Archive for the ‘business’ Category

Replace McWilliams with this guy -A Random Walk

Monday, October 1st, 2007

Someone that has a clue, doesn’t need to make up stupid words and says it how it is. Which newspaper will pick this guy up and have him give another view on Irish finance?

Cities of Knowledge Conference – Dublin November 20th

Sunday, September 30th, 2007

Got the below and I have to say it looks really interesting. Might head along.

Cities of Knowledge

Cities of Knowledge

20 November 2007
An International eGovernment/Public Sector Knowledge Management event, co-organised by Dublin City Council and DIT. The event is part of ICiNG (Innovative Cities for the Next Generation) which is a project funded through the European 6th Framework Research programme. It aims to develop effective e-communities and e-access to city administration. The project is based in Dublin, Barcelona, and Helsinki. Each city is providing ‘City Laboratory’ test-bed sites in strategic development/city regeneration locations where users will trial and evaluate technologies and services.

Speakers include

* Jon Udell, Technology Evangelist, Microsoft
* Martin Curley, Head of Innovation, Intel
* Mark Wardle, Head of Innovation Programmes, BT
* Graham Colclough, Vice President, Capgemini
* Prof John Radcliff, DIT Futures Academy

Book here:

10% discount on bookings before Friday, 19 October.
Conference delegate registration is €195.
Book 4 delegates for the price of 3.

Nominated at Net Visionary Awards for IrelandOffline/Tribune work

Friday, September 28th, 2007

The Net Visionary Nominations are out and I have been nominated in two categories, Social Contribution and also Technology Journalist. I’ll get to the journo one later.

IIA Nomination

There were a few nominations for me for social contribution and I was told by one of the people that nominated me that it was my work with IrelandOffline over the past three years that got me their nomination and this is the reason I accepted the nomination. (Last year I declined as I was still working in IrelandOffline). I have been told by those behind closed doors (which in itself is a shame) that IrelandOffline was more than a thorn in the side of telcos and the Government and the pressure via public and private was enough to drastically speed up broadband rollout in Ireland as well as reducing line failure rates. It also taught certain regulatory groups to think twice before trying to pull their usual statistic scams.

With the Irish telco market being such a small space it is annoying that all those that helped IrelandOffline can’t be publicly thanked for their work but that might make their lives in eircom, Comreg, the DCMNR, the Taoiseach’s office, the EU and numerous telcos a lot more difficult. I accepted the nomination on behalf of all these people, not me and also on behalf of the committee members and chairpeople of IrelandOffline over the past few years, each one of which deserve their own award for the work they did, most of it probably went unrecognized. All those who also helped out via the Boards.ie forum and via direct contact also made a difference. Combined everyone helped the drip drip dripping which eventually wore away the calcified opponents to broadband roll-out. One person I will highlight though is John Timmons who did a huge amount of work in the background while bigmouth here got all the attention. I’m not sure would IrelandOffline have lasted as long as it did without John.

I’d like your vote so all the above people can be thanked and would like if you could spread the word too to your friends and readers if you have a blog. The broadband issue is far from over and the regulatory environment is still woefully bad and vindictive but the work done so far should be rewarded. You can go here to vote and choose who you want to vote for. Social Contribution is the one I’m down for. Check out the blogger and podcaster category too, you might know some people. Any of the public can vote too.

IIA Nomination

Yeah, a nomination for Best Technology Journalist. I’m only doing this for 9 months but it is nice to be considered. Vote for me if you like but I really would like your vote for Social Contribution. Thanks.

Profile Ireland – Irish Tech Company Profiles

Tuesday, September 25th, 2007

A while back I said I was looking to profile Irish tech companies. I now have a dedicated blog for this which is ProfileIreland.com and over the next few weeks and months I will do a profile of a technology company every Tuesday and Thursday. First one just went out. So there you go.

Blogging for business – Nice quote

Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

When I started blogging, it never occurred to me that later, for economic reasons, I wouldn’t be able to stop

from Hugh MacLeod

Auctomatic launches!

Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

Congrats to Patrick, John, Kul and Harj for the launch of Auctomatic. Let the selling begin!

Fear of Google while Google has Fear of Facebook

Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

Most tech companies and apparently non tech companies too have something called “Fear of Google” where some of them are just frozen to the spot about Google coming along and obliterating their business. Up to a few months ago, Google probably didn’t fear anyone but now, well now it is becoming quite apparent that Facebook is scaring the absolute shit out of them with the leak that they are going to open up some of their systems and bring out their own social graph. Remember this is the company that killed off the API they used to have for search and replaced it with a very shitty AJAX version. Now they are going to be open and start releasing APIs again?

Here’s the brilliant Techcrunch scoop:

On November 5 we’ll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut’s social graph information – the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more – such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs. And Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform – meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.

And that is a potentially killer strategy. Facebook has a platform to allow third parties to build applications on Facebook itself. But what Google may be planning is significantly more open – allowing third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications

Starting with the godawful Orkut though? We’ll see. I really can’t see Google being as open as has been mentioned above though. There’ll be a twist no doubt and where does this feed into search or more importantly, spamming people with ads? Still, this looks like it could be a lot of fun. If they are opening to everyone, hell maybe Facebook can suck it all into their site too. Thanks for getting us even more traffic Google! That would be funny. 🙂

Update: Great comments from Danny Sullivan. Google is YEARS away. Maybe too far for catchup?