Author Archive

The Damien Lifestream

Monday, July 16th, 2007

Simon made me finally understand Tumblr. (What a great name for Simon’s page)

Another day, another fad. Thanks to Tumblr, I now have a single URL where you can read blog posts from Mulley.net, Awards.ie, Twitter, IWillNotHold.com, my delicious feed and my Facebook status feed. It can also take in new content from YouTube and Flickr.

Check out damienmulley.tumblr.com

eircom – Breaking up is hard to do

Monday, July 16th, 2007

A thread on boards.ie covers the to and fro about the eircom strike. Seems eircom wants the staff to sign new terms and conditions of employment which will mean staff cannot object to any eircom business units being sold off. eircom’s owners are Babcock and Brown who traditionally are an infrastructure investment company. They don’t like retail arms. No siree.

The new programme for Government talks about encouraging eircom to be split into a wholesale and a retail arm. “encourage”. Heh.

Also consider that eircom will be launching “eircom mobile” soon which will work almost like an MVNO. Perhaps they’ll turn it into a full MVNO (virtual mobile network piggybacking off Meteor or maybe Voda?) and then sell off Meteor too, once they have the 3G network up and going. One thing is for sure, the debts they have for eircom since the purchase are considerable and I’m sure they’d like to get rid of some of them.

Firefox takes 38.6% marketshare in Ireland

Monday, July 16th, 2007

Via Mozilla Links A survey from Xiti Monitor has shown that Firefox usage in Ireland is growing at an impressive rate and that Ireland is one of the top users of Firefox in the EU behind the top users of Slovenia, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Croatia. At 38.6% usage, it is a comfortable 10 points above the 28% European average. The actual growth rate of 55% is the highest this quarter for all of Europe too.

Pity there’s not better stats for Nintendo.

So why are so many Irish people moving over to Firefox?

What are your site stats for Firefox?

Fluffy Links – Monday July 16th 2007

Monday, July 16th, 2007

Red Mum’s guide to bus traveling etiquette.

Glad the One Laptop Per Child crowd and Intel followed my advice and put away their differences. I’m sure it was my influence really that did it.

So yeah, Japan is set to get 300Mbps over 3g, but then check out this old lady in Sweden who is getting 40 Gbps.

Una. Rocks. Nail. Head. Oxegen. Society. Life.

any problems at Oxegen are not Oxegen problems, they are social problems. On Saturday night, we got the bus back into town from the festival and arrived on O’Connell bridge at around 3am. And as Neil remarked, the only difference from the behaviour of the people at Oxegen and the people on O’Connell bridge was the mud.

Kinda linked. This guy chose heritage and culture over a few billion dollars.

Murphy’s did the ice cream for the McManus wedding. Love the blog post title.

I got this book too. I’ll leave Adrian do the review.

The moon is easy to lift. Heavy hearts weigh more.

To be in heaven or hell. All the same people, all the same jobs, all different roles.

Seriously! Flip flops are bad enough, now with L.E.D.s?

I think this is one of my favourite music videos ever ever ever:

A different kind of hart. Muir dar.

Auctomatic gets more attention, Roam4Free has grown up a LOT

Sunday, July 15th, 2007

Congrats to the Auctomatic crew for the Mashable and Venturebeat coverage.

Chatted to Pat Phelan last night and he showed me and others the next version of Roam4Free. I had some doubts about version 1 of Roam4Free and version 2 removes all doubts and then some. This could be a very big thing in my view. I can’t wait until they officially launch this and then there are all the other projects Pat has up his sleeve, which I can’t talk about but again, they’ve impressed me.

Video Producer wanted for short YouTube video

Sunday, July 15th, 2007

As I posted on Twitter and Facebook, looking for someone that wants to do a video for me that I’ll be putting on YouTube. Would suit a multimedia student or enthusiast as I’ll have SFA money to give to you for it, but if done right, it should get you some recognition, so consider it padding for your portfolio.

