Microsoft says it is going to take on Sun Microsystems by offering its office software as a service on the Internet. The move comes just days after Sun announced that it was giving away its newly acquired StarOffice suite of wordprocessor, spreadsheet, graphics, email and other productivity software. This can be downloaded from www.sun.com and Sun says it will soon allow users to run the software over the Net without having to download it.
Announcing Microsoft's plans, Steve Ballmer was reluctant to say when its online software would become available and whether it would be free. However, he did say that the services would be based on Microsoft Office, the office software that has cornered over 90 per cent of the market. He was also quick to sneer at a threat to Microsoft Office from StarOffice, which he said lacked the functionality and compatibility of Microsoft's offerings.
Gee4 Whizz: Billed as "the fastest personal computer ever" Apple's new PC is to be manufactured at the company's Cork plant. With performance of one billion operations per second, the Power Mac G4 is said to be 200 per cent faster than the fastest Pentium III-based PC. Available in Ireland from midSeptember, the G4 will cost between £1,633 and £3,508, depending on specification. It can be seen on Apple's site at: www.apple.com
Offal Offer: The online auction house eBay stepped in to block a sale when it emerged that shoppers had bid more than $5.7 million for a human kidney. Described as "fully functional", the kidney had been on sale for 10 days and had pulled a bid of $5,750,100 before eBay intervened. eBay's vice president of marketing, Steve Westly, said that it was impossible to tell if the offer - or the bids - were genuine. Reassuringly, he did add that offerings of organs were a relative rarity on eBay, which boasts almost six million registered users.
In Business: Web hosting company irishBIZ is to offer free hosting and an online site-building tool to Irish businesses. It also promises low-cost hosting for Irish-related businesses anywhere in the world. Business owners will be able to use up to 10MB of server space for sites constructed with its sitebuilder tool. - info: www.irishbiz.com
Play Your Cards Right: Norway's national lottery operator is to introduce a multi-application smart card which will allow users to make payments and collect winnings. Norsk Tipping says this is the first lottery scheme in the world to use smart cards instead of the more familiar magnetic strip card, already being used by two million people in Norway. Run on a Hitachi Multos chip, containing the user's ID and a Mondex "electronic purse", the card will allow remote payment via the Internet, mobile phone, kiosk and ATM.
Bite The Bullet: e-Commerce provider Twelve Horses has become the first customer for Bullet, Esat Net's new high- speed Internet access service. Aimed at companies that use the Internet for distribution of product information, Bullet offers broadband connectivity on the Esat Telecom fibre optic network with a bandwidth of up to 622Mbit/s.
On Course Online: The National College of Ireland (NCI) is to offer three courses to be delivered exclusively online from October. Aimed at managers interested in upgrading their skills, the courses cover e-commerce and management skills. Courses will be delivered via a browser or with specialised conferencing software to minimise cost. - info: www.ncirl.ie/online
Posting The Winners: Winners of the third annual itPost Business Website of the Year will be announced at a ceremony tomorrow evening. Awards will be presented in two categories, best corporate web site and best SME site. In the running for corporate award are Bord Failte (www.ireland.travel.ie), NCB Group (www.ncb.ie) and Trintech (www.epaynews.com). Meanwhile, details of last week's Golden Spider awards are at www.spiderawards.com.
First Day Tuesday: Ireland's First Tuesday club, aimed at people working in online business, will hold its inaugural meeting tomorrow night at the Zanzibar pub on Ormond Quay, Dublin. Former IOL MD Colm Grealy will be the first guest speaker in a series of monthly meetings to be addressed by Internet entrepreneurs. The First Tuesday concept has already enjoyed considerable success internationally, gaining 2,500 members in London in just one year.
All The Nines: Don't forget that Thursday is Infinity Day (9/9/99), a date preceded by many gloomy predictions of computer mayhem of Y2K proportions. It's also the date chosen by Minister of State Noel Treacy as the target compliance date for Irish businesses. Of course we know that 20 per cent of businesses are doing nothing about the millennium bug, according to the Enterprise Ireland survey.
In Brief.... . .The French cabinet has backed a draft law giving electronic signatures the same status as signatures on paper. . . Cable & Wireless has signed a $75 million deal with Compaq for supply of the latter's Desktop Pro PCs and Armada notebooks. . Dell has released its new PowerEdge 8450 server. . . Intel has introduced a network processor and a family of silicon-based products to be based on its Internet Exchange (IX) architecture. . . Now in the shops is Corel's Gallery, a collection of web clip art, professional photos, images, animations and fonts. . . IBM and Lycos have formed an alliance for the supply of content and personalisation features for use on IBM's Rapid Access II keyboard. . . Hewlett-Packard has said it will incorporate Intel's Merced processor into its high-end server product lines by mid-2000. . .