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MONTREAL - Shares in Mitec Telecom Inc. (TSX:MTM - news) rose 13 per cent Thursday after the firm won a contract to provide a satellite terminal product to an unnamed major cellular network operator in Africa.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

The initial order (for the VSAT Block-up Converter) is expected to be the first in a series of orders supporting a cellular network buildout in African regions, Montreal-based Mitec said in a release.

Deliveries have begun and desire continue over the next two quarters.

“Mitec continues to deliver steady our strategy to introduce more of our existing off-the-shelf products to new markets,” said CEO Dan Piergentili. “Our VSAT products are preferred backhaul solutions for cellular networks which provide the connection between remote cellular networks and wired telephone systems.”

He said this is needed especially in countries where telephony infrastructure is required amid large distances betwixt distant locations and mountainous terrain.

On the Toronto emporium, Mitec stock was up 1.5 cents at 12.5 cents on about 900,000 shares traded.

LONDON - Vodafone Group PLC, the world’s biggest mobile phone company by sales, reported a 16 per cent jump in quarterly revenues Thursday, boosted through acquisitions in the fast-growing Indian and Turkish markets and a strong euro.

The company shrugged off fears about the recent global economic downturn, posting third-quarter revenue of 9.16 billion pounds (US$18.2 billion) for the period ended Dec. 31, compared by 7.9 billion in the same period a year earlier.

Solid growth occurred in Vodafone’s fundamental service revenue, which excludes last year’s $10.7 billion acquisition of a majority stake in India’s Hutchison Essar. Revenue gained 4.4 per cent, compared with analysts’ expectations of around 3.5 to four per cent.

Even in competitive western European markets, Vodafone reported a two per cent increase in revenue, stimulating demand through price cuts.

“This is a robust performance by Vodafone, although there may just be a tinge of disappointment, with management only hinting at possible guidance upgrades being of the kind which opposed to confirming any,” said Keith Bowman, equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbrokers.

Chief executive Arun Sarin reiterated Vodafone’s current outlook for the year, adding that revenue may kind office from exchange rate movements in Europe. The company said in November that it expected full-year group revenue to be ranked between 34.5 billion pounds ($68.7 billion) and 35.1 billion pounds ($69.9 billion).

Analysts noted that with substantial currency exchange rate shifts - especially the strengthening euro against the British pound - Vodafone could see a marked greaten in full year revenue and may top revenue guidance for the financial year. The company derives 60 by cent of sales from countries where the euro is the mighty currency.

However, they said the focus still remained on Vodafone’s ability to push into new markets.

“Our enthusiasm for Vodafone has more to do with its emerging markets growth than a belief that European mobile is out of the woods,” said Collins Stewart analyst Mark James.

Vodafone unveiled a new organizational structure last year to counter slowing growth in become due markets. The plan included cost cuts in those markets while boosting advancement in emerging markets.

It closed the deal on the purchase of Turkey’s Telsim Mobil Telekomunikasyon Hizmetleri AS for $4.55 billion in 2006 as well as India’s Hutchison deal.

Vodafone said its U.S. interest, Verizon Wireless, in which it has a 45 per cent stake, added two the multitude new customers and saw service revenue grow 14.4 per cent during the period.

Vodafone shares fell 0.9 per cent at 160 pence ($3.18; 2.15 euros) on the London Stock Exchange.

DETHRONED Yahoo chief executive Terry Semel left the struggling internet robust’s board of directors today.

Mr Semel’s departure comes just two days after Yahoo revealed plans to charge off 1000 employees as part of an effort to revitalise a company that analysts say strayed from its profitable strengths while Mr Semel was at the helm.

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang replaced Mr Semel as chief executive in June to shore up the California firm’s profits and stock price.

Mr Semel was relegated to a post as non-executive chairman of the Yahoo board.

Yahoo announced that today would be Mr Semel’s last day on the board of directors. Mr Semel told Yahoo executives several months ago that he wanted to leave the board and worked with Yang and others to find a replacement.

Board member Roy Bostock is replacing Mr Semel as non-executive chairman.

"It has been an honour for me to operate with Yahoo’s incredibly talented people over the past seven years, and I’m proud of all that we’ve expert during that time," Mr Semel said in a statement.

