Wed Developer briefs

Sofcom IPO flops

Web design specialists Software Communications (Sofcom) has had a shaky introduction to the Australian Stock Exchange, floating at five cents below its Initial Public Offering (IPO) price.

The oversubscribed IPO was expected to trade at 35 cents a share, but began trading at 30 cents a share, at one stage dropping to 27 cents per share.

Sofcom, established at Monash University and chaired by former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, offers Web design, software development and technical consulting services, and was one of the first Internet-based companies in Australia.

After initially expecting to sell 31.6 million shares to raise 11 million, it gained an additional $5 million in over-subscriptions, leaving over $16 million cash. During the public listing, Sofcom also gained significant funding by Shell, which now owns almost 20 per cent of the company.

Object World in town

Adios athletes, here come the geeks! Some of the world's most advanced minds are flying in to Sydney on October 23 for the Object World Developers forum at the Sydney Convention Centre.

This year, the theme for the forum is ‘Objects for Enterprise', an educational series of keynotes and tutorials for object orientated and Java developers. Subjects range from CORBA programming with C++, to Java programming and XML.

Keynote speakers include: Steve Vinoski, chief architect for IONA Technologies; Ken Arnold, senior staff engineer for Sun Microsystems; and Dr Robert Sutor, program director for XML Technology at IBM.

Cookie clean up

McAfee has released a product designed to delete cookies and other unwanted data off Windows-based PCs. The Network Associates subsidiary claims that the program, named QuickClean, deletes all cookies, except those bookmarked by the user, as well as Internet cache, downloaded and temporary files, and ActiveX plug-ins.

The product allows users to maintain anonymity on the Web and control the use of hard disk space on PCs that are regularly used for Web browsing. As well as cleaning up Internet clutter, the program also deletes e-mails according to user criteria. It offers a permanent file removal option, to avoid security holes caused by sensitive files that remain on the system even after deletion. A 30-day trial of QuickClean is currently being offered via Internet download.

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