Ireland's traditional distributors and wholesalers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices could be bypassed by the Internet and call-centres, according to a new report by consultants Prospectus and BSM. The study, "Healthcare 2005 - A Prescription for Ireland", also argues that IT "has a major role to play in bridging the gap between static Government spending on health as a percentage of GDP and increasing demand for services caused by more discerning consumers and an ageing population." It found that 35 per cent of respondents in the healthcare industry including hospitals and health boards would prefer to buy supplies directly via the Internet or through telesales. Yet only 3 per cent of pharmaceutical/medical device manufacturers in Ireland currently sell via the Internet. The report is available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format at www.prospectus.ie
MULTIMEDIA STARS: Irish multimedia developers have an opportunity to get a foothold in other European markets through the EuroPrix MultimediaArt '99 competition launched at the Milia trade show in Cannes. The competition, now in its second year, featured an Irish winner last year - Martin Casey in the student category. "The feedback has been phenomenal," said Casey last week. "EuroPrix means that international publishers and sponsors take me more seriously than they might have otherwise." Closing date: June 30th. - info: www.europrix.org
PENTIUM PRIVACY: As Intel prepares for next Friday's launch of its Pentium III (P3) processor, privacy groups in North America are intensifying their opposition to the chip. Each processor has a unique serial number, and the groups claim the numbers could be seen remotely by marketers or anyone else wanting to eavesdrop on a user's browsing habits. Dell and Compaq say they will ship P3 computers with the serial number turned off.
Meanwhile SSE (www.sse.ie), a Dublin-based subsidiary of Siemens, is working closely with Intel to develop software taking advantage of the P3's security features. SSE's TrustedDoc system for business-to-business users offers digital signing, timestamping, verification and secure archiving of electronic documents. The P3's serial number adds a new dimension to "non-repudiation", tying the signature to a physical device.
SEARCH ENGINE SHAKEUPS: Yahoo has started charging a $199 fee to speed up its reviews of website submissions. It says only sites offering products for sale are eligible for the "express consideration" service. While Yahoo encourages site submissions, there have been growing complaints about delays in getting sites listed in Yahoo's directory. Yahoo's editor-in-chief said part of the fee will be devoted to hiring additional reviewers to handle those submissions.
Yahoo's rival Lycos is planning to acquire Wired's online services for about $100 million. The acquisition of the Wired news sites and HotBot search engine would boost Lycos from the No. 4 online service to No. 2. Lycos is also attempting to complete a complex deal to merge with Barry Diller's USA Networks. And Compaq is to buy the Zip2 Corporation for its popular search engine AltaVista. Zip2 specialises in developing, hosting and maintaining consumer websites for major media companies, including the New York Times, Knight Ridder, and newspapers in the Hearst and Times Mirror chains.
Meanwhile BullSoft, a sister company of Bull CARA Group in Ireland, has signed a multi-million dollar contract with Microsoft. Microsoft will use BullSoft's OpenMaster to manage Hotmail, the free Web-based email service that claims over 35 million users.
WINDOWS PROTEST: About 100 PC users demanded refunds for Windows software at Microsoft's offices in Foster City, California, last week. They said they didn't want to buy Windows and didn't plan to use it. "I got stuck with this software because I couldn't buy a laptop without it," said Charles Lingo, a retired maintenance engineer and fan of Linux, the free system with a penguin mascot that has risen to the forefront among the products that can substitute for the Windows operating system.
SOFTWARE RAID: Gardai raided a commercial premises on Wednesday under the 1996 Trade Marks Act. The raid took place following information supplied by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) of alleged software piracy. "This was a raid in respect of end-user piracy which is a form of white-collar crime and was the first such raid of its kind in Ireland," according to a BSA representative.
FLOWER POWER: Canny entrepreneur Marc Ostrofsky has agreed to sell the domain name eflowers.com to Flowers Direct for £25,000. The catch: they have to deliver a bouquet to his wife Sara (36) every month for life. And Ostrofsky, from Houston, Texas, will get a 50-cent commission from each order placed through eflowers.com. He registered the domain name two years ago for $70.
LATEST RESULTS: Hewlett-Packard, which employs 1,600 people in Ireland, had record quarterly net earnings, up 3 per cent to $960 million. Meanwhile, Dell is now the fastest-growing top 10 PC vendor in Western Europe. Last year it had 75.5 per cent growth (in unit terms), and online sales from Europe jumped to $3 million per day in its fourth quarter, up from $2 million per day in the previous quarter. According to IDC data, Dell moved up to number 3 in the Western European PC market for 1998 with a unit market share of 8.4 per cent.
IN BRIEF: A new IT centre at Cork Institute of Technology will officially opened today, providing 262 computer spaces and five lecture halls with seating for 750 students . . . Siemens is to establish a pan-European call-centre at Penrose Wharf in Cork, employing 150 people . . . IBM has announced a new mark-up language for speech-enabled browsers, SpeechML . . . Apple has released a new version of its Java Virtual Machine for Macs which is up to five times faster than previous versions. It can be downloaded for free from Apple's website . . . The Euro- pean Commission has denied that AT&T has agreed to sell its stake in British cable company Telewest to gain regulatory approval for its joint venture with British Telecom . . .
An investment banking firm has filed a $10-million lawsuit against shopping.com, accusing the online retailer of cutting it out of the pending its merger with Compaq . . . Hallmark says it has patched up the glitch in its website's search function that accidentally revealed names and email addresses of people who sent Internet greeting cards from the site . . .
Linux has received another boost after IBM decided to bundle the alternative operating system on its servers and PCs . . . Exchequer Software has formed an alliance with Pervasive Software. Exchequer will incorporate Pervasive's structured query language (SQL) database technology into its client-server accountancy application . . . Bull says its Express 5800 NT server sets a new TPC-D world record running a 100-gigabyte Oracle8i database on Windows NT . . .