Archive for the ‘business’ Category

Art of Being Subtle Part II

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

Brendan has a great post about the way some people online treat newcomers to online communities:

Over the past while I have witnessed several individuals and companies being dressed down by leading members of Ireland’s online community. These are individuals and companies that have broken the rules of the community.

He goes on:

The misdemeanour could range from the way they set up their blog, taking advertising on their personal website, to sending unsolicited emails to large numbers of people. Individuals are named and shamed, and often rightly so.

He points out that businesses are probably afraid to come online and interact when they see that kind of aggression. Very wild west! Where are the Pinkertons? 🙂

I’ve given out when people set their blog up on blogspot, which I call catpissspot. I’ve given out when people dress lies up as advertising and I’m constantly giving out about businesses spamming people. It’s frequently pointed out to me that I’m very ratty on this blog. Certainly when it comes to spamming, I wouldn’t shed a single tear when a business infringes on my privacy and blames it on a simple mistake and then gets hammered. If we had a competent Data Privacy Commissioner I think this would happen less. It’s like the excuse those headcases give when they microwave their dogs. They didn’t know. They were never informed. That was never written down. No get out of jail card there from me. Anyway, back to the point.

How subtle!
Photo owned by faeryboots (cc)

I’ve previously mentioned the art of being subtle and of observing and I left a comment advocating the same on Brendan’s blog post. The trouble is that it seems companies now hire consultants to quickly tell them what the rules and nuances of this online game are and the companies jump straight in with their rulebook learned off by heart. They still need to observe. What’s with the rush?

What do you think? Should we attempt to turn the other cheek and not get so enraged? Leave a comment over there. Brendan is the chair of the IIA Social Media Working Group and I’m sure would enjoy as much constructive feedback and different viewpoints as possible.

Presentation Zen – Authors@Google: Garr Reynolds

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

A must watch for anyone that sucks at Powerpoint or Keynote but has to use it (probably everyone):

Taste Marketing with Adnan Aziz at talks@Google

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

I find this a highly interesting area:

For an anti-smoking campaign they had ashtray flavoured taste strips

The first TechLudd Cork was great

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

Techludd Cork

Image nicked from Robin, taken by Donncha.

Go TechLudd in the People’s Republic. I hope we see many more. Disappointing that there wasn’t a large turnout but it is holiday season. Well done to Anton for organising this. And thanks. It was great to get to see people from Dublin, Limerick, Cork and elsewhere. Also nice to see people I hadn’t seen in hours, days, weeks and years!

In the room were three, count em! THREE stars of Techcrunch.com. Can you guess who they were? Robin is destined to be a fourth for definite. SnapScribe should be able to get there too. Great idea and great tech.

We need more events like TechLudd with the demos, drinks and networking. Got some good feedback from people who hadn’t been to tech events in Cork before. They’ll be back and will be bringing others.

Bernie gives his take.
Donncha gives his and has amazing photos of the 2009 home of the Blog Awards. Jaysus it looks great.
Robin talks about his thoughts here.

Spammery and fakery from BrandEvents.ie (Taste of Dublin and Taste of Cork company )

Friday, August 29th, 2008

A few people told me that they got a spam email from Scott in BrandEvents.ie today. And not for the first time. What’s worse is these gobshites put all the addresses in the CC field so everyone can see who got the email. The A-C email contains 1300 emails alone it seems.

So people have made a complaint to the Data Protection Commissioner who’ll no doubt give Brand Events a hug or something. Not like they will do anything more than give them a warning.

Ciaran blogged about it here. He has already asked to be removed from the list and his request appears to have been ignored. They also told him that no Scott works there. So they’re using a fake persona to send emails? That seems dodgy to me. I wonder can they be done under the new EU Consumer Protection laws for fakery? Might be work informing the National Consumer Agency.

RTE’s Recipe For Success wants foodies to contribute

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

RTE Cork are currently in pre-production for a new food and business programme called Recipe for Success where they invite amateur cooks to submit their original recipe ideas. The best ideas will then be selected and participants will be invited to present their recipes to a well-respected Irish food businessman who will over several weeks select a winner. The winner will then have their product sold in the Supervalu.

The closing date for applications is 26th September 2008

Receipe for Success

For further information please email the show at recipeforsuccess@rte.ie

Or write to them at:
Recipe For Success?,
RTÉ,
Father Mathew Street,
Cork.

Want to start a business in the South East?

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Via Eugene (and Keith covers it too)

South East Enterprise Platform Programme

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: The problem to telecoms solutions in Ireland

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

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.

Apricot Miniature Poodle
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.”

Gastronom.ie – Sinéad writing for us / sponsors sought

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

As you may or may not know, I run Irish Food and Drink aggregator Gastronom.ie. There are about 45 Irish Foodie blogs that it aggregates and it gets about 110 visitors a day and has a few dozen people subscribed to the feed. If you want to get emails updates of the posts then there’s a subscription box towards the bottom right of the front page.

Aggregator, what’s one of them? Yeah, it’s a single place online where you can get the latest content from a load of other sites. Gastro is structured so that it only takes summaries of the blog posts and so the original owner gets all the Google rankings for their content.

Local fare
Photo owned by Phillie Casablanca (cc)

The site is going to be rejigged in the next few weeks and we’ll ramp up the homemade content. We’ve already started though and the wonderful Sinéad from Inkheart has come on board to write summaries of what Foodie content was covered in the Sunday papers. We decided to call it Post the Roast. Go and have a read. She’s a great writer isn’t she? You’ll see a new Post Roast on a Monday morning. With enough sponsors we’ll have new content daily.

Speaking of which, if you want to sponsor sections of the site, let me know. There’ll be regular sections a sponsor can have their name on. Our main sponsorship route right now is the sponsored blog post. See, we dislike pure ads. We think they’re bad for the advertiser and bad for the reader. A sponsored blog post means the advertiser/sponsor has to do a bit of work and create something useful such as a competition or a blog post with recipes or a sample chapter from a book or something interesting for the readers of the website. Our readers get value and our sponsors engage more with the readers as a result. Well, that’s the idea anyway… Email me at the usual (see contact page) if you want to be a sponsor. It might work well for companies that work in the Food business.

Cork and Twitter = Bread and Jam

Monday, August 25th, 2008

TweetRush.com

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)