Researchers at Vanderbilt University have found that whites in the US are more than twice as likely as blacks to own a home PC - even when household income is taken into account. And white students who didn't own home computers were three times more likely to have used the Web recently than black students in the same economic situation. Until now, many researchers assumed inequalities in Net access could be explained by income differences.
E-Complacency: A new report by Prospectus consultants warns against "Internet complacency" in the Irish financial services sector. EU firms with more advanced technology such as the ING Group "will be well positioned to poach customers from Irish companies lacking the technology to compete".
Ice Cool And Alex: Sunday Business Post technology journalist Alex Meehan is hosting a new half-hour technology show on East Coast Radio on Thursdays at 9.30 p.m. The show will also go out on the Web.
Firefly Flying: Microsoft is to move Firefly's 70 staff to its Redmond HQ. Earlier this month Microsoft bought Firefly, a spin-off of Professor Pattie Maes's department in MIT's Media Lab in Boston. Its artificial intelligence techniques are used in data filtering and for privacy. The software compares a user's behaviour to that of other users, then makes recommendations on books, films etc that they might like.
Virtual Strike Over: The two-week "virtual strike" by 30 volunteer spam fighters on Usenet ended on Friday. The "de-spammers", who normally cancel the spam (junk messages), were trying to force the issue - they say several leading academic sites crashed, and other systems scrubbed messages days earlier than usual.
Divine Carmody: Irish comedian Dermot Carmody will do his second online gig from Dublin to a bar in LA next Wednesday at 5 a.m. GMT. "This time the Dublin end will be using a faster connection," he says, "ISDN as opposed to the 22.8 modem connection used last time - and superior video and sound equipment donated by 44k.com." Multimedia group 44k.com contacted him after reading his article in Computimes last month.
Chip Chops: It was a topsy-turvy week in the PC and microchip industries. Intel is to cut 3,000 jobs after disappointing first-quarter earnings, though it says expansion plans in Ireland are unaffected. Motorola will create 120 jobs over three years at its new chip design centre in Ireland. Most jobs in the first year will be for graduates with expertise in RF, mixed-signal, and precision analog circuit design. Meanwhile Digital continues to be absorbed into Compaq, whose profits plunged by 95 per cent; Silicon Graphics also announced workforce reductions, and AMD reported steep losses.
Latest Results: Apple surprised Wall Street last week with quarterly earnings of $55 million, after strong sales of its G3 systems. Sun's net income rose to $232 million. Ameritech, GTE and Seagate all posted losses. Web index Excite had a first quarter loss of $6 million; rival Yahoo's shares hit $118.
Irish interactive training company CBT's first quarter revenues were $34 million - up 51 per cent on the same period last year. Cambridge Technology Partners, which employs 100 people in Dublin, had quarterly revenues of $133.5 million, up 62 per cent on 1997.
Hifibre: Esat Net (formerly EUnet Ireland) has become one of the first Irish Internet service providers to offer fibre-optic technologies for its customers, after linking into Esat Telecom's new fibre optic network.
Y2K Cover: The Irish Insurance Federation has informed members that most commercial insurance policies don't cover the consequences of Y2K failures, though insurers might offer Year 2000 coverage for policy holders who have taken all appropriate steps to achieve Y2K compliance.
In Brief...Texas musician Willie Nelson's new release will be available only on the Net for a month. . . British comms company Cable & Wireless is to sell $2 billion of its international assets to Telecom Italia. . . IBM is to relabel its PCs, laptops and other computers as "e-business tools". . . USWeb expects to buy British Internet consultants Xplora. . . Netscape has announced Raptor, an upgrade of the "rendering engine" at the heart of its Navigator browser. . . Psion has created the first Chinese operating system for palmtops - it's called McChinese. . . WorldCom Ireland has launched UKReach, a freephone service that allows Irish-based businesses have a freephone number in Britain which directs all calls back into their Irish offices. . .