According to analysts, the move taken by the company is primarily aimed at projecting Facebook as a lucrative platform for marketers before the service becomes public.

Yesterday, the social media giant organised its first ever big event for advertisers where it announced a number of new offerings to generate more opportunities for Facebook as well as a number of 3rd party marketing and advertising organisations.

“It’s not us, it’s we. If we’re going to make marketing truly social, it won’t be us, it’s going to be you,” revealed chief operating officer at Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg (as reported by The Financial Times).

According to Facebook’s director of global business marketing, Mike Hoefflinger, Wednesday’s announcement will now sees businesses manage the renovation of their Facebook pages in order to suit the new timeline implementation which would offer them a perfect platform to keep fans in the loop regarding their updates.

Two laptops were stolen in December last year from Eircom’s Dublin office while the third was stolen from an employee’s home. All these laptops were not encrypted. According to an official statement from Eircom, data of 6,441 current and previous eMobile business customers is at risk, out of which 146 did have financial data. Details of another 404 Meteor customers is also at risk confirmed the company.

Head of Communications at Eircom, Paul Bradley, has issued an apology and has revealed that two investigations are currently underway. Eircom has also confirmed that “A review of the Group’s encryption policy is underway to ensure all computers and laptops are compliant with the Group’s encryption policy.”

Data Protection Commissioner Billy Hawkes slammed the company for its sheer negligence by saying that the loss of Eircom’s laptop is “one of the most serious breaches” his office has seen reports SC Magazine UK.

Hawkes wasn’t at all happy with the delay in the disclosure of the breach. “Our normal delay in getting reports in is 24 to 48 hours which is our guideline for reports of such incidents. So I find it very surprising to hear that reason being given by Eircom,” said Hawkes, reports the Irish Times.

will complete its rollout of super-fast broadband ahead of schedule, making the service available to each of the 13m homes passed by its network this spring.

The group, which is expected to report its first annual profit on Wednesday, will announce on Monday that its super-fast service now passes 10m of the UK’s 26m homes and that its entire network will be plugged in several months ahead of the original mid-2012 deadline.

Virgin Media, which is the UK’s only cable company and was formed through rounds of mergers between loss-making predecessors, is forecast by at least two banks to report a small net profit. Analysts forecast an average of £3.988m in revenues for the year, with BNP Paribas saying this could produce a £72m profit, and JP Morgan Cazenove estimating £60m.

BT Group and Virgin Media are engaged in a broadband arms race which will see download speeds double for many households in the coming year. In a separate project, Virgin will over the next 18 months double its customers’ download speeds, with the fastest going from 50Mbps to 120Mbps from the summer. BT will move its 40Mbps customers to 80Mbps. The higher speeds ensure several members of a household can simultaneously watch internet TV, play online games, or use smartphones, tablets and computers.

The UK is outside the world’s 30 fastest for internet connections, according to speed testing company Ookla, but Virgin Media says its work will push the country into the top 20, ahead of the US, Japan, France and Germany.

Jon James, executive director of broadband at Virgin Media, said: “Soon half the country will be able to get superfast 100Mbps broadband from us. Reaching today’s milestone puts us ahead of schedule as we help propel the UK up the global broadband rankings.”

The TV and telecoms group could add 13,000 customers in its fourth quarter, according to JP Morgan Cazenove, bringing its total subscribers to 4.8m. The total, which takes into account those leaving the network, could include 30,000 more broadband subscribers. In its last quarter, BT added 146,000 broadband subscribers.

BT and Virgin Media are racing towards higher speeds in the hope that consumers will leave Talk Talk and BSkyB, which will struggle to match their service. BT and Virgin are the only two operators that own fibre cables.

Sky and Talk Talk have spent millions unbundling BT’s copper network, installing their own equipment in telephone exchanges, but the higher speeds cannot be delivered over copper.

According to analyst Robin Bienenstock at broker Sanford Bernstein: “This leaves the unbundlers (but in particular BSkyB as TalkTalk is the clear discounter in the market) in the unenviable position of having to choose between selling product that is margin dilutive or resisting its sale and seeing their premium quality status diluted.”

