A new training process being piloted by Telework Ireland and FAS is attempting to address the skills shortage in Ireland's software localisation industry. Funded by the European Social Fund's ADAPT programme, the scheme provides 36 weeks of training aimed at producing skilled software localisation quality testers capable of working remotely via teleworking.
Participants from all over the country are brought together for a short period "on site". Their training continues at home with CDs, Internet-based tutorials and remote supervision. One hundred trainees have already signed up and will complete their courses with a work placement. Telework Ireland hopes the initiative will provide a pool of skilled people unavailable for this work until now because of their geographical locations.
- Info: www.telework.ie
In Tune And Online: The National Concert Hall is to offer online booking services on its newly launched Web site (www.nch.ie). Classical music fans will be able to pay for tickets via Bank of Ireland's Clikpay service, which allows secure credit card transactions. The site also features musical excerpts of upcoming concerts and a virtual tour of the hall.
Optiplex Optimum Value: Dell has released its cheapest PC to date, the OptiPlex GX100, which will sell for about £700. It has a 15-inch monitor, 400MHz Intel processor, 4MB graphics memory, 32MB RAM and a 4.3GB hard disk.
Building Trust: SSE, the Dublin-based information security company, is to use the Intel Random Number Generator in its Trusted family of products. Where possible SSE's products will use hardware-based random numbers as an effective method of generating cryptographic keys.
Sanctions Ahoy! Israel's justice minister plans to visit Washington this week to try to ward off US trade sanctions threatened over copyright piracy. The US ambassador to Israel last month presented Israel with a US Justice Department report that it as the Western world's top copyright violator and a centre of pirate distribution, the daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported.
Active Enterprise: Software Resources, the Irish representative of software developer J.D. Edwards, has released ActivEra E-Business. It allows a company to set up a "virtual enterprise" with self-service applications that extend enterprise software to partners, employees and customers.
Keeping The Right Companies: IFG Technology & Development has signed a contract to offer Internet access to Companies House in Britain. This will involve handling details of the 1.2 million companies registered and over four million documents a year. The deal was announced at the launch of IFG's BusinessGold service, which provides data on companies, markets, judgments, stocks and news from 12,000 publications. Full-Time Management: AIB Asset Management has installed a £600,000 Hewlett-Packard system for automated trading. The twin HP9000 K570 servers will support automated trading on behalf of clients 23 hours a day, five days a week. Some 220 users world-wide will use the servers located in Dublin.
Sold For A Song: Lycos has purchased Internet Music Distribution, maker of the popular Sonique MP3 music player, for $38.8 million in stock. This will put Lycos up against AOL, which in June bought MP3 content site Spinner Networks, and Nullsoft, which makes the popular Winamp MP3 player.
What's In A Name? A 21-year-old Internet entrepreneur is presiding over a bidding war which may reap him $1 million for the name Drugs.com. Eric MacIver, from Arizona, owns the domain name and several large drugs companies want it. So far the bidding stands at $260,000, but the name is expected to sell for considerably more.
Call For Papers: Proposals for conference sessions and speakers are being sought for the 10th Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP) conference to be held next April in Toronto. CFP has pioneered discussion of privacy and online civil rights issues. - Info: www.cfp2000.org
Mitnick Sentence: Kevin Mitnick is due in a US federal court today for sentencing on hacking charges to which he pleaded guilty in a plea-bargain deal last March. He is likely to receive a five-year sentence and to be released early next year as he has been in custody since 1995. Separate state hacking charges were dropped on Friday.
Falun Gone: Chinese authorities are said to have hacked into a US website dedicated to the Falun Gong sect which has been banned in China. The Associated Press news agency says it has traced the apparent tampering back to the Public Security Ministry's Internet Monitoring Bureau in Beijing. Nearly all Falun Gong sites in China have been shut down.
In Brief...Cambridge Technology has won a £500,000 contract to provide the IT infrastructure for the National Car Testing Service which will begin compulsory testing in 2000 . . . Oracle has announced the general availability of Oracle8i on Linux . . . 3Com's Palm Computing organisers have snagged a 70 per cent share of the personal companion market, according to the latest figures released by the IDC . . . Net Results has signed a distributor agreement with Irish trade-only distributor, Microwarehouse . . . London Electricity is to spend £2 million sterling updating 400,000 prepayment Powerkey meters to cope with the millennium bug . . . Rational Software is to provide the automated test Certified for Windows to ensure applications are compatible with Windows 2000 . . . Salon magazine is to supply its content to Lycos in a co-branded area of the Lycos site at salon.lycos.com . . . Compaq Capital has bolstered its foothold on the financial services sector with a name change, to Compaq Financial Services Corporation . . . In what must be the most bullish prediction to date, a new industry study by the Myers Group, has predicted that online ad spending will reach $32 billion in 2005 . . . AOL and the online greetings card unit of American Greetings have done into a $100 million deal to provide online greeting cards on AOL's sites . . . President Clinton's top Y2K adviser John Koskinen announced on Friday that he plans to be on an aircraft in mid-flight when the clock ticks over to January 1st . . .