The build-up to the London Games dominated the news this week with a whole host of Olympic themed apps being produced including one that keeps track of all the Irish athletes.
It was the second week of Q2 results from the big tech firms. Facebook’s investors weren’t happy with hitting lowly targets as the share price took yet another hit following Zuckerberg’s first earnings call since the company went public. There wasn’t great news for Apple either, sales dropped as consumers wait for the iPhone5 and results didn’t meet expectations. However worse was in stall for Zynga, creator of Farmville whose shares dropped 40% after surprisingly posting a surprise loss.
‘Big Data’ and ‘High connectivity’ were buzzwords in Dublin’s tech scene this week as Dr Vishal Sikka of SAP launched the SAP Start-up focus program to support data mining and former Obama advisor Susan Crawford promoted the building of fibre optic networks at the Science Gallery. A new invite only event called START, which aims to gather the world’s top 100 start-ups, was also launched from the team behind the Dublin Web Summit.
Twitter introduced targeted tweets this week and rumours of Twitter TV abounded but on the eve of the Olympics when traffic is expected to soar the site went offline for the second time in a month. Google also experienced technical problems on Thursday as instant messaging service Google Talk was offline for a number of hours.
On the home front start-ups promised to create 900 jobs, sky entered the broadband market and DCU launched an interesting programming degree that requires applicants to submit a portfolio of their work and pass an interview before securing a place.
