conglomerate Time Warner will spin off its AOL unit to shareholders on 9 December, nine years after what's generally regarded as one of the most disastrous corporate mergers in history. Time Warner shareholders will receive an AOL stock dividend for every 11 shares of Time Warner common stock they hold. This would effectively value AOL's market capitalisation at around USD3.44 billion. When AOL's plan to merge with Time Warner was announced in January 2000, the internet company was valued at USD163 billion.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 