Two viruses reported last week may signal the beginning of a rash of viruses exploiting Y2K anxieties. One appears as an email offering a free Year 2000 countdown clock. If this is accepted the virus installs itself and gains access to the user's Internet account settings. The other, W32/Fix2001, is a bogus email from a "system administrator" claiming to provide a fix for a Y2K Internet problem. If launched, it will attach itself to all future email messages. Users have been warned to be suspicious of Y2K-related messages from strangers that ask them to download anything to their computers.
Speech, Speech: A UCD computer scientist has made substantial progress in allowing speech recognition systems to deal with words they have not heard before. Dr Julie Berndsen spoke at the Royal Society in London last week on how her system uses an extensive knowledge of the phonetic structure of a language to solve the "new words" problem.
Getting To The Point: Eircom, Esat, Formus Communications and Princes Holdings have been selected as the top-ranked companies in the competition for Fixed Wireless Point to Multipoint Access (FWPMA) licences. The Telecommunications Regulator, Etain Doyle, announced the leading contenders for four broadband and four narrowband licences ahead of the official awards later this year. FWPMA is an alternative means of connecting a customer's premises to a network access point. - Info: www.odtr.ie
ICL Opens The Oracle: ICL is to create 160 high-skill jobs over the next five years at its new software development centre in Dundalk. The ICL Oracle Centre of Excellence will develop and implement web-based applications.
Free Access From Abroad: Satellite TV channel Setanta Television plans to launch an Irish-branded free Internet access service in Britain. UUNET is to provide the Internet access for Setanta's service, to be launched later this year. Setanta has also outlined its interest in creating an Irish portal site at www.setanta.com.
Verified Viable: Voice-processing will create up to 2,000 jobs in Irish call centres over the next five years, according to the chief executive of a voice-processing technology company. Launching Buytel's voice-verification product Voicevault, Pat Keaney said that Ireland was well placed to gain from the $40 million global voice-processing services market. Voicevault identifies people by their voices in under a second, providing an alternative to PINs or passwords.
Overseas Scans: Delta Systems of Dublin says its Goldscan product is now in use by 2,000 companies, 80 per cent of them in the US. Goldscan adds document scanning features to the Goldmine workgroup contact-management system.
In The Mail: Dell can now notify customers by email of the status of their online orders. The new OrderWatch service is an addition to its existing Web-based tracking of system assembly and shipping.
Quality Counts: E-commerce in Europe will continue to lag behind the US unless high-quality business and credit information is provided to organisations on a pan-European basis, according to a credit information specialist. Kevin Murphy, of Interface Business Information, stressed the need for such information at the Eurogate conference in Dublin last week.
Masters Of Design: The 1999 Multimedia Systems graduation show opens to the public on Thursday at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin. It features the work of 31 students of the multimedia MSc at TCD - including 3D and space-based installations, interactive games and gallery kiosks - and runs for 10 days.
Managing Shortages: The Irish Management Institute is offering training to help software companies overcome the software skills shortage. Starting in November, the course will address staff recruitment, development and retention issues, management skills, and market growth. - Info: gus.liston@imi.ie
Genesis Ingenuity: Genesis Technologies is making available a device to deliver broadcast-quality television over standard telephone lines. The US-designed product is designed to allow the telecoms/cable industry to extend the range of services it offers.
In Brief.... . . An attempt to auction 500 pounds of marijuana on the eBay auction site failed after company officials pulled the plug, nearly a day after the sale began. . . US ISPs EarthLink and MindSpring are to merge in a $1.7 billion stock deal to form a rival to AOL. . . MSN's travel service, Expedia, is to become a stand-alone company with Microsoft holding majority ownership . . . Compaq has introduced a 17-inch flat panel monitor with a viewable area the size of a traditional 19-inch monitor. . . IBM has shipped its one-millionth copper PowerPC chip, just one year after shipping the first chip. . . Newbridge Networks has been awarded a contract to provide France Telecom with its high capacity ATM platform. . . SerCom Solutions has launched two customer product management tools, e-Vision and eFile. . .Now available is Dell's new notebook, Inspiron 7500. . . Corel is finally in the black, with a net profit of $17.6 million for the third quarter of 1999, compared with a loss of $7.8 million in the same period last year. . . Seagate has introduced packaging that can protect disk drives from over 1,000 Gs of shock. . . US stock markets fell late last week after Microsoft president Steve Ballmer said that technology stocks were overvalued, including those of Microsoft. . . Irish entrepreneurial technology companies with hopes of hitting $50 million revenue within five years are the investment targets of the $150 million Cross Atlantic Technology Fund announced last week. . .