Planet Business

LAURA SLATTERYlooks back at the week in business

Green shoot

By and large, the employment data presented in the CSO’s Quarterly National Household Survey (QNHS) was the usual miserable mass of brown, withering weeds. But while the gains were more than obliterated elsewhere, jobs were added in sectors including accommodation and food service, information and communication, education and health, while professional, scientific and technical activities also showed higher employment. This was the second quarter in a row that there was fledgling growth in the accommodation and food service (hotels and restaurants) activities, one of the hardest-hit sectors during the troughs of the recession.

Court date

EasyJet is “no longer a low-cost airline”, according to its founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou. After years of bitter dispute with the board of EasyJet, Stelios – who still owns a 38 per cent stake in EasyJet through his Easy Group – had his day in court this week. In this particular instalment, the Greek tycoon claims the airline is in breach of its rights to the “Easy” name under a brand licence agreement, which states that only 25 per cent of EasyJet’s revenues can come from ancillary businesses. EasyJet counts charges such as baggage check-in fees as part of its core ticket sales, while Stelios reckons they are very much ancillary.

His fears stem from a desire that EasyJet does not turn into a conglomerate that swamps his other “Easy” branded businesses such as the divinely orange EasyHotel.

€6,000– A retraining grant of just over this sum will be available to 653 former Waterford Crystal workers, after European funds were approved.

"Very bizarre"– the response of EU officials to a Spanish newspaper report that a €250 million liquidity plan was being drawn up for Spain.

STATUS UPDATE:

HD howler: Some 1.5 million viewers of the ITV 1 HD channel got to see an advertisement for Hyundai rather than the sole England goal in its match against the United States.

City speculation: The Bank of England has warned that growing numbers of investors are placing bets on a Black Monday-style crash in the FTSE.

Box office buzz: After a poor run over recent months, Hollywood studios are hoping that Toy Story 3, released in the US today, will boost cinema ticket sales this summer.

How important is Microsoft's Kinect? 

Kinect for Xbox 360, a motion-sensor game system officially unveiled this week, is Microsoft’s attempt to out-Wii the Wii. Microsoft wants to loosen Nintendo’s grasp on the market for casual games (computer games for people who don’t like computer games). Kinect has eliminated the need for players to hold a controller in their hands: its camera technology means it recognises a person standing in front of a television. Wave, sucker-punch, do the cha-cha. It sees it all.

If you don’t have the time/money/joy in your life to indulge in even casual games like Wii Tennis – or would rather play a real game of tennis – then you’ll probably be bored by all this hype already. Isn’t Microsoft kind of unfashionable these days anyway?

Ah, but according to some experts, the Kinect technology will eventually move beyond mere games. Fancy a future with a controller-free interface for all of your computer and entertainment needs? A world where you are your own remote control? According to the influential tech blog All Things D, Kinect is “a new control paradigm for the digital living room”. The New York Times says the technology is “one of the most significant changes to human-device interfaces” since the early 1980s advent of the mouse.

But why listen to them, when you can hear the verdict of Jack Osborne, son of Ozzy and renowned futurist? Kinect is “more or less a game-changer”, he told the BBC outside a star-studded launch event in LA. “It’s like the future’s kind of here now.”