The European Commission is attempting to establish an "international communications charter" for online business. It aims to encourage co-operation on legal and technical issues affecting the Net such as data protection, copyright, taxes and porn, rather than having electronic commerce slowed down by fragmented national legislation. Commissioners Martin Bangemann and Leon Brittan stress the charter would not be legally binding.
XML AGREED: The World Wide Web Consortium, which sets technical standards on the Web, has just endorsed the XML 1.0 specification. XML, a cousin of HTML, is a system for defining, validating, and sharing document formats on the Web. The Irish Internet Association is having a "Techie Brekkie" on XML next Thursday at 8 a.m. in Herbert Park Hotel, Dublin 4 (email events@iia.ie for reservations).
QUICKTIME WINNER: Several other formats were set last week. The International Standards Organization (ISO) has chosen Apple's QuickTime file format as the standard for developing the emerging digital media standard MPEG-4 (MPEG stands for Motion Picture Experts Group). Intergraph, Visio and 12 other companies have formed the OpenDWG Alliance to promote Autodesk's DWG file format as an open industry standard for exchanging CAD (Computer Aided Design) drawings.
ART ONLINE: A month-long show by artists Jim Dingilian (New York) and Alan Phelan (Dulin), Self-Rescue Mechanism, will open this Thursday at Dublin's Arthouse. The installation evolved via Web-based scrapbooks (see www.arthouse.ie/selfrescuemechanism) and the duo say "the Internet was used as a tool to develop and distort ideas as well as being a particular type of public space to explore."
PRIX MULTIMEDIA: The European Commission launched the EuroPrix Multimedia Art Contest at last week's annual Milia show in Cannes. It's open to any multimedia developers, from amateur individuals to commercial organisations, who are resident in the EU, the EEA or the 10 EU-applicant countries. Closing date for fully operational products "in any language and on any technical platform" is June 30th.
- info: Midas-Net, email martina.flynn@ul.ie
Meanwhile Scoot business directory (www.scoot.co.uk) took two top prizes in the Milia d'Or awards. Other winners included Quake II, the Virtual Baguette (www.baguette.com), CNet's News.com and Amnesty International's refuge awareness campaign.
INFORMIX EXPANDS: Informix had profits of $17.8 million for its fourth quarter, with revenues of $181.2 million - up 21 per cent on the previous quarter. Informix Ireland is to recruit 30 extra staff at its European HQ in Ballymount, Dublin.
ATLANTIC CABLE: A consortium of telecom carriers is to construct a $236 million undersea cable link between Europe and the US. The 10,000-kilometre fibre-optic cable will link Florida to Spain, and Portugal and Italy by September 1999.
MEDIA MOGULS: The European Federation of Journalists has accused the European Commission of "cowardice in the face of media moguls" following news that plans for a media concentration directive have been abandoned. "The crisis of concentration of ownership of media is growing and threatens the fabric of democracy and pluralism in European media," says the EFJ's General Secretary Aidan White. EFJ representatives discussed the decision in Brussels on Saturday.
ISP SURVEY: Last week's survey of Internet service providers' rates was compiled just before Ireland On-Line raised its charges by 25 per cent. From February 2nd the monthly subscription is £15.13 including VAT, with a £30.25 connection fee and annual rate of £151.25. The survey also said local dial-up access to Indigo was available from most parts of the State except areas of Wicklow, the midlands, Mayo and Clare. Indigo users from other regions - including the 053 area (parts of Co Wexford including Wexford Town) - contacted us to say they were also still waiting for local dial-up access.
VIRTUAL WAR: IBM is to build the US Energy Department's new $85-million supercomputer to simulate the detonation of nuclear warheads. The machine will have 8,192 processors working in tandem to execute 10 trillion calculations per second - 250,000 times faster than a PC.
IN BRIEF. . . Software supplier Computer Associates is making a $9-billion hostile bid for Computer Sciences . . . Kodak is to buy a majority stake in PictureVision . . . Yahoo is to offer Spanish and Italian content . . . Microsoft is acquiring the rights to use content from Collier's encyclopedia in its Encarta CDRom. . . America Online has upped subscription prices by 10 per cent and is to sack half the 1,000 employees from the recent CompuServe acquisition. . .Intel has donated £40,000 of equipment to TCD's new computing lab in its Department of Electrical and Microelectronics Engineering. . .
MicrofileCapacity of Columbus III, the new cable linking Florida and Europes1] : 40 gigabits per second (500,000 simultaneous calls)
Top ".com" domains in January (millions of visitors)BO]: 1. Yahoo (26.7); 2. Netscape (20.7); 3. Microsoft (15.6); 4. Excite (12.5); 5. Infoseek (11.6); 6. AOL (11.2); 7. Geocities (10.4); 8. Lycos (6.7); 9. Altavista.digital (6.7); 10. MSN (6.3); 11. Hotmail (6.0); 12. Four11 (4.4); 13. Webcrawler (4.4); 14. Zdnet (4.0); 15. Whowhere (3.2 16. Real (2.9); 17. CNN (2.9); 18. Att.net (2.8); 19. Weather (2.8); 20. Tripod (2.7)
Sources: 1 AT&T; 2 RelevantKnowledge
Modem Worldwww.hr/mprofaca/news059a.html
Connections can be slow but well worth the wait - Croatian journalist Mario Profaca has a great starting point for resources/links about the Gulf crisis, including declassified CIA data on Iraqi chemical warfare and Saddam Hussein's speeches.
www.ucc.ie/celt
The Corpus of Electronic Texts (CELT), UCC's project to digitise Irish literature, now has the complete works of James Connolly and Oscar Wilde online, plus essays of Michael Collins, and Dail debates about the Treaty.
www.goethe.de/gr/dub/ensbsp01.htm
The Dublin Goethe-Institut's Horst Weber has a very authoritative-looking new series of reviews of software for learning German, starting with a dictation package.
http://www.archeire.com/mps/
Monaghan Photographic Society's cool and classy site.
www.irish-horses.com/bba-syndicate
The British Bloodstock Agency (Ireland) is now selling thoroughbreds over the Net.
www.maths.tcd.ie/anvar/project/
A shared-world fiction setting with 15 writers, with "an average of one new chapter a day at the moment" (some strong language).
www.geocities.com/Pentagon/8046
Ex-member of the Irish Naval Service Alan Finan's well-designed "Unofficial Irish Naval Site".
Diary February 17th: free seminar about Visio products in business. Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin 2.
- Reservations: tel 01-6612047, email ukinfo@visio.com
February 17th: "Doing business on the Net", illustrated talk by Ireland
On-Line's Colm Grealy, Central Library, ILAC Center Dublin, 6.30 p.m.
February 18th: Apple Ireland one-day multimedia seminar at the Music Centre, Temple Bar, Dublin (noon). Places are limited and members of the public are welcome on a first-come first-served basis. Admission £20 (advance bookings) or £25 at door.
- info: tel John at (01) 294 3100.
Text Bites"The show is over, the monkey is dead, and they've folded the tent."
- a security guard at Power Computing's HQ, talking to the Tampa Tribune. Power Computing was the fastest-growing PC company of the 1990s until last summer, but it seems to have closed its doors, after failing to shift from being a Macintosh cloner to making Wintel PCs.
"There used to be this old saying that the lie can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. Well, today, the lie can be twice around the world before the truth gets out of bed to find its boots."
- Hillary Rodham Clinton at a Washington press conference last week, criticising how Web sites handled the latest White House sex scandal.
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