A round-up of today's other stories in brief

Ulster Bank app sends overdraft risk alerts

Ulster Bank has released its mobile banking iPhone app for the Irish market. Available to download from the App store on iTunes, features include ability to check account balances, mini-statements showing the last six transactions on the account and a text alert service, which notifies customers when their account is close to being overdrawn.

Glynis Hobson, head of direct banking with Ulster Bank, said: “We asked our customers about the product and service improvements they’d most like to see from Ulster Bank. When customers told us that they would value a text service which would help them avoid being overdrawn on their account, we decided to make that a reality with a new iPhone app.”

IT services company set up

Zinopy, a new IT services company, was formed this week and immediately acquired software development firm Input Systems and training and development specialist Clear Learning.

Selling to large businesses, government and the public sector, Zinopy will initially employ 30 staff.

Zinopy has been founded by John Ryan, who has 20 years’ experience in the IT industry, having held senior positions with Entropy and Expert Edge. Geoff Keating, managing director of Input Systems, has been appointed chief operations officer, while Ger Coakley, founder of Clear Learning, has been appointed chief financial officer.

In the cloud with 3 and Google

Mobile network 3 has teamed up with Google to provide its customers with a package of cloud computing services, allowing small businesses to access technology that has traditionally been affordable only for large companies.

The offer, which is exclusive to 3, includes Google Apps, a web-based suite of communication and collaboration tools, and free mobile handset and dongle from 3.

Pricing for the service starts at €7 per user per month, with no additional licence costs.

€750,000 contracts for IT Alliance

IT Alliance, which employs about 400 people, has won contracts valued at €750,000 to optimise and support two data centres in France and Denmark.

“Overseas revenues exceeded 50 per cent for the first time last month, but to date most of this work has been in the UK.

“These wins represent an important expansion of our business into the rest of Europe,” commented Philip Maguire, chief executive of IT Alliance.