IN THE PAPERS
In the papers 26 July
26-07-2007
by Sylvia Leatham
R Donnelly Global Turnkey seeks Cork redundancies | Nielsen launches game tracking service
The Irish Independent reports that mobile operator Three Ireland has grown its market share to 150,000 subscribers. The growth came mainly in the past year, after the operator launched its prepaid service in May 2006. On Wednesday the company announced plans to slash its roaming rates, as reported by ENN.
The Irish Examiner says that R Donnelly Global Turnkey, which is based at Hollyhill in Cork city, is hoping that a "very attractive" severance package will enable it to shed 200 jobs through voluntary redundancies. The company, which produces computer manuals and other publications and was formerly known as Banta Global Turnkey, is relocating some of its production to the Czech Republic, where wages are lower.
The paper also says that containers specially purchased by the Government to house electronic voting machines in one centralised location are too small, according to private briefing papers prepared for Tanaiste Brian Cowen. This means the State will have to continue paying for the storage of some of the machines at a number of other locations. The Government spent EUR52 million acquiring the 7,504 voting machines, only to see them subsequently mothballed because of fears over their security.
The Financial Times reports that Sun Microsystems has said it would start to release important corporate news first over the internet, in what is thought to be the first time a US company has used the online medium as its main channel for price-sensitive information. While not yet entirely bypassing existing mechanisms for distributing corporate news, Jonathan Schwartz, chief executive officer, suggested the move points to the day when companies stop issuing news releases and communicate with investors directly over the internet instead.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Nielsen, a company that tracks television and internet usage, is launching the first results from a new service, Nielsen GamePlay Metrics, that can track what games users are playing, on which devices and when. The service could provide one of the most complete pictures yet of game usage on consoles and provide major data that could help game publishers sell ads within the action of their games.
The paper also says that a US federal judge has expressed skepticism about a copyright-infringement case against Facebook and suggested that the lawsuit was a publicity stunt intended to extract a settlement from the social networking site. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and chief executive, is accused of copying source code and other materials from three fellow students at Harvard University, as reported by ENN on Wednesday. In a pretrial hearing in a US District Court, Judge Douglas P. Woodlock criticised the plaintiffs, whose social networking site is called ConnectU, for scheduling a press conference after the hearing and speculated that they were seeking news coverage "for the purposes of a settlement."
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 