Smartforce plans to recruit 215 staff over the next three years in a £17 million investment at its worldwide development centre in Dublin. The training company is moving away from CD-based products to online learning services. At the opening of its development centre in Clonskeagh, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, said the Government was determined that Ireland would become a centre for e-business that he was heartened that an Irish company was taking "a pioneering role in achieving that goal".
The eircom.net site was down for hours last Friday after being defaced by crackers who replaced the ISP's home page. (See www.hackwatch.com for a mirror of the cracked site.) The site was taken down shortly after 1 p.m. and remained down into Friday evening. A spokesman said that eircom.net "would do everything in their power to find out who did it".
Going Down: David L. Smith, a programmer from New Jersey, has pleaded guilty to releasing the Melissa virus, which hit over 100,000 computers worldwide in March.
Blue Gene: IBM has announced a $100 million initiative to build a supercomputer 500 times more powerful than today's fastest computers. Nicknamed Blue Gene, it will be capable of over one quadrillion operations per second.
Dell Dons New Hat: Dell is to install and support the Red Hat Linux operating system on all its PowerEdge server models, making it the first major systems vendor to factory-install Linux across its entire server line.
British Ask Jeeves: Two British TV companies, Granada and Carlton, are investing £40 million to create a British edition of Ask Jeeves (www.askjeeves.com).
Free BT: British Telecom has unveiled plans to offer unmetered Internet access for a fixed monthly fee. BT has been under pressure to reduce the cost of using the Internet.
In Brief... Oceanfree.net has linked up with LookSmart to create another Irish portal for information and e-commerce. . . Card Services International is to change its name to CardBASE Technologies from January 1st. . . ICL and Sx3 have undertaken are to provide a call handling and service order scheduling system to Northern Ireland Electricity. . . Eircell has launched a new Internet-based service called Message Bank that consolidates email, voice and fax messages. . .