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Nike has broken its own record for most watched viral ad in its first week of release, with its World Cup commercial ‘Write the Future’ clocking up more than 7.8m views in the first seven days of the campaign. The previous record – with 6.3m views in its first week – was Nike’s ‘Earl and Tiger’. The new ad was created by Wieden + Kennedy London and directed by Alejandro Gonzále Iñárritu, whose film directing credits include Babel and 21 Grams. Starring a host of top football stars, including Wayne Rooney, Didier Drogba, Ronaldinho, Christiano Ronaldo, and Franck Ribery, it shows the life changing effects a split second on the…

Knowledge is the main driver of today’s global economy and countries need to harness innovation and entrepreneurship to boost growth and employment, the OECD has said. The Paris-based organization said in its Innovation Strategy that innovation will be key to a sustainable rise in living standards in OECD countries. According to the strategy, governments have a key role to play to boost innovation as some essential research often attracts little private-sector support. The OECD also said that the current economic crisis makes it even more necessary to push through reforms: “Governments battling to get their economies onto a sustainable growth path need to reduce administrative hurdles for new and existing…

Two recent analyses of Ireland’s economic situation have made for sobering reading. Writing in the Irish Times on Saturday under the headline ‘Burden of Irish debt could yet eclipse that of Greece’, UCD economist Morgan Kelly said that unless the Government abandoned the bank bailout, the country faces bankruptcy. Kelly, who correctly predicted the bust several years ago, said in his article that on the face of it Ireland’s debt position does not appear “catastrophic.” However, when the costs of the bank bailout are factored in the national debt could hit 115pc of GDP by 2015, “if we are lucky.” He warned that in the face of a borrowing crisis on the…

Green Energy in Ireland With so much happening in the green-energy research field in our third-level institutions, Ireland is genuinely staking its claim as the home for green tech. Carmel Doyle reports With the race on to progress Ireland’s green-energy portfolio to meet our 2020 energy targets and to create a cleaner, smarter economy. An increasing array of researchers in universities and institutes of technology (ITs) around the island are focusing on the renewable energy space to harness Ireland’s wave, wind, solar and bioenergy resources. Professor Fionn Murtagh, director of information, communications and emergent technologies at Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) , says there is a lot of awareness of the potential of green-energy research…

Despite declining mobile handsets sales in 2009, smartphones continue to represent the fastest-growing and most profitable segment of the mobile handset market. Volume sales were to grow by 33.5pc year-on-year in 2009 and by 36pc in 2010, said Informa Telecoms & Media. However, the importance of the smart-phone segment is underlined by the fact that, although they will only account for 27pc of the total number of handsets sold in 2010, they will represent more than half (55pc) of the value of the total mobile handset market. Beyond that, they will account for almost two thirds (64pc) of the market in terms of profitability. “The strong volume growth rate and high…