Communications Minister Pat Rabbitte, TD, with Mairead O'Sullivan of Gagababy.ie, a recipient of the OPTIMISE fund this year; and David Curtin, chief executive, IE Domain Registry
A digest of the top business technology news stories from the past week.
IEDR to help small businesses develop their websites via €150k fund
Ireland’s .ie Domain Registry (IEDR) will make €150,000 available to 20 SMEs or micro-enterprises via its OPTIMISE fund in 2013 to help qualifying companies develop their online presence.
The registry, which manages the .ie top-level domain, announced it will provide 20 companies with €150,000 worth of support services to work on website development next year.
The 2013 fund will be open to SMEs or micro-enterprises that already have an existing .ie website.
The IEDR will be announcing more details about how companies can apply for the OPTIMISE funding early next year.
Lawsuit alleging Nokia misled shareholders dismissed
A US lawsuit by an investor who claimed smartphone maker Nokia had inflated the introduction of its Windows Phone has been dismissed, Nokia announced.
Nokia said the case, which was filed in New York in May, closed after shareholder Robert Chmielinski agreed to dismiss it without any compensation.
Chmielinski had claimed Nokia and its CEO Stephen Elop and CFO Timo Ihamuotila, who were named as defendants in the suit, wilfully misled and defrauded shareholders between October 2011 and April 2012 by making false statements about a potential turnaround thanks to strong sales of the Lumia smartphone, The Next Web reported.
Chmielinski had sought unspecified damages plus costs, having also claimed that Nokia’s switch to the Windows Phone platform did nothing to stop its decline in the smartphone market. This, Chmielinski said, led to significant economic losses for thousands of Nokia shareholders.
Cisco completes Cloupia acquisition
Computer-networking equipment maker Cisco has wrapped up its acquisition of software company Cloupia in a deal worth US$125m in cash and retention-based incentives.
Cloupia is expected to enable enterprises and service providers to manage pools of computing power, network services, storage and virtual machines as a unified whole in order to deploy and deliver IT services more rapidly and at lower costs when it’s combined with Cisco’s data centre management solutions.
The deal includes Cloupia’s infrastructure management software and employees, who will be integrated into Cisco’s Data Center Group.
PayPal co-founder joins Yahoo!’s board of directors
Internet giant Yahoo! has appointed PayPal co-founder, serial entrepreneur, angel investor and computer scientist Max Levchin to its board of directors, effective immediately. David Kenny and Brad Smith have stepped down from the board to focus on their respective companies.
There are now 11 directors on the Yahoo! board.
Levchin has extensive experience building internet companies. He had also served as CTO of PayPal and vice-president of engineering at Google, and not only incubated Yelp but is its first investor. He also serves as chairman of the board at Kaggle and Yelp, and is a director at Evernote.
His latest venture, HVF, is ‘focused on solving problems and improving lives by extracting insights from the vast quantities of data around us,’ Yahoo! said in a statement.
Stay informed – get daily updates on the latest happenings in technology directly to your inbox.
