NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 1 August
01-08-2008
by Billy MacInnes
Eircom rings call charge changes | Government laptop lost at bus stop
Eircom has announced changes to its call prices that will lead to an average increase of 3.8 percent in customer telephone bills from 2 September. The company plans to replace the existing minimum fee charge of 6.65 cents (inclusive of VAT) with a fixed call set-up charge of 5.95 cent (inclusive of VAT). The telecoms operator defended the increase as being "below the current rate of inflation" of 5 percent. Line rental will be unaffected by the change and broadband prices will remain at current levels. Eircom also said 'TalkTime' packages that bundle line rental and selected call categories would be unaffected. Call allowances have been adjusted for customers eligible for the telephone allowance scheme administered by the Department of Social and Family Affairs and Vulnerable Users Scheme to limit the effect of the price increase, the company added.
The loss of a laptop from the Comptroller and Auditor General's (C&AG) office containing details of IDA Ireland companies is being investigated by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC). RTE News revealed that the incident, in which the laptop is believed to have been mislaid at a bus stop, was reported to the ODPC at the beginning of last month and the C&AG's office was co-operating fully with the investigation. The C&AG office audits and reports on the accounts of public bodies and scrutinises their administration of public funding.
Computer security specialist McAfee has announced plans to buy data loss prevention (DLP) company Reconnex for USD46 million. Reconnex claims the learning technology in its DLP products helps customers protect the information on their network without requiring upfront knowledge of what needs to be protected or how that information is stored, secured or communicated. McAfee CEO and president Dave DeWalt said that although data prevention was the "number one concern" of many chief information security officers, DLP solutions "take too long to deploy and obtain results". The acquisition of Reconnex would enable McAfee to "leapfrog other data protection vendors and to reinforce our position as the largest dedicated security company", he claimed. Separately, McAfee announced a worldwide agreement to provide a 60-day trial of its Total Protection Software on selected HP commercial desktop and notebook computers. In addition, it will provide a 30-day free trial of its Internet Security Suite on Toshiba notebooks aimed at the consumer and SME markets in the EMEA region.
Companies seeking to successfully target the youth market through investments in virtual worlds should be prepared to spend a minimum of 1 percent of their advertising and promotional budgets. That's according to a guide to investing in virtual worlds produced by Strategy Analytics, which claims that many companies are failing to see a return, despite the popularity of virtual worlds among consumers, because they have lacked the economic justification, metrics, and process to guide investments. In many cases, businesses are guilty of failing to include virtual worlds as part of an integrated PR and promotional effort. And while they can access virtual worlds at only a small development cost, building and maintaining interest requires an ongoing budget of at least 60 percent of the initial outlay, Strategy Analytics argues. Barry Gilbert, vice president and research director of the Strategy Analytics Virtual World Strategies programme, said it was important to get the investment right because "virtual worlds can serve as a strategic catalyst for penetrating youthful markets as well as a checkpoint for demonstrating a company's focus on innovation".
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz reiterated the company's faith in open source as the driver for future growth after the company reported a 73 percent fall in fourth quarter profits, and flat sales. The company highlighted "slowing performance in the US" as a major factor in the flat sales figures, despite "strong growth" in international operations. Schwartz said Sun remained confident that increased adoption of Sun's open source offerings, including the OpenSolaris operating system and MySQL database, would act as "the accelerant to our growth strategy". For the fourth quarter, Sun's sales were down 1.4 percent at USD3.78 billion and full year revenues declined by a marginal 0.1 percent to USD13.88 billion. Profits fell from USD329 million to USD88 million for the quarter but the decline for the year was just under 15 percent at USD403 million. Sun has also authorised a USD1 billion share buy-back programme.
Apple has finally patched a dangerous security flaw which could leave computer users open to a phishing attack, nearly a month after other IT companies addressed the issue in the domain name system (DNS). The DNS flaw enables an attacker to redirect traffic from a legitimate domain name to a malicious one using "cache poisoning". It was first revealed to computer companies by security expert Dan Kaminsky at the beginning of last month and Cisco and Microsoft were among the first to issue patches.
Intel has won the contract to supply Facebook with thousands of servers based on its Xeon processor over the next year. The companies announced that Facebook had selected the Xeon processor 5400 series for a round of new deployments which began last month. They have also signed a collaboration agreement to address technology evaluation, benchmarking and optimisation of Facebook's software on Intel's architecture. They claim the collaboration could benefit the Web 2.0 industry in general because Facebook's applications are mostly built on open source technologies and some of the insights could be contributed back to the open source community.
Creating successful email surveys: Denise Cox of email specialist Newsweaver argues that you can tap into your readers' likes or dislikes by surveying them.
