IN THE PAPERS
In The Papers 9 March
09-03-2011
by Sylvia Leatham
Science courses grow in CAO popularity | Startup Bootcamp to come to Dublin
The Irish Times reports that hackers brought down the International Women's Day website on Tuesday. Three separate denial-of-service attacks were directed at internationalwomensday.com, the organisers said. According to the Women's Day organisers, the website was the target of "a massive five gigabytes per second" attack directed at the site in an attempt to prevent "legitimate users" from accessing it.
The paper also says that Eircom staff have been told by their union that the telecoms group could be taken over by its lenders if workers do not agree to implement the EUR92 million in labour savings outlined in a rescue plan. The warning came from the Communications Workers' Union (CWU), which represents the majority of Eircom's 7,170 workers. "Your executive is now satisfied that if the present financial position of the company is not addressed as soon as humanly possible, then ultimately the company is likely to be taken over by the banks and bondholders," the CWU told its members last week.
The Irish Examiner says there has been an increase in the number of people applying for science courses through the Central Applications Office (CAO). According to the first statistics from this year's 71,466 applications to the CAO, the numbers choosing honours bachelor general arts degrees and social science degrees have fallen almost 2.5 percent on 2010. Meanwhile, some 6,876 people have chosen a science course this year, an increase of almost 6 percent on the 2010 figure, which itself was a 9 percent increase from 2009. There was also a slight increase in the number of applicants who put an engineering degree at the top of their course list.
The paper also says that the founders of Startup Bootcamp have announced the addition of Ireland to its growing list of locations. The venture acts as a high-level incubation centre for technology start-ups. Dublin, London, Madrid and Berlin will be the next hubs for the programme. The announcement was made at the Dublin Web Summit, which was attended by 500 delegates and featured high-profile speakers including Ben Parr from Mashable, Paddy Power's Breon Corcoran, Ray Nolan of Hostelworld and Dan Cobley of Google.
The same paper says that online gambling giant Betfair has said it is fully supportive of the proposed 2 percent levy on online operators in Ireland. Betfair said the Irish online tax will be "a positive step". "Betfair looks forward to working with the new Government, to ensure a licensing regime for online gambling is introduced so we can be regulated and contribute to the Irish economy in a fair and sustainable manner," a spokesperson said.
The paper also notes that Myles Murray of PMD Solutions, a student of CIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, has won the Cork Institute of Technology Entrepreneur of the Year 2011 award. His project was called Breath Counter: The Patient Friendly Respiratory Rate Monitor.
The Financial Times says that Research in Motion's new PlayBook tablet device will come pre-installed with 7digital, a digital music service from a UK company with the same name. It will provide 13 million tracks for owners of the tablet to purchase.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Warner Bros will start renting and streaming movies via Facebook. The studio, owned by Time Warner, created the rental application independently of Facebook, enlisting a third party to host and stream the movies.
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Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 