It’d be a fictional and slightly satirical corporate sales video. I’d like to stress that I am not looking for suggestions or ideas. I know exactly what I want. It would be along the same ideas as this video, in that there’ll be a voiceover and some graphics, no need for actors as such:

Email me if you are interested.

For the trainspotters – Videos from London Tube Drivers

Saturday, July 14th, 2007

Via Metafilter and the Beeb:

Picadilly line:

Moor Park to Croxley:

Loads more on YouTube.

Handy out – For all those into ego surfing and SEO too!

Friday, July 13th, 2007

Dave Davis’ RedFly Marketing is after releasing the egotastic Google Global Firefox Extention which allows you to do a search on Google and then switch to the results lists from all the country specific Googles that exist. For example I am 4th on Google.com for “damien”, currently 1st on Google.ie for “damien” and 5th on Google.co.uk for “damien”. It’s not just been made for us ego nuts though, it’ll be a nice tool for those that optimise their websites in search engines and they can see how they are performing on a country by country basis.

Richard likes it too.

So which Google likes you the most and likes you the least?

Update: Nice one Dave, this made Techmeme:
Google Firefox Plugin

The great MScape

Friday, July 13th, 2007

I blogged previously about the HP Event in Lisbon and briefly mentioned the MScape technology that HP are working on. I’m going to give it a little more coverage as I think it is worth looking at and could be used for a lot of things in Ireland.

Mscape is HP’s location based software which adds a layer to the landscape around you via your mobile device. Right now you need a Windows Mobile device with a GPS signal for it to work. In Lisbon, two applications they built for us were a giant version of whack a mole and a tourist guide to the park we were going around in. With the tour guide, as you walked into an area an mp3 would load and it would display pictures, but over time this could trigger any kind of software application I would guess. Loads more details about their Lisbon escapades on their blog.

There’s a good deal of hippy thinking with this from HP with a community building up around their forums, they have a blog and the software and dev kit is free to download and use. There’s also a wiki.

The attitude I got from the really friendly HP Labs staff was “here’s a new type of platform we put together and please be our guest to play and fiddle and try new things with it”. Now i’m not comparing it to the web, but it does seem to have that attitude where it is maybe not up to them to create the killer app, but us and they are happy for us to use their layer. Some people have already made interactive art installations with the software, the usual tour guides will be in abundance and I can see special guides for those with learning difficulties, helping them do their daily tasks and it might finally get the kids off the couches and way from the XBoxes while still allowing them to play digital games. I wrote about this in the Tribune last week. Imagine sending the kids down the park to play with the dinosaurs.

I think future versions of MScape will hopefully seem them embrace more operating systems and other location aware technologies and not just GPS. RFID, Bluetooth, GSM etc could also be used for interacting with landscapes too. I’d love to do a few walking tours of say Fota Gardens and maybe old World War 1 battlefields in Flanders.

Here’s what other people have to say about MScape:

ShinyShiny review:

Collison brothers feature in the Times today

Friday, July 13th, 2007

Patrick and John Collison who I mentioned previously here, are featured in the Irish Times this morning. Link. (sub required) Patrick talks about how they started Auctomatic and what they are up to with it. Nice to see something about young tech entrepreneurs in the papers. Might inspire others as well.

Some quotes:

They rented an office in Limerick for three months but had no luck in securing funding in Ireland despite applying to Enterprise Ireland and other sources of seed funding.

“From my limited experience, organisations in Ireland are much more risk-averse and very credentials-oriented,” says Patrick.

The pair applied for funding to Y Combinator, a specialist seed fund established by Paul Graham.

Paul Buchheit, the architect of Google’s Gmail application and the man who suggested the company’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto, has invested, while Evan Williams, creator of Google’s blogger platform, sits on the board.

Well done on the coverage lads! I say we visit the lads when we’re over for Paddy’s Valley, distract them and steal their Blackberrys and get their contacts lists. 🙂