Short takes from this week's news
Europe lags behind US and Asia for
innovation
European IT suppliers are more expensive and less innovative
than their counterparts in the US and Asia, according to research
conducted by KPMG. "This will have alarm bells ringing in Europe's
IT industry," said Crispin O'Brien of KPMG's technology practice.
He said European firms were particularly vulnerable to competition
from Asia, but still rated most highly for attending to local
business needs.
Self-learning service to deal with Xmas
queries
Otto Group, which operates the Freemans, Grattan, Look Again and
Kaleidoscope websites, is using Metafaq, a service from Transversal
eService, to handle customer questions during the Christmas period.
Metafaq is designed to provide instant online answers to questions,
avoiding the need for customers to e-mail or call the contact
centre. The Metafaq product builds the questions asked by customers
into an up-to-date, self-organising, self-learning knowledge base
of answers without requiring any programming.
LDA aims for better system integration
The London Development Agency is to work with IMGroup to
implement SQL Server 2005, with the aim of improving its local
government agency reporting and better integrating business
systems. "Our vision is for users to come to a single place for all
their information needs," said Linda Chandler, head of IS and
knowledge management at the agency.
Less software piracy could boost economy
Cutting software piracy in the UK by 10% could boost the
country's economic growth by £11bn, according to the Business
Software Alliance. A study by the organisation concluded that
reducing software piracy from 27% to 17% would create 34,000 jobs
and generate £2.8bn in tax revenue. The BSA is pressing the
government to tighten the enforcement of software copyright
law.
Siemens poised to sell business unit to
Fujitsu
Siemens Business Services is poised to sell its product-related
services (PRS) unit to Fujitsu, according to the Financial Times.
The PRS unit accounts for about a fifth of the IT services unit's
revenues of £3.5bn. The supplier has major contracts with Transport
for London, the Office for National Statistics and National Savings
and Investments, plus a £2bn deal with the BBC.
Internet Explorer 7 beta ready in four
months
Microsoft is planning to distribute a beta of its more secure
Internet Explorer 7 browser within four months. The beta will be
made available to users of the company's Windows XP operating
system from next March, ahead of the launch of its next-generation
Vista operating system. As well as new anti-phishing and
anti-spyware features, the browser is expected to offer users
tabbed browsing, in the same way as the open source Firefox browser
does.
Police force extends emergency call system
West Midlands Police has extended its emergency call handling
system to provide details of the location of a call coming from a
mobile phone. The system, developed by Northgate Information
Solutions, links geographical information system terminals and the
command and control system to ensure operators can quickly access
the information they need.
M&S uses mobiles to improve
efficiencies
Marks & Spencer has equipped employees at 400 UK food stores
with mobile devices that enable them to replace shelf labels as
mistakes are spotted. Store workers are using Symbol PDT8142
devices to draft replacement labels and Zebra QL320 mobile printers
to print them while on the shop floor. The devices have enabled the
retailer to abandon a five-stage manual process for changing shelf
labels.
Firefox threatened by malicious code
Exploit code to crash the open source Firefox browser has
surfaced on the internet. It is designed to take advantage of a bug
in the history.dat file of the recently launched Firefox 1.5. The
history.dat file stores information from websites that the user has
visited using Firefox. Users who visit a malicious site loaded with
the code could find that their browser will crash.
Clarification
We would like to clarify that Voca's new £100m IP-based payment
system featured in Computer Weekly on 6 December will run in
parallel with its existing system until both produce reconciled
output. This is expected to occur in the third quarter of 2006.