Sky is already considering renting fibre from BT, and has begun a trial on the former national monopoly’s network which could form the basis of a high speed broadband offer to its customers.

Figures from Gartner reveal that total Q4 UK PC shipments fell 19.6 per cent annually to 2.95 million. Market leader HP suffered a sales slump of 27 per cent, and its 618,000 unit shipments gave it a 21 per cent share of the market.

Second-placed Dell saw its quarterly shipments fall 32.2 per cent on the corresponding period last year to 408,000, giving the Texan firm 13.8 per cent of the market. Despite a 5.4 per cent Q4 decline in units shipped, third-placed Toshiba has seen its market share jump from 8.5 to 10 per cent in the past year.

Apple, in fourth, was the quarter’s only big winner, with shipments growing 17.2 per cent to 267,000. The Mac maker’s market share has swelled from 6.2 to 9.1 per cent over the past 12 months.

Fifth-placed Acer’s annus horribilis came to a suitably nightmarish end. The Taiwanese firm’s quarterly shipments plummeted 62.4 per cent to 230,000. Its market share was cut by more than half in 2011, falling from 16.7 to 7.8 per cent.

The market’s smaller players had more joy in Q4, with shipments for everyone outside the leading quintet growing 5.8 per cent to more than 1.1 million. The percentage of the market held by non-top-five manufacturers has risen more than nine points to 38.3 per cent during the past year.

Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner, told ChannelWeb that the hard-disk drive supply issues could potentially lead to inventory shortages, resulting in PC price rises in 2012. This, in turn, could slow corporate refresh cycles, he predicted.

“There is nothing that is really helping the PC industry move forward at the moment – everything is stacked against it,” he added.

Atwal claimed that many enterprises might look at a variety of client compute platforms beyond traditional desktops.

“Organisations are re-evaluating their device portfolio and are trying to understand better where PCs are most valuable within their organisations, and how they can supplement them with other devices or, in some cases, replace them,” he said.

“[This is] not necessarily [just about] getting smartphones in and looking to tablets, but also thin clients; [they are asking] ‘what is the best way to do the applications?’ ‘Do we really necessarily need a full-fat client?’”

The UK’s decline exceeded that of the other major western European markets, with French Q4 shipments falling 11.8 per cent year on year, and the German market contracting by 8.2 per cent. The PC markets in the troubled southern European economies of Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain shrank by more than 30 per cent in Q4, according to Gartner

It’s been revealed that Japanese video game and arcade giant Namco, ignores the mental health issues of its programmers, even at the urgings of physicians – to the point that they commit suicide.

While Apple might be getting a lot of attention for its poor employee working conditions, it’s not the only firm that deserves it. Namco in Japan has now been revealed to ignore requests for transfers and reprieve, including when those requests are made by the physician of an employee. The ultimate end to the saga of requests? The worker in question committed suicide.

Kotaku has handled the translation for the original My News Japan posting, saying that the man in question worked as part of Namco’s Panchi slot machine division. Originally “Mr N” as he’s called in the article, wanted to work at Namco to make video games and found the environment in the Panchi programming department too stressful.

He soon began suffering from depression and began requesting to be transferred. Even when his doctor contacted Namco to make the request on his behalf it was denied. Nine months after becoming part of the Panchi division, Mr N committed suicide.

This is unlikely to be a single incident in a country that features some of the world’s highest suicide rates. Hopefully reports like this will help raise awareness and make it easier for individuals to get help or at least know where their health will be respected and where it won’t be.

The updated app, however, will not allow users to either pre-order or specify their drinks electronically.

LONDON — When Eventbrite, a start-up based in San Francisco that sells tickets online, decided to open its first international office, the founders turned to the East End of London.

The British capital offered a thriving music and theater scene, a large work force of young, multilingual college graduates and easy access to both the Asian and North American markets. In October, the technology company moved into a converted jewelry workshop in Saffron Hill, a district that was notorious for crime in the 19th century and inspired Fagin’s Den in “Oliver Twist.”

