ALTECH has appointed Willie Oosthuysen as its new chief technology officer. Oosthuysen was formerly a regional director for systems engineering at Cisco and spent the past five years on assignment in France. In his new role at Altech, Oosthuysen will have “overall responsibility for the long-range direction of technological planning, development and delivery within the group”.
The INTERNET CORPORATION FOR ASSIGNED NAMES AND NUMBERS, the authority on the Internet’s unique identifiers or domain names, has approved a plan to allow custom generic top-level domains (gTLDs) – allowing traditional domains such as .com and .co.za to be replaced with names, such as surnames or company names. However, the application process for the new gTLDs requires both time and money. Customs gTLDs will cost US$185 000 to register and $25 000/year thereafter. Applications for custom top-level domains will be accepted between 12 January and 12 April 2012 and the actual domains should be in operation by year-end 2012.
RESEARCH IN MOTION (RIM), maker of BlackBerry cellphones, missed its profit forecasts and lowered its predictions for the full year. RIM’s net profit was US$695m in the three months to 28 May, down from $769m over the same period last year. The company is competing against new handsets produced by rivals Apple and manufacturers employing Google’s Android operating system. In addition, analysts say RIM has become sidetracked with new products, such as its new tablet device, the Playbook. In its results it said it had shipped 500 000 Playbooks but didn’t provide detailed sales figures.
The INTERNET CORPORATION FOR ASSIGNED NAMES AND NUMBERS, the authority on the Internet’s unique identifiers or domain names, has approved a plan to allow custom generic top-level domains (gTLDs) – allowing traditional domains such as .com and .co.za to be replaced with names, such as surnames or company names. However, the application process for the new gTLDs requires both time and money. Customs gTLDs will cost US$185 000 to register and $25 000/year thereafter. Applications for custom top-level domains will be accepted between 12 January and 12 April 2012 and the actual domains should be in operation by year-end 2012.
RESEARCH IN MOTION (RIM), maker of BlackBerry cellphones, missed its profit forecasts and lowered its predictions for the full year. RIM’s net profit was US$695m in the three months to 28 May, down from $769m over the same period last year. The company is competing against new handsets produced by rivals Apple and manufacturers employing Google’s Android operating system. In addition, analysts say RIM has become sidetracked with new products, such as its new tablet device, the Playbook. In its results it said it had shipped 500 000 Playbooks but didn’t provide detailed sales figures.