A round up of other technology stories in brief.
HP dominates PC sales
Preliminary figures from analysts IDC show that HP bolstered its position as the world's number one PC maker with a market share of 19.1 per cent. Second-placed Dell's share of the global PC market fell to 15.2 per cent, with 663,000 fewer sales.
Acer and Lenovo are next, each with 6.7 per cent of the market.
IDC said the PC market grew by an unexpected 10.9 per cent in the first quarter, but it questioned how much impact the release of Windows Vista had on the figures.
New software to study shares
Dow Jones has introduced new analytic software which analyses news feeds and archival information to try to predict share price movements for banks and hedge funds that use automated trading.
It says Dow Jones News Analytics can "identify trends and correlations in news and sentiment for most asset classes or instruments".
Paddies head for the Valley
An informal group of Irish tech execs will visit Silicon Valley in early November under the banner "Paddy's Valley" in order to foster closer links with the software mecca. To date 20 firms have signed up for the trip. Further info at www.web2ireland.org
Irish Blackberry users in luck
Irish users of the Blackberry mobile e-mail device escaped a failure in the service which left North American users unable to send or receive messages for up to 14 hours. The outage began late on Tuesday night but a spokesperson for mobile operator O2 confirmed that service on Irish networks was unaffected.
Yahoo sued for China policy
Internet giant Yahoo is being sued by a US civil rights group which alleges that it provided information to the Chinese government which led to the arrest, torture and imprisonment of a dissident. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Wang Xiaoning, who received a 10-year sentence for circulating articles via e-mail which called for democratic reform.
The internet search company also disappointed investors this week with first-quarter figures showing net income of $142 million.
