By Business & Finance 
Business & Finance brings you the day’s Irish business news in brief.
Irish get Oscar nod as nominations are announced
It has been another successful year for Irish talent as the 89th Academy Award nominations were released today.
Irish actress Ruth Negga is nominated for Best Actress for her performance as Mildred Loving in Jeff Nichols’ Loving.
IFB-funded film, The Lobster, is nominated for Best Original Screenplay.
Irish costume designer Consolata Boyle received a nomination in the Best Costume category for her work in Florence Foster Jenkins.
CallidusCloud’s learning platform wins G2 Crowd award
CallidusCloud Litmos learning management system has won top spot in G2 Crowd’s ‘Best Software for HR Teams’ for both enterprise and mid-market HR teams.
G2 Crowd – a world-leading leading business software review platform – assists its software buyers in making better purchasing decisions.
Litmos by CallidusCloud is a learning management system designed to deliver and track on-demand training for an unlimited number of users.
Read the full article here.
Property jobs market on the rise
Chartered valuation surveyors, residential block managers, and quantity surveyors are the top three skills shortages in the Irish property sector that are currently paying a premium, according to new research by Recruitment Plus.
The December 2016 salary survey established pay and conditions for all roles within the property sector, identifying that salary levels rose across the board in 2016, in some cases by up to 20%.
The skills shortage also saw bonus rates for 2016 of between 10% and 30%, according to the Irish recruitment agency which has offices in Dublin, Dundalk and Limerick and a dedicated property division covering residential and commercial sectors.
Demand is bringing people home from abroad, particularly the UK and the States, according to the research.
In the second half of 2016, Recruitment Plus saw a 35% increase in the number of Irish property specialists abroad enquiring about current opportunities in the Irish property market.
European Financial Forum gets underway
Leading global financial institutions, policy makers, entrepreneurs and innovators participated today in the European Financial Forum in Dublin Castle.
The Forum, organised by IDA Ireland in association with the FT and IFS Ireland, is a European platform for top decision-makers and influencers in the public, private and regulatory fields of financial services to explore the disruptive forces that are shaping the financial sector into the future and discuss where opportunities lie.
“The European Financial Forum is an opportunity for senior industry decision-makers, policy-makers and academics to discuss how they see the European and Global Financial Services industry evolving.”
Major themes to be explored this year included the financial services landscape, Asia-Europe and disruptive innovation. The forum also focused on the latest macroeconomic and regulatory scenarios, and the impact of Brexit and implications for banking and financial services.
€4m extra funding for Local Enterprise Offices announced
Minister for Small Business and Employment, Pat Breen TD, today announced an additional €4m in funding for the Local Enterprise Offices to stimulate new startups and jobs across the country and to help micro businesses to cope with challenges in the year ahead.
Minister Breen said: “Companies are facing global economic challenges and the extra funding will be mainly used to work with clients to cope with those challenges, to investigate new markets and new opportunities and to boost the pipeline of new startups around Ireland.
“The promotion of a ‘start-your-own-business’ culture is a key element of the Government’s job creation policy to reduce unemployment across the regions. The LEOs are leading that drive in every county and I am confident that the additional resources being made available to the LEOs will deliver results.”
Irish software company’s debug tool approved by European Space Agency
OCE Technology today announced that its debug tool, DMON, has been approved by the European Space Agency to support its latest navigation processor, the AGGA-4.
The AGGA-4 chip, installed on satellites and spacecraft, measures signal distortions in the upper atmosphere which are used for weather prediction modelling.
The chip can also be used to measure maritime conditions using reflections from ocean surfaces. The chip uses signals from European, US, Russian or Chinese global positioning systems to find its precise location in space.
OCE Technology, headquartered at NovaUCD, the Centre for New Ventures and Entrepreneurs at University College Dublin, develops software for technical applications and supplies radiation-hardened chip-level components targeted primarily at the space and high-reliability sectors.