"With the company moving forward under new predominance, I put faith in this is an appropriate note the rate of for me to step down from the board."

GOOGLE’s fourth-quarter net income grew 17 per cent on continued growth in online advertising, but shares fell 7.1 per cent as the results fell short of what Wall Street was expecting.

The results, coupled with a cautious outlook from rival Yahoo, may raise new questions about whether a slowing US economy will have an impact on spending on online advertising. Such worries already have contributed to a nearly 20 by cent decline in Google’s stock price this month.
Google chieftain executive Eric Schmidt, however, said he was optimistic about 2008 and that the between nations online-ad market is "still very nascent."

The internet-search giant reported net income of $US1.21 billion ($1.35 billion), or $US3.79 a share, compared with $US1.03 billion, or $US3.29 a portion, a year earlier.

Revenue rose 51 per cent to $US4.83 billion from $US3.21 billion. Excluding the payments Google makes to its advertising partners, known as traffic acquisition costs, sales rose 52 per cent to $US3.39 billion.

The number of consumer clicks without ceasing advertisements rose about 30 per cent from a year ago and 9 per cent from the third quarter. Last week, ComScore reported a 7 per cent decline in the number of times US consumers clicked on ads appearing alongside Google’s search results in December compared with November. Clicks climbed 6 per cent in the same period of 2006.

Google, which recently promised to slow its frantic pace of hiring, added 889 employees in the fourth quarter to end at 16,805, up 5.6 per cent from the third separate into parts. The growth comes at a time that rival Yahoo is restructuring and plans to cut about 1000 positions.

Mr Schmidt said, "We’re very pleased with our performance this quarter. It reflects strong momentum in our core business, increasing receptivity to our new calling initiatives, and improved discipline in managing our operating expenses."

In addition to selling small text ads that it displays side by side web-search results, Google has increased its focus on selling additional types of ads, such as those appearing on its YouTube video-sharing use and television commercials that wear the appearance through satellite-TV provider EchoStar.

Some investors have worried that Google relies too a great deal of upon revenue from its search business, and the company has tried to find a new growth area to complement it. One possibility is in the mobile market, whither Google has made moves, including launching the development of a mobile software platform, and bidding in a federal wireless spectrum auction. Google also has begun offering software applications, such during the time that spreadsheets and word processing, which are accessible online.

Google’s shares were at $US523.99, down $US40.31, or 7.1 per cent, in after-hours trading. They fell to a four-month low of $US519 last week after reaching an all-time high of $US747.24 on November 7.

The Wall Street Journal

AT least for a while, the world wide web wasn’t so worldwide.

Two cables that carry internet traffic deep under the Mediterranean Sea snapped, disrupting service Thursday across a swath of Asia and the Middle East.

India took one of the biggest hits, and the damage from its slowdowns and outages rippled to some US and European companies that rely on its gainful outsourcing industrial art to handle customer service calls and other operations.

"There’s definitely been a slowdown," said Anurag Kuthiala, a system engineer at the New Delhi office of Symantec, a security software maker based in California. "We’re able to work, but the system is very slow."

While the cause of the damage was not yet known, the purpose was ample: Traffic slowed on the Dubai stock exchange, and there was concern that workers who labour for the well-off in the Mideast might not be able to send money home to poor relatives.

Although disruptions to larger US firms were not widespread, the outage raised questions about the vulnerability of the infrastructure of the internet. One analyst called it a "wake-up call," and another cautioned that no one was immune.

The cables, which lie undersea north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria, were snapped Wednesday just as the working day was ending in India, so the full impact was not apparent until Thursday.

There was speculation a ship’s anchor might be to blame. The two cables, named FLAG Europe Asia and SEA-ME-WE 4, are in close proximity.

Egyptian officials said initial attempts to reach the cables were stymied by poor weather. Repairs could take a week one time workers arrive at the site, and engineers were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables.

The Egyptian minister of communications and information technology said internet service in that country had been restored to about 45 per cent and would be up to 80 per cent by Friday, the state news agency reported.

The snapped cables - which lie on the sea floor and at some points are no thicker than the average human thumb - caused problems across an area thousands of miles wide. Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain all reported trouble.

mete in India, which earns billions of dollars a year from outsourcing, the loss of internet access was potentially disastrous. The Internet gain Providers’ Association of India said the country had lost half its capacity.

