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It is expected that today’s supplementary budget will contain a plan to create a new state agency tasked with buying up all the bad loans currently clogging up Irish banks’ balance sheets. According to a report in today’s Irish Times, the budget will contain a plan for a new asset management agency that will buy up the bank’s bad loans, and in due course, sell them down and hopefully realise a profit for the taxpayer. This new agency would fall under the auspices of the National Treasury Management Agency and would be backed eventually by a fund worth €60-€80bn, the newspaper said. There has been much speculation in recent weeks…

Popular teen and young adult social-networking site Bebo has expanded its reach to include native-language sites for France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. In addition to translated sites for these countries, Bebo already has local sites for Ireland, the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Poland. While Facebook currently appears to be the fastest growing of social-networking sites, Bebo already pulls in over 22 million unique visitors worldwide. Recently, the AOL-owned Bebo added RSS functionality to its site, so members can pull in social media from other sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace with Bebo Lifestream and its Open Media Platform. “The proven success of our platform…

Podcasting has the potential to create new and lucrative revenue streams for media owners, according to John Hirst, head of global content and podcasts with the UK’s Global Radio group, which in its latest financial year (which ends this month) has generated an income of £1m sterling from this channel alone. Podcasting also offers opportunities for brands that want to engage in a more meaningful way with consumers, he says. Hirst (pictured), who was in Dublin to address the Independent Broadcasters of Ireland Annual Conference, told businessandleadership.com that the group – which has stations and hubs in 60 locations in the UK, some 18 million listeners and a number of…

IBM and German business software and services firm SAP have demo’ed new technology that allows live migration of SAP applications across remote IBM POWER6 systems through cloud computing. What this means is that cloud computing is becoming more of a realistic option for organisations where ‘large pools of systems’ are linked together to provide IT services, but where there is also a desire for a shared infrastructure. IBM and SAP showed how enterprise applications can run in the cloud, allowing the movement of workloads across physical servers and data centres. In a nutshell, there could be different virtual machines – logical partitions – running separate applications on the same physical…

Do Irish businesses have the write stuff? As a matter of fact, yes they do. Never at any point in history has humanity engaged so much in the art of writing. Think about it. From people text messaging on their phones, writing on web forums, sending emails, conversing on Bebo or Facebook, writing weblogs (blogs), and lately, writing 140-character entries on services such as Twitter, the human brain has never been so engaged. The blogging revolution, in particular, started at least a decade ago, but in the past, three to four years has gained pace; year on year there has been a 300pc increase in the number of Irish people…

Independent News & Media (INM) has sold its 49pc interest in a German online price comparator for energy and telecom services. INM sold its stake in Verivox Holdings Limited to VVX Investments Ltd, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Oakley Capital Private Equity, for €18.3m in cash. The proceeds from the sale of €18.3m include repayment by Verivox to INM of a €2.3m loan prior to 31 March 2010. The sale also includes an additional €1m payable in 2010, which is conditional on Verivox achieving targeted EBITDA for 2009. INM will receive net proceeds from the sale of approximately €16m, which it said will be used to pay down senior debt. Verivox’s…