Trocaire has appealed for more support for its online campaign to have the unpayable debt of Third World countries cancelled in the run up to a crucial meeting between G8 leaders in Okinawa on July 23rd. Trocaire set a target of 100,000 emails to be sent from Ireland to Japan when the campaign, www.thelongestday.net, was launched on June 21st. 10,000 digital signatures have been received to date but considerably more are required if the target is to be met.
CYBER SLIGO: A `digital village' with full computer facilities is being built for students of the Institute of Technology in Sligo. Each bedroom in Yeats' Village will have a data area with computer connection point linked to the Institute via a high-capacity fibre-optic cable.
GENDER IMBALANCE: With the exception of the US, surfing continues to be a male preserve, according to a report from Nielsen/NetRatings. In the US, the Net audience is now slightly weighted towards females, who represented 50.8 per cent of activity in May. The largest imbalance can be seen in the UK, where 60.9 per cent of the audience was male. In Ireland 55.2 per cent of surfers in May were male.
SHINING LIGHT: A prototype website demonstrating the concepts of light to Junior Cert students has won a design competition run by NewMediaCV in conjunction with eircom.net and Multimedia Solutions. The site was developed by Liam McDonnell and it, and the other winning entries, can be viewed at www.newmediacv.com.
DECORATING DOTCOMPOUND: DotComGuy has passed the halfway mark in his year trapped in his own Dotcompound. The 26-year-old rented a Dallas town house six months ago and volunteered to live off e-commerce for a year. Since January 1st, he's bought everything including a workout room, postmodern furniture, pets and food exclusively online.
ALLGONE.COM Speaking of dotcom madness, any one interested in registering that killer dotcom address will be dismayed to learn that approximately 98 per cent of the words featured in Webster's English dictionary have already been registered as domain names.
TECH STYLE: A 10-month-old US company is offering consumers the opportunity to design their own trainers over the Web. Designs created at www.customatix.com go directly to a manufacturer in China. The shoes, priced between $60 and $100, are shipped within two weeks.
DOING DEALS: Almost half of all private investment in the State is being put into technology companies, with most coming from venture capital deals, according to a new Pricewaterhouse Coopers report on European technology investment. Overall, European investment in technology hit a record £5.4 billion in 1999, an expansion of 70 per cent over 1998, the report says.
DONE DEAL: ElectricNews.Net, www.electricnews.net, Ireland's online live technology and e-business news service, has reached an agreement with Yahoo! UK & Ireland to provide technology news to the portal's news service.
NO DEAL: Microsoft has agreed to limit its investment in British cable company Telewest Communications to a minority stake, and has withdrawn the transaction from review by the European Commission.
IN BRIEF... Connect Electronics has reported an increase in turnover to £63 million for the six months to March. . . Irish geographic data and systems company the Iris Group has announced that it will launch a new division, MapFlow, to offer online location-based services over the Internet and wireless networks. . .