IN THE PAPERS
In the papers 17 August
17-08-2007
by Sylvia Leatham
Skype users experience service outage | China buys IBM supercomputer for Olympic weather-forecasting
The Irish Times reports that mobile operators Vodafone, O2 and Meteor have voluntarily agreed to reduce their mobile termination rates. Read the full story on ENN.
The paper also says that the Irish Venture Capital Association has elected Prof Michael Donnelly as its new chairman, as noted by ENN on Thursday.
According to the same paper, a National Standards Authority of Ireland (NSAI) committee is to recommend that Ireland abstain in an upcoming international vote on whether the format for Microsoft Office files should be accepted as an International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) standard. Antoin O'Lachtnain of Evertype, who sat on the NSAI committee, confirmed that it will advise the NSAI to abstain in the vote on Open XML. The deadline for voting is 2 September and all 157 ISO member countries are entitled to vote.
In other news of Microsoft, the paper says that Microsoft Ireland has launched a scheme to increase the number of refurbished PCs available to charities and schools, as reported by ENN on Thursday.
The paper also says that a new tool called Wikipedia Scanner has uncovered dozens of companies and organisations that have been editing their entries on the Wikipedia site in order to improve their public image. The scanner, built by a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, works by comparing 5.3 million edits made on the encyclopaedia site against the internet addresses of more than 2 million companies or individuals. Among those found to have altered their entries were the CIA, the British Labour party and voting machine supplier Diebold.
The same paper reports that research firm iReach has said the Government should consider granting non-EU graduates who study here an automatic two-year green card. It said the new green card legislation was making it harder for Irish firms to hire skilled staff from outside Europe, as they were required to apply to the EU first. iReach claims there is a shortfall of 14,000 skilled IT workers in Ireland.
The paper also notes that 200 Irish people with visual impairments are testing a new Danish technology that enables them to submit documents via e-mail and have them returned in Braille or as MP3 audio files within minutes. Robobraille is designed for people who are blind, partially sighted or dyslexic, as well as for the elderly and those who find it difficult to read, and is free for non-commercial users.
The paper also notes that internet audience measurement firm ComScore says that Bebo is now the most popular social networking site in Britain, just ahead of MySpace. However, Facebook is now the fastest-growing social networking site for UK-based visitors.
The Financial Times reports that Sprint Nextel has said it expects to spend about USD5 billion building an expanded nationwide 4G wireless broadband network in the US based on the WiMax technology standard. The third largest US mobile operator plans to market services based on the new network under the name Xohm and expects them to generate between USD2 billion and USD2.5 billion in revenues for the fiscal year 2010, with more than 80 percent coming from new lines of business.
The Wall Street Journal says that VoIP provider Skype revealed on Thursday that software problems had left many of its millions of users around the world without service. It was not immediately clear how many users were affected, but Skype users in Colombia, Brazil, Germany, Finland and the US reported difficulties logging on. "Our engineering team has determined that it's a software issue," the firm said. "We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours."
The paper also reports that China's weather bureau has bought a supercomputer from IBM to help forecast rain and pollution during next year's Olympics. The IBM System p575 carries a price tag of "several million dollars," according to IBM officials. It will run China's most advanced weather-forecasting systems and provide 10 times the computational power of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau's current system.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 