“London will be our hub for the rest of Europe,” said Renaud Visage, a co-founder of Eventbrite who splits his time among the Bay Area, London and Paris. “It’s a natural progression for U.S. start-ups to move to the U.K., then expand further afield.”

Once a rundown area dominated by derelict warehouses and manufacturing sites, East London has emerged as a miniversion of Silicon Valley, attracting hundreds of technology and new media start-ups.

Rundown greasy spoons have been replaced by hipster coffeehouses that serve $6 macchiatos to trendy customers in their 20s. Local pubs like The Queen of Hoxton and Commercial Tavern now stock high-end European microbrews. Amid the revitalization, the price of office space has jumped as much as 50 percent at some buildings.

“All the start-ups out here are forming our own little community,” said Paul Brine, chief marketing officer for the Web site FarFetch, which provides an online marketplace for high-end European and North American fashion boutiques. “It helps to have a support network as we’re all working towards the same goal.”

The local industry is getting a helping hand from the British government. Last year, Prime Minister David Cameron announced a $23 million investment fund to attract technology entrepreneurs to East London, which the government calls Tech City.

Officials also created an entrepreneurial visa to fast-track immigration approval for non-Europeans interested in starting businesses in Britain, and announced $312 million of equity finance for fast-growing homegrown technology companies.

“Our role is to make sure the right infrastructure is in place to help the tech cluster grow,” said Eric Van Der Kleij, the British government’s “entrepreneur in residence,” who oversees the state-backed Tech City Investment Organization. “My target is to set a date to close our organization because the private sector is doing so well.”

The government’s strategy is starting to pay off. London-based companies attracted $433 million of venture capital in the first nine months of 2011, according to the data provider Dow Jones VentureSource. That is a 25 percent increase over the same period last year and the largest amount raised since the beginning of the recent recession.

The city has also been gaining ground on Britain’s most established start-up cluster, in Cambridge, which has fed off its university to churn out successful tech companies like the chip designer ARM Holdings and the business software company Autonomy.

“U.S. investors are paying increased attention to what’s going on in London,” said David Hornik, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capitalist firm August Capital, during a recent trip to Britain. “There’s huge interest from companies over here to be funded by established American V.C.’s.”

Silicon Valley stalwarts are considering East London, too. In September, Google announced plans to open a seven-story office building in the heart of East London. The company will use the space to run workshops, show off new products and provide office space for organizations that support local start-ups. Intel is building a computer research lab in the area, and Cisco Systems has pledged $500 million of investment over the next five years, including the construction of an innovation center at the site of the 2012 Olympic Games.

Despite London’s vibrant start-up community, the city still lacks many basics that help to fuel entrepreneurial activity. Mr. Brine of FarFetch said the company had to beg to break its lease when it outgrew its current warehouse office. Eventually, the property owner agreed to shorten the contract.

Bullseyehub, a Web site that helps event organizers promote their shows online, had trouble finding qualified developers and engineers in London as it grew from five people to a team of 28 in less than a year. To fill the gap, they had to recruit a product manager from Silicon Valley with experience in scaling up small tech companies.

“London is a fantastic place to run a business, but there’s a shortage of people who have been in successful start-ups,” said Alex Will, 28, a founder of the company, whose revenue now exceeds $1.5 million.

Britain’s technology infrastructure also may dampen East London’s growth. The country ranks 25th for Internet broadband speeds, according to the Web infrastructure company Akamai. That places Britain — the world’s sixth-largest economy — behind countries like Romania and Latvia.

And even though the country’s new entrepreneurial visa has helped to attract entrepreneurs to London, the system can be too inflexible to entice the best talent, according to Reshma Sohoni, a United States-born partner in Seedcamp, an investment firm that finances early-stage companies.

To qualify for a visa, entrepreneurs must have at least $78,000 in financing in place from registered venture capitalists or the British government. Ms. Sohoni said the Australian co-founder of a start-up that she backed was turned away because he had raised only $70,000.

“The government needs to focus on getting the infrastructure right,” she said. “East London is getting traction with investors. Now we need start-up success stories to convince them to stay.”

COMMENT: Interesting how we are seen from abroad? Silicon Roundabout indeed!