NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 8 January
08-01-2010
by Deirdre McArdle
Borders e-book store springs into action | Light 'Patch Tuesday' on the way
While the recent cold snap has caused havoc with the country's roads, it has also caused problems for the telecoms infrastructure. Eircom's nationwide network has been hit by service disruptions, with the telco working to clear over 8,000 faults this week alone. An additional 1,757 faults have been reported in the past 24 hours, with the current number of total faults standing at 5,134. Eircom said its technicians would continue to work to clear all outstanding faults.
Minister for Labour Affairs Dara Callery has outlined the measures, both currently in place and to be put in place, in order to provide assistance to the Dell workers who were made redundant in January 2009. Funding of EUR22.8 million (made up of an EU contribution of EUR14.8 million and Government funds of EUR8 million) is available to help the workers in areas such as job searching, training, business start-up and further education. Callery said a dedicated European Globalisation Fund (EGF) unit would be set up in Limerick and run by FAS to ensure efforts are co-ordinated at a local level. Third level institutes in Limerick have also worked to tailor courses to suit Dell workers, details of which can be found on a dedicate website called Tus Nua (http://www.tusnua.ie/). Entrepreneurial supports have also been set up and internships with companies in the region are to be established.
ICT Ireland has welcomed the Irish Patents Office's launch of the 2010 Junior Inventor Competition. The contest, now in its third year, aims to spark interest in science and engineering by encouraging students to be innovative from an early age. Primary school students can enter an idea or invention for a new product or procedure, an improvement on an existing product, or any idea that solves a problem or makes life better or easier. The closing date for entries is 26 March and the winners will be announced on 26 April, to coincide with World Intellectual Property Day.
Irish-headquartered insurance firm Allfinanz has been named one of Forrester Research's "Hot Insurance Tech Companies to Watch in 2010". Forrester cited Allfinanz's new business and automated underwriting, decisioning and analytics as the key reasons for its inclusion on the list of eight vendors.
Book retailer Borders has signed a deal with Spring Design that will see its e-book store prominently displayed on Spring's upcoming Alex e-reader device, reports Reuters. Spring launched the Alex device at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday. The device runs on Google's Android software and will hit shelves on 22 February in the US, selling for USD399. Borders has been slow to the e-reader market; two of its main rivals are Amazon and Barnes & Noble, both of which have launched their own e-reader devices.
Looking ahead to next Tuesday, Microsoft has said its Patch Tuesday security bulletin for January will feature a fix for just one vulnerability. The flaw is rated as critical for Windows 2000 and 'low' for all other platforms, according to a Microsoft blog post. In the blog, the firm also said that it is still working on a fix for a known vulnerability in the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol that could allow denial of service attacks. "We are not aware of any active attacks using the exploit code that was made public for this vulnerability…" wrote Jerry Bryant, security spokesman for Microsoft, in the blog.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 