It has been a dark week for Irish e-businesses following the collapse of Ebeon, the technology firm in which eircom holds a 51 per cent stake, and the announcement that Irish fruit wholesaler, Fyffes is to dramatically scale back its online enterprise. More than 170 staff at Ebeon were laid off without any wages last Thursday as the firm announced it had run out of cash and gone out of business. The closure of one of the State's fastest-growing indigenous technology firms is expected to cause aftershocks throughout the Irish tech sector.
Further evidence of difficulties within the industry came when the banana company, Fyffes, announced cutbacks at its portal, worldoffruit.com. The firm said it had failed to attract venture-capital support and half its 20 workers had lost their jobs as a result. The fruit portal said it would scale back its activities because of falling market interest in e-commerce projects.
Let's not: Last week saw another slew of global ebusinesses either fall on their virtual swords or announce swingeing cuts. Hopes of a last-minute rescue for troubled Internet retailer Letsbuyit.com have faded. Letsbuyit's business model of selling discounted consumer goods by grouping together customers to get volume discounts was regarded by industry analysts as basically sound, but in common with other e-tail flops, the company simply ran out of cash.
Altavista's lows: The search engine AltaVista has announced another round of layoffs to reduce its work force by 25 per cent. The move brings the number of AltaVista employees down to 600 worldwide. The company withdrew its application for an IPO last week, nine months after the company postponed it because of poor market conditions.
Not good for NBC: NBC Internet announced a second round of deep job cuts late last week as it braces itself for a slowdown in online advertising. The 150 layoffs represent about 30 per cent of the company's work force. The San Francisco-based company said it had originally forecast total revenues of $150 million for this year, but that a cooler climate for online ads would trim that figure to $100 million.
Rising sun: It's not all bad news though. Technology giant Sun Microsystems, which employs 275 people at the company's Strategic Software Development Centre in Dublin, has reported record results for the company's second financial quarter to December 31st. Revenues increased by 44 per cent to $5.115 billion on the same quarter a year ago.
Doing good online: The Irish Hospice Foundation has launched a new website initiative - a fundraising ecommerce portal, www.hospiceshop.com, aimed at encouraging people to shop online or visit affiliate websites, and by doing so contribute to charity.
Web movies: Miramax Films makes the romance Guinevere available for downloading today, marking the first time a major studio is providing a feature film for rental via the Net. The unit of Walt Disney said the movie, first released in September 1999, will be distributed for 24-hour rental at a fee of $3.49 at www.guineverethemovie.com and Miramax and SightSound's websites.
Gunning for AOL: Gun enthusiasts in the United States are calling for a boycott of America Online because the Virginia-based company fired three workers for keeping guns in their cars parked in a Utah AOL call center.
Lining up linux: IBM and the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at last week announced that NCSA will install two IBM Linux clusters, creating the fastest academic-based Linux supercomputers in the world. NCSA's clusters will have two teraflops of computing power and will be used by researchers to study some of the most fundamental questions of science, such as the nature of gravitational waves first predicted by Albert Einstein in his Theory of Relativity.
Baltimore first: Internet security specialist Baltimore Technologies claims to have become the first company to integrate an e-security programme with Windows 2000 without the use of additional client software. Customers around the world can now easily architect a secure enterprise infrastructure in a Windows 2000 environment using Baltimore's digital certificates to authenticate users, the company said.
In brief...ICL has signed a multi-million pound, three year contract with Reuters UK and Ireland covering a range of IT infrastructure services associated with Reuters for outsourcing of logistics and supply chain management for its customers. . .