The tech buiness week: Trustev wins SXSW competition, NDRC launches FinTech

18 Mar 2014

The Trutev team, Chris Kennedy, Donal Cahalane and Pat Phelan, in Austin, Texas

A digest of the top business technology news stories from the past week, beginning with the news Cork security company Trustev has won the start-up accelerator competition at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

Trustev takes top prize at SXSW Accelerator competition

Cork security company Trustev has won the start-up accelerator competition at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

Trustev was among 50 finalists – whittled down from more than 1,000 initial entries – to deliver presentations on 8-9 March to tech leaders at SXSW Accelerator.

Winning the top prize positions Trustev on the same path as previous success stories at the music, film, and interactive conference and festival, such as Uber, Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.

NDRC launches financial start-up accelerator FinTech

Financial services start-ups in Ireland have a chance to access mentors, resources and the opportunity to develop their ideas now that the National Digital Research Centre (NDRC) in Dublin has launched the NDRC FinTech start-up programme.

Established in association with blue chip firms and Bank of Ireland, Enterprise Ireland, Mediolanum and State Street, NDRC FinTech will recruit 10 early stage financial services start-ups for a part-time, five-week programme beginning on 19 May 2014.

Start-ups interested in applying to the programme may do so online before 5pm on 2 May.

Irish cloud learning player strikes deal with Chinese government

Irish e-learning player Onwards Learning has struck a deal with Chinese Ministry of Education-backed EOL (China Education Online) to provide a portal on the site.

Onwards Learning has signed an online distribution and marketing agreement for its cloud-based English-language learning social marketplace with eol.cn, China’s largest integrated education portal.

LearnOnEnglish.com will be hosted and promoted through eol.cn as a branded mini-portal across EOL’s web properties, which have achieved daily page views as high as 150m. E-commerce player

Scurri raises €1.2m in second seed-funding round

Irish e-commerce platform player Scurri has secured a second round of seed funding totalling €1.2m, enabling it to focus its efforts on developing further in the UK market.

Haatch, Episode 1 Ventures, and ACT Venture Capital joined existing angel investors to fund expansion plans for the delivery management firm.

Scurri’s cloud technology has been designed to optimise the customer delivery experience, allowing merchants to effectively deliver on brand promises and drive customer loyalty.

Intel to launch 800Gbps cables by the end of this year

Chip giant Intel is to release cables capable of transferring data at up to 800Gbps (gigabits per second) in the later part of this year.

The new MXC cables will eventually replace existing copper cables that are only capable of achieving a maximum speed of 10Gbps. Intel’s Silicon Photonics labs is developing the cables with the help of component and cable maker US Conec.

According to Intel’s estimates, users of the new cabling at its maximum speed would be able to download a two-hour 4GB HD movie from iTunes in less than two seconds.

Twitter hires former YouTube exec to lead video ads

Twitter has hired former YouTube executive Baljeet Singh as the social network’s product director to push its new line of video advertisements.

Singh is to lead Twitter’s video-sharing future, which will include letting users find and watch videos, creating easier partnerships with companies to post their videos on the site, and using Twitter’s Amplify advertising programme to sell more adverts with videos on users’ feeds.

Singh has been one of YouTube’s top employees in terms of revenue-generating video software and is the person behind YouTube’s introduction of skippable video adverts that appear before a video, according to news and media network The Verge.