Damien Mulley

One of the many bands at Electric Picnic:

I recently went to Lisbon for a week to attend the HP Labs University event. It was an all-expenses paid trip, courtesy of HP. This year was the 10th anniversary and they really looked after the 350 journalists and analysts they brought along. There were 10 talks to choose from over the week and we were told to choose 5. Some were very academic and a bit long. The talks I put myself down to attend were:

• Original HP ink cartridges vs. alternatives.
• Connections: The future of personal computing.
• The reviewers guide to printers.
• Future.
• Inside the HP camera.

I skipped the last one on the last day after hearing a lot of feedback from journalists saying it was mind-numblingly boring and far far too academic. Instead I went to the bar, surfed the net and wrote up my notes on the event. It was pointed out to be afterwards that I skipped the talk. I told them why. 🙂

Highlights:

• Actually liking a 3 hour talk on ink and cartridges. I guess it helped with the enthusiastic HP staff and the funny Germans who did some testing on reseller cartridges and released a survey on it. I’d like to do my own survey here to see how refiled cartridges do. From the tests done by the indepdendent German company, the pageload is way way less and the fade speed is rapid.
• The night out at the Casino, where we never got to gamble but did watch a show that was a bit like Cirque de Soliel.
• Meeting Haydn.
• Meeting Rusty and Simon and other UK journalists.
• Talking tech shite with Kerry Gaffney from Porter Novelli til about 5am on the last night. Kerry could easily give a technology journalist a run for their money with the breadth and depth of her tech knowledge. Very professional and good fun.
• Finding myself having immense fun at a big massive samba thingy in an ampitheatre. I made noise by shaking something. I rocked.
• The “Future” talk where HP demonstrated the MScape technology, Pluribus and other stuff that is still NDA’d. I’ll blog about these in other blog posts in the next while.

Flickr set from event.

Were I HP, next time I’d cut the talks down a bit more and do a little more practical stuff and less on the mathematics behind some stuff. I’d also include some “unconference” type talks where it basically is a group discussion. They have 350 technology journos captive, it would be good to get their collective intelligence to do more than write up the event. See what their thoughts on future trends are, for example. All in all it was worth going to and hopefully we’ll see more Irish journalists there next time.

The Blakeotron has some nice pics of the Letterkenny skate park.

Annie has moved too.

Maybe we should go back to paper, if all our data is stored on weird tapes and devices?

With AllofMP3 gone, here are some alternatives.

Bill Gates saves the gays, again.

Via Una is the Mentos Intern. Oddly addictive.

Via Loic Le Meur, Jyri Engeström from Jaiku at MoMo Amsterdam. I saw this young guy around Reboot minding his kid, little did I realise he was one of the Jaiku founders:Absolutely terrifying BASE jumping video:

Conor has started a discussion about running an initiative to get college grads to start their own startups with financial help and help from experienced people:

• Every summer we run a Hothouse in one/more of the colleges
• It is open to those who graduate that summer or the following summer
• 10 weeks long
• Build something you can demo
• You’ll have subsistence money to live/eat
• A limited company will be formed for you and all legals/IP taken care of
• You’ll get introductions to everyone you need to help you get the thing built
• You present your product at the end

This model works well in other countries.

Alan O’Rourke has also added his comments to this:

My proposal is to take a group of students from varying disciplines and combine them into a well rounded business group, give them space and a basic support wage and let then run at a project for the 3 summer months.

Its an idea heavily inspired by Joel of FogCreak software and their development of CoPilot.

A group of 3 students, consisting of a developer, a designer, a marketing person.

For me, there definitely needs to be a mix of business and techies for these startups. Not insulting tech people but you also need to be a shark to survive and I think that’s the issue with many startups. You need someone that dreams of swimming in a sea of money and not about efficient code. You need someone that will go out and be all about taking money off people whether you have a great product or a fantastic one.

Dennis Deery too has some comments too.

Let’s keep this going.

Happy July 4th and stuff. Flaming Lips in Cork last night was second best show I was ever at. Fan fricking tastic.

Best t-shirt ever?

Check out this World Clock. Time, number of deaths, births, temp of earth and ways people are dying. Fascinating.

Unlock your iPhone here. Hack it here.

Dave Winer’s Twittergram phone-in service seems very like MySay now.

LG are now doing a YouTube phone. Hmm.

Win a free festival t-shirt. Go on. Do. Like.

Check out the Curry 2.0 vids.

Flaming Lips dvd thingy:

With rumours that the Blogorrah reunion tour is still on hold til Derek gets his polkadot M&Ms and a second wheelbarrow of cash, Adrian Weckler has decided to feed the rabid public some PR pics and starts off with the grand ole dame of lovely girls: Lorraine Keane. Adrian, you don’t know how many people are glad of that fix, just make sure you don’t have them ODing with too many of them.

Update: I forgot to link to Adrian to start with. Ooops. Apologies.

For those that use Feedburner, now the pro tools it offers are free, since Google now owns it. Should be able to get even more interesting stats for my feed now.

Mr. Uber event organiser himself has suggested a blogger dinner in Cork, sooner rather than later. I’m there. But please please please, not the same old fucking faces again. Ok, yes the same old faces but only if they bring a new face too. I really do fear that BarCamp and other events are getting far too cliquey. We need to expand the brainwashing programme.

Don’t bring a bottle, bring a new person. Start of August maybe?

This is the article I wanted to write about Cork and Cork people for years. Kathy Foley saved me the bother. Great great article. I don’t read the Sunday Times anymore because it is no longer online. I won’t buy half a tree just to read Kathy and a few more people.

New blogs on block are back.

Fraudband. What a great term.

Wow. Nice bit of dosh there for the IIA. Though not massive.

Google takes a few shots at Michael Moore’s new film in order to sell more ads. They suggest running ad campaigns to counter any searches for the movie on Google.

EI lends their support to Paddy’s Valley.

Another fantastic TED talk on poverty and the third world.

I still miss Ze Frank. Here’s an old post from 43 Folders about how Ze stays creative.

Majesty Snowbird. Again.

CC Licenced Spanish short film on YouTube has 10M views and encourages remixes of it:

Via Andrew:

My sister rescued this little fella when she saw a group of young boys, around 11 years old, throw him off the blackstone bridge in Kileens. The bridge had a drop of about 10 – 15 foot with water only ankle deep below. The kids walked off leaving him down there, he was okay but for a small cut on his paw, he must have landed well, luckily. He was unable to get back up from under the bridge as it was too steep. Lisa was able to get help from a teenager nearby to climb down and get the dog up.

He had no collar on his neck. My sister asked the teenager if they knew who might own him, but he had no idea. He looks like he’s been well kept up til now. Really nice dog. It’s likely the young kids led him away from his home.

He’s a Labrador, About a year old. Very friendly, luckily totally oblivious to what the kids had meant to do to him.

If anyone around Cork might know his owner, like to adopt him or know of a good home, email me.

amonaghan AT gmail.com