Archive for the ‘business’ Category

Win a $1500 Nokia phone

Friday, December 19th, 2008

Via Pat Phelan once again. Leave a comment and consider donating a small amount of cash for the chosen charity.

Ones we watched in 2008

Friday, December 19th, 2008

So how did the Ones I suggested we watch do in 2008? Not bad at all.

Robin Blandford.
Himself and David are now building and running Decisions for Heroes. Trailblaizers!

Fergus Burns
Another trailblazer. Nooked getting bigger and better every month.

The Paddy’s Valley 20
Well…

Patrick Collison, John Collison and all at Auctomatic
Sold! Massive attention. Late Late with the Plank. Household names and names uttered by Mammies when scolding their kids for not being proactive enough.

Richard Hearne
Still the S.E.O. God in Ireland even if he didn’t enter the Geansai Gorm competition! He went through 2008 at breakneck speed, let’s hope he slows a bit in 2009!

Conor O’Neill
Well Argolon and LouderVoice have been doing immensely well and once again Conor has been giving so much to the Web 2.0 community in Ireland with his constant help and sharing. Let’s hope he’s appreciate for that.

Alexia Golez
Well she moved to a new domain and battled O2 towards the end of the year over the iPhone. Mizz Golez is on the brink of a hostile takeover of the Fluffy Links with her Red Links. I think think Alexia would be of immense benefit if she can be convinced to leave the good ship Redmond.

Martha Rotter
Loved and respected by people in the Irish tech scene for her tough job envagelising Microsoft. Still the shining star she was last year.

Marcus Mac Innes
Well Pix.ie is doing rather wll thanks very much and there’s been impressive work with some rather large brands this year establishing Pix.ie as the place to be when it comes to photos in Ireland. Also won a few awards to boot!

Pat Phelan
The hardest working man in Irish technology? Net Visionary for 2008 (which I wasn’t very surprised about)

Cian O’Flaherty
Helped organise the EU bloggers conference in Dublin this year and working like a trojan for a certain current affairs show.

Paul Fabretti
In the UK Paul is establishing himself as a much respected social media ninja dispuptive maven coach. Go Paul!

Paul Walsh
Wubud. The Digital Mission and so much more. I think that shows how well Paul has done.

The blog is the battery in your pleasure toy

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Nice quote taken from this here blog post. Head over to Nick’s new gaff and read and comment on his posts about adland from an Irish perspective. And another fine quote which will surely get him lots of Google hits for all the wrong reasons:

Bloglessness equals a dildo without batteries. You’ll get fucked in the long run, but it’ll be a lot more hard work and always, always the certain knowledge that really? you did it to yourself

Free stuff, cheap stuff

Saturday, December 13th, 2008

Pat is giving away a Nokia e63. Just leave a comment on his blog to be in with a chance of winning.

Paul gives great free marketing advice to charities.

Update: Niall is taking free advice requests.

Then via Boards.ie:
Get 30% off Timberland

Get a 23inch dell monitor for about €186 delivered (when you add it to your basket the price then drops to the €186)

Don’t forget to nominate MAXRoam and 12seconds

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

MAXRoam for the Crunchies.

12Seconds for the Crunchies!

And?

Monday, December 8th, 2008

There’s no worse time to leave that safe pensionable job and there’s no better time to start that business with your limited resources.

* But starting a business now is tougher than ever. And?

* I know nothing about web apps or code. And?

* I’m not sure I can get a grant for this. And?

* But have you seen the trouble blogs can generate. And?

* Remember the bubble! And?

I stuck up a video about procrastination on the site this weekend and it’s a very Irish thing that we target reasons NOT to start a business and take a risk unlike the American model where it’s about the positives and the attitude is obstacles can be taken care of. Just like the video, there will always always be reasons (many valid) not to start a business in this country. Even a failed or failing business is good for Ireland as the money spent stays local, knowledge is shared, scars are earned.

Confusion and Happiness Street Graffitti Background
Photo owned by Halima Ahkdar (cc)

Here’s a reason to try out that idea, to work for yourself, to develop that web app:

You can always go back to living in medicority, taking shit from a boss who is flailing about in a bumbling along industry. You’ll have learned more practical stuff in one week working for yourself or in a small startup than you’ll ever learn in a lifetime in that pensionable job. Would you take a risk for love? Would you do it for business?

And you don’t have to give up that day-job just yet anyway. 9 to 5 jobs are just that. Switch off and back on at 5.01 and work til midnight on that new business.

And don’t start wasting time on fucking lists.

Getting my stuff done

Saturday, December 6th, 2008

Edit: Now with extra D!

Sue Pool: eircom, o2, Vodafone or Meteor: Who’ll sue Eamon Ryan first?

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Bear with me here…

Via the National Dialup Scheme Three Ireland now are getting Government money to expand their mobile broadband market into areas other broadband providers are not going. Great. The EU says that’s cool.

But Three’s network is all data with voice going over it. Where they have service they have all service. Broadband and voice. Where three doesn’t offer a service, they use Vodafone. They pay them for this. If the Government pay Three to go into an area they were not before then they can offer voice too. Fabuloso! They can dump Vodafone and save a pile. But I bet those areas have a voice service from Vodafone, o2 and Meteor already don’t they? Now the taxpayer is giving an unfair advantage to Three in the mobile area.

Lincoln
Photo owned by markhillary (cc)

Wouldn’t you sue if you were these boys? And then there’s eircom with some good exchanges that could have been enabled. They have good lawyers too.

So who’ll sue first?

Giving Thanks – Via LinkedIn

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

It being the season of goodwill and all of that, it’s worth noting that this can be done in many many ways. Right now with the recession biting and many good people being let go or made go part-time, it’s worth making a little effort in pointing out to others the good work they’ve done with/for you. Other people don’t even know it but they’ll be let go soon too. It’s unfortunately inevitable. One way for me to give thanks to people is LinkedIn, where over the next few days I’ll try and recommend as many people that I worked with as I can.

Map at Nemuro Station
Photo owned by shirokazan (cc)

It doesn’t take much effort at all to make a recommendation but might be of immense benefit to the person you’re recommending. Don’t do it for any other reason than to recommend the other person. Don’t expect reciprocity. Also don’t ask for recommendations from people you haven’t worked with. That’s messy.

On that topic, please note I’ll be doing that LinkedIn thingymajig with it@cork next week and I’ll put the notes for it online after it. 50 people have so far registered for it. I would have thought events like this would have been snapped by a recruitment company to sponsor… 😉

And the winner of the SEO competition is…

Monday, December 1st, 2008

The winner of that competition is, if we go to Google.ie:

Winner of Geansai Gorm competition

Congratulations to Paul Savage for his Geansai Gorm site MyBlueJumper.com

Honourable mentions: Cormac Moylan for going pure Irish and including the fada and seeing where it brought him. Some nice research into how Google really doesn’t pay attention to the Irish language too.

Keith Shirley for running Google Search Ads just for this competition. A fantastic way of getting the attention of the people interested in this competition. Well done Keith.

Shame we saw some sites banned by Google for spamming. Hilarious that a fake press release made news in Limerick.

Many of those involved found it a learning experience though some I’m sure were bored to death by it too being the experts that they are. For the Web Awards 09 there’ll be some kind of practical part that will either be about pure SEO or recognise it. (Best Practice this year had an SEO element to it.)