Damien Mulley

Via Eugene (and Keith covers it too)

SEEPP – the South East Enterprise Platform Programme that’s run in the WIT Centre for Entrepreneurship starts again in September.

They have a few places left for this programme that starts in September so if you’re thinking should you/shouldn’t you/maybe I might etc. why not give Eugene Crehan a call or email and have a confidential chat. He’s on 051 302953 or email ecrehan < at > wit.ie, hurry though. You just have enough time.

ComReg are the telecoms regulator in Ireland. Their job is to make competition in telecoms healthy which should result in better offers and great pricings.

Recently they had another consultation and decided that eircom’s wholesale price for a wholesale broadband product (we’ll call it that for now) needed to come down in price. This was an extensive consultation and was really drawn out. So they decided on a new price. All the competition of eircom said “Yay”. But eircom didn’t like it and went to Court about it, which they are well entitled to do.

Even before they went to Court, ComReg’s own staffers were fairly open in thinking eircom would win in Court. But the Courts are on holiday now so we’ll all have to wait. Except we don’t.

ComReg have now decided their very extensive and detailed consultation and deeply considered consultation was in fact bollox. See, here’s the trick to ComReg, bring em to Court and you own them. They always give up. They always settle on the steps. Settling normally means negotiating but ComReg again and again just throw it all away. Here they decided to reverse another of their decisions and it cost 5 Million in legal fees as they had to pay their costs and the costs of o2, Vodafone and Meteor.

Which is what they did yesterday.

Citing the cost of contesting the appeal, the resources it would have to devote to it and the probability a judgment would not be delivered “until well into 2009”, ComReg said yesterday it had “decided to set aside its decision”.

The new price directed by the regulator was an interim one and would have been in place for a year. “A more detailed expert analysis has been furnished to ComReg since the announcement of the interim price which will enable a process whereby ComReg can propose a specific and substantive price to the market in place of the benchmark price previously proposed,” ComReg said in a statement.

More here. Magnet the only telco to give out about it.

I keep calling ComReg the telecoms poodle. Someone needs to put this mange riddled creature down after years of failures.

Photo owned by charkesw (cc)

Heads should roll for either them being totally incorrect on the initial consultation or being devoid of testicular fortitude to fight this out in Court.

Update: I see once again that the Consumers’ Association (who are on the payroll of ComReg by the way) have blamed eircom for this. More misguided bullshit from them:

Dermot Jewell, chief executive of the Consumers’ Association of Ireland, has called on the European Commission to intervene if necessary.

“Comreg is being frustrated by one provider just because it’s in a position to do so,” he said. “There are other players out there ready to roll up their sleeves and get competitive and this is just another stumbling block for them.”

TweetRush.com is finally live and has been TechCrunched! Delighted to see the hard work of 5 lads pay off. They kept their heads down and worked and refined it until they were ready to launch it. So we have Pat Phelan and Twitterfone (Cork!) and now TweetRush.com (Cork). Yeah. So maybe we’ll see a Jaiku app from Dublin or Tipperary then?

TweetRush is a very slick Twitter analysis website that’s powered by the Rush Hour analytics engine. It shows what appears to be the hype free stats for Twitter and not the not-denied numbers that have bandied about the place before. Despite the numbers it shows a powerful online community that generates a huge amount of concise content.

I got a sneak peak of Rush Hour. Damn. It’s going to be a powerful and interesting beast.

Well done to TweetRush. (Disclaimer: I helped a little with PR)

Or words to that effect. My god what an ignorant bunch of people in that office.

As you may be aware the Data Protection Commissioner’s Office investigated Bank of Ireland’s losing of four laptops. BOI won’t publish the report. I tried to do an FOI to get details of this report but was told rather smugly by their media person “You can’t find details of our FOI Officer because we don’t have one. We don’t come under FOI.” It was suggested I send in a request anyway and they’d consider it. So I did and it’s below. Their answer came back two hours later, which is also below. They really considered it for a while didn’t they?

Thanks for the call. What I was looking for and which I wrongly assumed I could get under FOI was the report sent to Bank of Ireland about their laptop thefts. RTE last week reported that the Data Protection Commissioner’s Office delivered a report to Bank of Ireland which included recommendations to prevent future data loss. Bank of Ireland said they would not release that report. I was looking for said report but obviously with the commercially sensitive information removed. I doubt that all the report is giving away BOI’s IP.

I also wanted to get details of the costs involved in putting that report together. Numbers of staff and manhours involved.

And the reply:

As you are aware, no regulations are currently in force specifying this office as a body to which the Freedom of Information Acts apply. As a matter of good practice and with due regard to the privacy of the parties involved, we endeavour to keep both data subjects and data controllers informed of the progress of investigations. This does not apply to your request. Having reviewed your request, I won’t release any of this information to you.

I made it very clear that I wanted non commercially sensitive information. Suddenly everything is commercially sensitive?

Why is the Data Protection Commissioner using taxmoney to write reports for non-Government organisations and then refusing to disclose a single sentence in the report? Were they under FOI they’d have to disclose everything in it that is not commercially sensitive and even then it can be argued with appeals.

What’s worse is the DPC refuses to disclose the work and costs involved in creating this report. I think the public have a right to know at least this. How is this information breaching privacy? It’d be nice to see how much money was spent on behalf of Bank of Ireland’s screwup. Bank of Ireland’s profit before tax was €1.93 billion for the year ended 31 March 2008, by the way.

I’m meeting some EU folks in a few weeks where they’ll be asking about ComReg and the DPC. Once again I’ll be happy to point out what a useless shower they both are.

Via Niall:

The M50 Enterprise Programme at Synergy Centre, ITT Dublin, Tallaght, is a one year full-time programme designed to help entrepreneurs with a high technology or knowledge-based business concept to get their company off the ground and growing as quickly as possible. The next programme will commence the first week of November 2008. For more information on the programme visit the programme website – www.m50-enterprise.ie – or call Nicola on 01-4042221. Deadline for applications is 26th September 2008.