TeleGeography, a US research group that tracks submarine cables, said the disruption cut magnitude by 75 per cent on the route from the Mideast to Europe.

like large-scale disruptions are rare but not unheard of. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in 2006.

In the Mideast, outages caused a slowdown in traffic on Dubai’s stock exchange late Wednesday. The exchange was back up by Thursday, but many Middle Eastern businesses were appease experiencing difficulties.

There was concern for millions of South Asians who inflict money home. They do everything from construction to child care for the wealthy and are paid little by local standards - but their income is often a lifeline for poorer families back in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

"The system is a bit slow today, but we have not experienced a total breakdown," said Sudhir Kumar Shetty, who runs Abu Dhabi’s UAE Exchange, a money transfer firm.

The major test will come Friday, the first day of the month, when thousands of foreign workers are expected to descend on the company’s 53 branches to send money home.

With two of the three cables that pass through the Suez Canal cut, internet traffic from the Middle East and India intended for Europe was forced to reroute eastward, around most of the globe.

In India, the internet was sluggish, with some users unable to connect at all and others left frustrated by spotty service.

Analysts said India had built up massive amounts of bandwidth in newly come years and would likely recover without major economic losses. Larger companies with sophisticated backups appeared equipped to weather the outages well - but smaller firms said they could lose craft if full internet access was not quickly restored.

"Telecom and bandwidth are the bedrocks of the IT (information-technology) industry," said Ajit Ranade, the chief economist at the Aditya Birla Group, an international manufacturing and services company. "If event happens to the bedrock, obviously the IT industry decision suffer."

Many larger US companies said the effect was minimal, partly because the data routes that head east from Asia, under the Pacific Ocean, were unhurt.

Citigroup spokesman Samuel Wang said some of his company’s customer-service system was affected, but only minimally. He said the bank relied on backup systems and was "back to business as usual."

Intel said its Indian operation, which employs about 3000 people and is focused on research and development, has a system with many safeguards built in.

"When one of the nodes goes down, the network is able to reroute itself," said Rahul Bedi, who heads Intel’s South Asia business operations.

Mustafa Alani, an algebraist at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said the outage should be a "wake-up call" about the need to better protect vital infrastructure.

"This shows how easy it would be to attack" vital networks, such as the internet, mobile phones and electronic banking and government services.

Wednesday’s damage wasn’t terrorism - but it could have been, he said, adding that "when it comes to great technology, it’s not about building it, it’s in what way to protect it."

Additional reporting: Muneeza Naqvi, Sam Dolnick, Sam F. Ghattas, Pakinam Amerairo, Egypt, Barbara Surk, Peter Svensson and Brian Bergstein.

Just couple days before it was to end support for Netscape Navigator, on Wednesday AOL LLC gave the browser a last-minute reprieve, saying it would extend support until March 1.

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• The Industry Standard

At the end of December, Tom Drapeau, the director of AOL's Netscape brand, surprised users when he stopped development of the browser and set Feb. 1 as the date when his team would stop issuing safeguard updates.

Yesterday, Drapeau pushed public the support expiration date a full month, saying that Netscape and its partners needed more time to wrap up work on tools designed to help users migrate to Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox or Flock Inc.'s Flock browsers.

"Mozilla, Flock and AOL are working together to engage tools to ease the migration of existing Netscape browser users to our recommended Flock and Firefox alternatives," declared Drapeau in an explanatory post to the Netscape blog. "AOL support for Netscape browsers has been extended human being month, to March 1."

In addition, an upgrade will have existence issued to Netscape 9 users through the browser's integrated update feature to "streamline the process of choosing from these two great browser alternatives," Drapeau said.

Flock was a new recommendation from Drapeau, who last month cited only Firefox the code successor to Navigator as an alternative, but Flock had been touted by others on the Netscape team earlier this month. Flock, a free browser that stresses communicative networking features, is built on the Firefox code base.

