Experian's new Marketing Services Centre, officially opened in Cyberjaya on 5 October, will develop its analytical and marketing services products for the world, according to Gavin Appel, Experian Marketing Services senior vice-president for Global Product Development and Delivery.

At the same time, Experian Marketing Services centre also received MSC Malaysia status from Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) chief executive officer, Datuk Badlisham Ghazali.

This opening comes about two years after Experian's Global Research & Development Centre opened in another building in Cyberjaya. The Marketing Services Centre is housed in the Ericsson building nearby but their operations are separate.

“Products offered by the Marketing Services Centre include Hitwise, CheetahMail and QAS services and will help  our clients target and acquire new customers and achieve better returns on investment,” said Andy Went, operations director, Experian Global Development Centre Malaysia.

Kuala Lumpur, 29 June, 2010: The Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), the driver of the MSC Malaysia National ICT initiative continued to support the adoption and use of open source software (OSS) at the three-day MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference 2010 (MOSC) which opened at the Berjaya Times Square Hotel here today.

The event was jointly organised by MDeC, in collaboration with the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation Planning Unit (MAMPU) which is the force behind OSS adoption by government and the Open Source Developers Club Malaysia (OSDC.my).

MSC Malaysia encouraged Malaysian companies to adopt open source software as a means to raise productivity and efficiency while lowering costs and to improve their competitiveness in world markets.

The term “open source” refers to to software of which its initial form in human-intelligible script is made available along with its executable form which can be run by computers, along with permissive licensing conditions which allow users to freely use, copy, modify and distribute the software or its derivatives.

Most of the proprietary software used today only comes in its executable form, which is very hard for even the most competent programmers to fully understand and modify.

An analogy would be an open source cake, where its recipe is provided along with the baked cake, so that others can either make the same cake or with modifications and enhancements to suit their taste.

Also, OSS is usually available for download free of charge or at a nominal fee covering the cost of the CD, DVD or USB-drive on which it is provided.

KUALA LUMPUR, Sunday 27 June: Yasar FC, a joint venture between Malaysian company Dondurma AP Sdn Bhd and Yasar Dondurma of Turkey will introduce the Turkish company's desert cafe chain to Malaysia and the Asia Pacific region.

The agreement was signed at the Bosporus Restaurant, Pavilion shopping mall this afternoon, by MADO group chairman, Mehmet Kanbur and Shaifubahrim Mohd. Salleh and Ameta Kaur on behalf of Dondurma AP, before Her Excellency Serap Ataay, Ambassador of Turkey to Malaysia.

Yasar Dondurma owns the MADO branded cafe chain, Turkey's largest, as well as the MADO ice cream brand made from goats milk and saleb, an orchid extract found in the Marash region of Turkey, which give the ice cream its viscosity and provides an aroma which counters the smell of the goats milk. The ice cream is unique in that due to its viscosity, it's eaten from a plate with a knife and fork.

MADO has been making ice cream for five generations and it positions itself as being family-oriented, with family-oriented service, along with modern facilities such as WiFi, and it combines high European standards with the assurance of halal food.

Yasar FC will use Malaysia as a base for distribution of the MADO brand of ice creams, Turkish coffees, speciality cakes, its range of baklava (a rich, sweet pastry), breads, Turkish pastry's and small pizzas in Malaysia and across the region, and the company expects this to bring in US$100 million in various investments over five years. Dondurma AP owns 51% in Yasar FC, while Yasar Dondurma owns the rest.

KUALA LUMPUR, MARCH 30 - Even with the rise of Internet, certain aspects of society find it difficult to integrate technology into their lives. Education, is one such field, finding itself limited to factors such as equipment costs, electrical capacity and manpower.

In light of this issue, technology manufacturer Hewlett-Packard has come up with a solution: It intends to introduce school students to using thin clients, instead of the more expensive desktop workstations.

KUALA LUMPUR, March 25 - Juniper Networks, an IT and networking products manufacturer, was recently in the capital to talk about the advantages of using cloud computing, and more specifically, its own addition to the technology known as a 'cloud-ready data center.'

At the ‘Data Centre Green Tech’ conference, CK Lam, Enterprise Solutions Marketing Manager for Juniper Networks APAC (picture below), explained that existing networks throughout the world faced the problem of complexity as more users plugged into the Internet.

Kuala Lumpur, 26 January: HeiTech Managed Services, a wholly owned managed services subsidiary of HeiTech Padu, today launched Padu M.O.B.S (Managed Online Backup Services), the first such hosted backup service in Malaysia, designed especially for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs).

The company will initially target the services at its current 40 customers which store their tape backup off-site with it. Most of them are small-to-medium sized manufacturers (SMIs), SMBs and insurance companies.

Based on Avamar technology from EMC Computer Systems (Malaysia), Padu M.O.B.S. remotely stores data backed up from an organisation's servers, desktop & notebook PCs, as well as mobile smart phones onto servers at HeiTech Padu's Tier IV secure data centre in Bukit Jelutong, Shah Alam.

Generally available since 1 September, 2009, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (DB 11g Rel 2) helps organisations reduce their IT costs, according to Mark Townsend, Oracle Server Technology Division vice-president of Product Management.

Its new features include Real Application testing and Active Data Guard which are a boon to database administrators.

“DB 11g Rel 2 reduces hardware capital costs by a factor of five times, storage costs by 10 times, upgrade costs by four times, on the other hand it improves performance by 10 times, database administrator productivity by at least twice, eliminates downtime and unused redundancy, and considerably simplifies customers' software portfolio,” said Townsend in Kuala Lumpur on 3 November.

Firstly, it reduces hardware costs by consolidating all the disparate e-mail, applications, data warehousing and other servers and storage within an enterprise's data centre into a grid comprising an in-memory database cache, a bank of real application clusters and an automatically managed storage farm, all managed from a single location by an enterprise manager.

KUALA LUMPUR, DECEMBER 4 - In a strange bid to make itself more appealing to young Malaysians as well as local stamp collectors, Kaspersky has decided to market itself by bundling its products with their own 1Malaysia stamps.

Encased in a green booklet with Jackie Chan in a white helmet on the cover, the stamps depict blankly-smiling oval-shaped cartoon characters with the 1Malaysia logo. The stamps are valued at 30 cents each, and are represented as a joint effort between Kaspersky and POS Malaysia.

BUKIT JALIL, DECEMBER 3 - Astro has confirmed its intention in making High-Definition Television (HDTV) available to its viewers. Although it has not given a time-frame as to when it will release the service, Astro has confirmed that its intention in providing HD-quality television in Malaysia, which will be known as Astro 2.0. The current implementation that Astro is currently operating on is known as Astro 1.0.