NCB has become the first Irish stockbroker to offer clients the facility to engage in online dealing after the launch last Thursday of its ncbdirect web service. The features of the site, www.ncbdirect.com enable private clients to buy and sell, view their SPIA portfolios and to access research. NCB's share price information, which covers Irish equities, the FTSE and all Irish stocks listed on NASDAQ is available to the public. The company has also launched a website www.ncb.ie to give its institutional clients access to all of NCB's research.
All Smiles: A new markup language promising to enable easily crafted, bandwidth-friendly web pages has been christened as an official Internet standard by the World Wide Web Consortium. W3C declared Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) ready for use. Using simple HTML-style tags, SMIL (pronounced smile) enables the scheduling and choreographing of sound, video, text and other elements on a page. Not everyone is convinced that the standard will be a success however. "As it is currently defined, we don't think SMIL is mature enough at this point to support," said David Britton of Microsoft's Windows-platform marketing group. The W3C, whose recommendations are not legally binding but widely respected, gave its preliminary approval to SMIL in April.
Happy Birthday Baby: 50 years ago yesterday Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams' Baby was born in Manchester University, the first computer to contain an electronic memory. Seeing the potential of Kilburn and Williams' breakthrough, the British government funded a joint development project with the computer company Ferranti, which within three years had developed Mark One, a commercially built computer based on Baby. The Mark One was the ancestor of later generations of computers from the Ferranti Atlas of the 1960s to the ICL mainframes of the 1970s. A replica of Baby is still on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, which is holding a series of conferences and symposiums to mark the anniversary of the first digital computer. In 1949, breathless with excitement, the magazine Popular Mechanics predicted that "computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tonnes".
Education Online: More than 3000 schools have received a free Gateway Multimedia PC courtesy of Telecom Eireann as part of the company's Information Age schools project. Another 1000 schools will get their free gift during the summer and by September every school in the country will have a free PC and free connection to the Internet while more than 800,000 students and teachers will be given email accounts. The Information Age project is the largest investment in the Irish school system by a company outside the Department of Education.
Euro Friendly: A new CD Rom designed by a Dublin based company to assist businesses in planning and implementing their conversion to the Euro was launched late last week. Euro Essentials, developed by Euro Dynamics, is an interactive tool aimed at assisting organisations in identifying and addressing the critical strategic and technical issues involved in the impending changeover. Although initially the CD Rom is being produced exclusively in English, the company has announced its intention to localise the software and has signed its first joint venture agreement with a Spanish company.
And The Winner Is: Net Results (Ireland) Limited last week won the AIB/Bolton Trust New Ideas Competition. Anthony Quigley and Alex Porter, the founders of Net Results, received a cheque for £5,000 from the Tβnaiste, Mary Harney. The company has designed a straightforward PC-based appliance, called net.works, that enables everybody in an organisation to get email and gain access to the Internet through a single telephone connection.
No More Memory Lapses: Losing friends because of your inability to remember even the most important birthdays and anniversaries? Help is at hand in the form of WebCal's free Web-based calendaring and event tracking service that allows anyone with an Internet account to set up a personal calendar and browse the world's largest database of public events. www.webcal.com
In Brief... According to the Internet Advertising Bureau the industry could earn more than $1 billion this year. . . Disney is to buy a 43 percent stake in the search-engine company Infoseek for $770 million. . . Yahoo, the leading directory of Web sites, expects losses for the second quarter and fiscal year due to a $45 million charge related to the search engine's purchase of Viaweb. . . America Online and IBM last week announced an agreement under which AOL's Interactive Service software will feature on IBM Aptiva and ThinkPad computers. . . Last week's first Internet birth, relayed via the American Health Network, was watched by an estimated audience of two million people. The baby boy has been named Sean. . . 3Com Corporation has become the first vendor to achieve top positions in 10 categories of Ethernet technology for the LAN workgroup.
Diary
June 25th: The Irish Internet Association, www.iia, will host a discussion on the current state of online communities with Irish and international speakers in UCD. Speakers include Frank Cronin, from the Virtual Irish Pub and Frank Hannigan, Head of Sales and Marketing at IOL. Ralph Averbuch, Producer for Yahoo! UK and Ireland, will add some international perspectives.
June 30th: Net Results Limited is hosting the launch of the award winning product net.works In the Stakis Hotel, Charlemont Place to explain how the software package works. details (01) 668 7155.
Modem World
www.hbicecream.ie/intro.htm Flash World Cup site with daily commentaries, updates and the chance to win tickets to the World Cup quarter finals in Marseilles.
www.dublin-2000.com With a clock that counts down the seconds to the new millennium (no slime in cyberspace obviously) this site acts as a focal point for information and communication about millennium projects in the capital.
www.iol.ie/royalcork New and comprehensive web site giving full details of Ford Cork Week '98, the world's biggest sailing regatta to be held off Crosshaven in Cork Harbour from July 11th to 17th.
www.fbi.gov/foipa/ufo.htm The truth is out there. Well, the truth the FBI want you to know about is.
www.dcu.ie/~comms/hsheehan/connell.htm Running dog gremlins omitted tilde from this Red Flag site.
www.linkasaurus.com Linkasaurus - designed to be the ultimate collection of bookmarks for kids of all age and the best start-up page for web surfing children.
Text Bytes
"A keyboard is a tool. It is no more dangerous than a bricklayer's trowel, a piano, or even a pen." - Thomas Siekman, Compaq's senior vice president and general counsel in a statement released after Digital, which officially merged with Compaq two weeks ago, defeated a lawsuit which alleged upper limb injuries resulting from use of the company's computer keyboards.
"Bigness, per se, does not appear to be an issue for national economic policy. Rather, it appears that bigness should be primarily the concern of shareholders whose returns could be muted by large company inefficiencies, and their customers who may face bureaucratic inflexibility." - Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's comments to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week could seriously under-mine the Wintel Antitrust action.
"The net is turning commercial business on its head. One day the net will be the place where the entire world comes to shop." - CNET CEO Halsey Minor speaking at the PC Expo show in New York last week.
Computimes is edited by Tom Moriarty. Monitor compiled by Conor Pope. Send email only (no attachments, faxes or letters please) to computimes@irish-times.ie (private correspondence should be marked Not For Publication). There will be no Computimes on 29th June, it will return on July 6th.