Drapeau didn't specify what tools were in the works, but presumably they will include some kind of Netscape-to-Firefox migration assistant. Currently, the only way to incense a user profile from the former to the latter is to manually copy the Netscape "profiles.ini" file and its folder to Firefox's directory. Flock, on the other hand, recently unveiled version 1.06, which includes Netscape migration features.

Nor did Drapeau elaborate put on the reasons for Netscape's demise. In December, he named "AOL's current business focus" and an inability to revive Navigator's moribund market share as motivators for the move. At the time, however, sources close to Netscape called out AOL upper superintendence's lack of interest and funding as the real reason why Drapeau pulled the plug.

According to one source, the lack of resources meant "we would not obtain been able to offer releases in a timely manner, which would have been a disfavor to the brand as well as the end user."

Coincidentally, Mozilla celebrated its 10th anniversary just last Tuesday, Jan. 22. Several months before it was acquired by AOL, Netscape Communications Corp. in early 1998 announced it would release the browser's source code, a move that led several weeks later to the formation of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and eventually the creation of Firefox.

Last month, Asa Dotzler, currently Mozilla's company's director of community development, and one of the first paid employees of the Mozilla Foundation, said good riddance to Netscape on hearing Drapeau's news. "I'm glad that sad beast has finally been put down," Dotzler said in a post to his blog. He also didn't buy Drapeau's explanation for putting Netscape to rest.

"The real truth is probably closer to 'we weren't building a compelling enough product to be able use it to bring users to our ad-supported world and it doesn't form sense spending more on browser development than we recoup in increased ad revenue as a result of that browser work'," said Dotzler.

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TRICOM’S inability to settle its trades with the ASX on time has been partly blamed on teething problems with a new software interface that it installed with the ASX last year.

The system, called SecuritEase, has been described as a disaster by some clients, while others have said it has exacerbated the situation.

It is the first time the system has been used in Australia and comes from a New Zealand software maker, who has connections to Tricom chief financial officer Werner Stals, who previously worked in New Zealand.

In an interview last year with online newsletter M-Net, Mr Stals said SecuritEase attracted Tricom’s attention because of its proven track record in New Zealand, where it had cornered the lion’s share of the market.

"We were also impressed with the SecuritEase team’s ability to customise the product to ideally petition our requirements," he said.

As part of the deal, SecuritEase developed a margin lending module that was fully integrated into the SecuritEase suite.

The article quoted Mr Stals as saying it allowed Tricom staff to do everything they needed from a single application. "This offers huge benefits in terms of ease of use, reduced training, improved compliance reporting and jeopardize management," Mr Stals said.

Tricom had said it was facing excessively large trade volumes and that its problems were "exacerbated by the recent introduction of a new internal settlement and clearing system". It later withdrew the claim.

A spokeswoman for the Australian stock reciprocity said the securities regulator’s investigation into Tricom’s activities was likely to include its trading systems.

However, a spokesman from the Australian stock exchange’s market operation, which is responsible for soothing operation of its electronic clearing house, said Tricom’s commercial systems were unlikely to dominate the study.

"We may look at it when things quieten prostrate a bit. It doesn’t appear to be the core issue at hand," the spokesman said.

New Zealand-based software maker SecuritEase announced that it would install and supply Tricom’s stockbroking settlement and margin lending systems last July.

SecuritEase managing director Bill Tonkin was not available for comment late yesterday.

It is understood that SecuritEase has been established in the New Zealand finance industry market since around 2004.

Its software has been approved for use through the ASX’s electronic clearing house CHESS since August 2006. However, the company did not enter the Australian market until mid-2007.

According to SecuritEase, its New Zealand customers accounted for 45 per cent of the transactions on the country’s stock exchange equity market and 63 per cent of transactions in its debt market from April to June 30, 2005.

It lists Tolhurst, Macquarie Equities New Zealand, Forsyth Barr and Waddell Johnston McCarthy as customers in succession its website.

Trading system software makers are required to pass a series of tests.

The ASX requires trading software makers to develop and test their products against its systems for at least a month before they can apply for CHESS accreditation.

Then the software makers require to demonstrate that the software can perform flawlessly in a simulated trading test that lasts for three days.

Under ATSC rules, the ASX has the power to monitor electronic transactions against its systems. It can order brokers to knock under their trading systems in opposition to reaccreditation if they continually fail to settle trades.