The Irish Internet Association (IIA) has welcomed the budget announcement allowing for the creation of a £12m public/private partnership for a high-speed Internet link between Ireland and major business centres in the US and Europe. The Association believes it will enable Ireland to position itself as a global Internet hub. The IIA chairman, Fred Crowe, said he hoped the money would not be spent on consultancy but invested in the establishment of "an advanced bandwidth park" which would operate in much the same way as advanced factory and industrial estates currently function.
The budget announcement, together with the accelerated deregulation of the telecommunications industry and the expected graduation this year of approximately 4,000 software graduates, places Ireland at the forefront in Europe of the e-commerce revolution, according to the IIA.
CLEAR THE WAY: Esat Telecom has unveiled its home phone and Internet service called Esat Clear. Features include local call rates for Ireland, volume discounts and a Pay-As-You-Use Internet service. There is no monthly subscription or fixed contract for Internet usage and customers are charged a per-minute fee that includes both call and cost of access.
BROADER INFRASTRUCTURE: Telecom Eireann is to invest £100 million to enhance the country's broadband infrastructure. The development will see an 80 per cent increase in the amount of optic fibre deployed in the network, from 55,000 fibre kms to 95,000 next year. The company is also completing a new 2.5-gigabit fibre optic submarine cable to Britain, called `Solas'.
DELL DOES WELL: Dell has been named the 1998 FT Business Website of the Year in the large organisation category. 20 per cent of Dell's worldwide revenues come from the Internet, making the company a leading player in the development of e-commerce. The site can be accessed from www.dell.com.
WEBFACTORY WIDENS HORIZONS: Webfactory has negotiated a package with Enterprise Ireland totalling £400,000 to fund international expansion. Over the next three years 22 jobs will be created in design, programming, sales and consultancy. The design company has also launched a new website for Ocean, the comms business of BT and the ESB at www.ocean.ie.
HOTMAIL BOMBS: Microsoft has fixed a problem in Hotmail that was causing email messages to be sent out multiple times. A glitch effectively led to Hotmail "mail bombing" ISPs. The problem had been caused late last week during a "routine site adjustment".
THE FAR SITE: Lotus releases a new tool next week that allows for DIY websites. FastSite 2.0 was previously offered only with Lotus SmartSuite, the package that competes directly with MS Office. Lotus hopes it will appeal to Office users because it can be used to publish Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, as well as documents from its own SmartSuite and Corel's WordPerfect Office. Trials are available from www.lotus.com/farsite
PRICEY PALM: 3Com has unveiled its latest Palm Pilot, which includes wireless capabilities that allow users to download from Internet sites and to send and receive email. 3Com expects to release it in the US toward the end of next year and will be set users back $800, twice the price of the current Palm III.
SUPER CHIPS: Toshiba and Fujitsu have announced plans to jointly develop and launch one-gigabit dynamic random-access memory chips by March 2002. Some 100 researchers at Toshiba's development centre will focus on ultra high-density 0.13-micron process technology, device technologies, product design and prototype fabrication for the next-generation 1-gigabit chips.
BORN TO WIN: Irishman Martin Casey (26) won a top prize at the Europ-wide Europrix MultimediaArt '98 event in Vienna last week. His winning entry Born with a Broken Tongue was created while he studied for the MA in multimedia at Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT). Pictured at the award ceremony are: Charlie Pritchard, DIT, Martin Casey, and Brigitte Ederer, Vienna city councillor, who presented the award.
IN BRIEF...Cable & Wireless has deployed a new fault-tracking system which uses Iona Technologies' Orbix. . . A number of big gaming companies, such as ID Software have apparently expressed their interest in having ports of their top games to the Amiga platfrom. . . MCI WorldCom has announced that Bank of Ireland Securities Services in the IFSC is the first Interconnect customer in Ireland. . . MarginMan Version 2.02 has been launched by Dublin-based International Financial Systems.