NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 19 February
19-02-2010
by Deirdre McArdle
Irish trio head to Silicon Valley | Apple to ban 'overtly sexual' apps?
Insurance group Allianz has announced it is to create 30 new jobs at its headquarters in Park West in Dublin. The firm already employs 250 staff at its Dublin base, with a further 25 located in regional offices. The new jobs will primarily be in the firm's finance and IT departments.
Three Irish start-ups are heading to Silicon Valley this weekend for a series of meetings with executives in tech giants such as Google and Sun Microsystems. They will also have the opportunity to pitch their business to some of the region's venture capitalists. The trio are: training search engine Learnpipe, retail lead generation system Tapmap, and golf analytics system imeeGolf. All three are currently taking part in the Endeavour Programme, which is based out of the Tom Crean Centre in Tralee, Co Kerry.
In more news of Irish start-ups, three companies will go head-to-head at the Docklands Innovation Park Enterprise Awards to take home the title of best investment proposal for 2010 and prize money of EUR10,000. Ikon Semiconductor, SensorMind and Kinesense will each have 15 minutes to present their investment proposals before being subjected to questions from a panel of judges on their plans. Last year's winner was Locle, which developed a location-based mobile social networking application. The awards will take place on 25 February.
Motorola has completed its acquisition of Israeli firm BitBand, which specialises in providing video-on-demand for IPTV. Financial details of the previously announced deal were not revealed. BitBand will be integrated into Motorola's Home division where Motorola said it will complement the existing on-demand video product line. Motorola plans to split itself into two separate publicly quoted companies in the first quarter of next year. The mobile phone unit and its set-top box business will be folded into one company, with its enterprise mobility unit and wireless networking business forming the second.
It's being reported that Apple has made changes to its application approval policy, which could see it remove and refuse "overtly sexual" apps. TechCrunch reports that it was contacted by Jon Atherton, the developer behind Wobble iBoobs, who claims to have received an e-mail from Apple telling him that his application was being removed from the App Store because of a new policy change. Read the letter Atherton said he received from Apple on the TechCrunch site. Since launching the App Store, Apple has been criticised for being inconsistent with its approval policy.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 