IN THE PAPERS
In The Papers 16 December
16-12-2010
by Sylvia Leatham
Japanese firm to create Galway jobs | Newspaper industry voices concern over RTE.ie
The Irish Times reports that Japanese medical device company Goodman Medical is to create more than 100 high-end jobs in Galway over the next five years. The new jobs are part of a EUR1.1 million investment by the Japanese company, and the new positions will be in manufacturing, sales and marketing, and research and development. The investment is supported by IDA Ireland.
The Irish Independent says that the newspaper industry has claimed that EUR200 million in funding from TV licence fees is giving state broadcaster RTE's website an unfair advantage. Frank Cullen, co-ordinating director of the National Newspapers of Ireland (NNI) group, told an Oireachtas Communications Committee meeting that the money generated from the TV licence fees gave RTE an unfair advantage over other online news sites, which are struggling to generate revenues. RTE rejected the claim, saying its news and entertainment website was part of the station's public service brief. Chief Financial Officer Conor Hayes said the licence fee revenues only covered half of RTE's operations last year. He said that the remainder was made up from commercial revenue such as advertising.
The paper also says that the Government is putting EUR37.5 million from the State pension fund into a technology investment company. Polaris Venture Partners is a US-based firm that gives cash to start-up companies in the hope they will grow into successful businesses and give a return on the investment. As part of the deal, the venture capitalists will set up a centre in Dublin for up to 50 budding entrepreneurs to kick-start their enterprises in a shared open office space. It will be the fourth so-called Polaris Dogpatch Lab -- with three already in Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York; and San Francisco -- and the first outside the US.
The same paper notes that cable TV provider UPC is cutting the price of its 20MB broadband service to EUR34 a month. The company also said that by May 2011 almost all of its customers will be using speeds of 10MB or higher.
The Irish Examiner reports that Irish-based companies spent less on research and development during 2010 than in previous years. Estimates of expected expenditure in 2010 indicate that R&D spend will be just over EUR1.7 billion, compared with an investment of almost EUR1.9 billion in 2009. In 2009, smaller firms spent EUR300 million on R&D, while medium to large enterprises spent almost EUR1.6 billion. However, estimated figures for 2010 indicate that the spend for small enterprises would be EUR425 million, with a corresponding figure of EUR1.28 billion for medium to large enterprises.
According to the Financial Times, Twitter's latest fundraising has valued the company at USD3.7 billion, up sharply from the USD1 billion that the microblogging service was worth a year ago. The deal also adds one of Silicon Valley's most powerful financiers to Twitter's growing ranks of backers, with John Doerr, the Kleiner Perkins partner who was also an early promoter of Amazon and Google, leading the funding round.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 