Today's other stories in brief

De Bono joins IGOpeople board

Renowned management thinker Dr Edward de Bono has joined the board of Irish start-up IGOpeople.

Dr de Bono developed the concept of “lateral thinking” and is the author of over 80 books on creative and conceptual thinking.

Founded by former O2 executive Campbell Scott, IGOpeople is a social networking-style website which makes it easy for people to get in touch with businesses. Firms already using IGOpeople include Eircom, FBD, Bord Gáis Energy and Vodafone.

1m hosting deal for Servecentric

Data centre operator Servecentric has secured a €1 million managed hosting deal with an unnamed international law firm.

The deal was brokered by Partners National Mission Critical Facilities, a US firm that specialises in selection and sourcing of facilities such as data centres, call centres and operating centres for its clients.

Back-up service for mobile contacts

Central Data Bank (CDB), a provider of offsite back-up services, has teamed up with hosted e-mail firm Funambol to launch an over the air back-up service for mobile phones.

The service wirelessly copies contacts from the SIM card and phone memory to CDB’s servers. Aimed at business users it costs under 10c a day.

Anti-virus protection in minutes – claim

Spanish firm Panda Security has launched an anti-virus and anti-malware product which uses 50 per cent less of a PC’s resources, it says.

Rather than loading signatures of viruses and other threats onto a user’s PC, the free Panda Cloud Antivirus stores the definitions on the internet “in the cloud”. Panda claims users can be protected from threats within six minutes of them being discovered.

The company is chaired by Irishman Kevin Dillon, formerly vice-president for Microsoft in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. www.cloudantivirus.com