First time seeing this girl live and she’s lovely. Talent and a good rapport with the audience. Amazing band too.
Disclaimer: I was there via an invite from WHPR, a client of Diageo and I got free pints of Guinness at it. The double cheeseburger, hamburger, cheeseburger and twisty fries I got from McDonald’s halfway through were not on their bill. Probably a good thing.
Myself and Alexia called into the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art after both being at Science Foundation Ireland to chat to fellow blogger Frank Gannon. The ReFunct Symposium in IMOCA is all but gone but one of the art pieces is a drill suspended from the ceiling, leaning against a wall and this drill is connected to their website. When the website is loaded by someone, the drill goes off. Here’s a video of this in action and me trying to explain it as Alexia loads the site on her iPhone.
Saw them last night. Great performers, these lads. The crowd didn’t seem too into it and felt like some were there for a chat. Not at all like the vibe when they supported Passion Pit. Right up front people were chatting away as the band kicked into their first song and chatted all through it. Then the idiots trying to mosh at the end. Remnants of the idiocy from Oxegen?
Fun moment when Orin? volunteered from the crowd to do keyboards for the band. “Do you know how to do a D?” “I do D all the time”
And this is a picture of balls. Two pairs. If you come from a Comreg IP address they spin, so you know what they look like:
Photo owned by jeffisageek (cc)
So we see that eircom are going to court against the telecoms poddle again. Once again this is about something called Local Loop Unbundlin which is all about who has full control of your phone line from the exchange to your house. In the UK unbundling is a massive success and we see dirt cheap, high speed broadband and lots of choice. The opposite to here. LLU has never worked here and companies that thought they could get it to work like Smart got walloped. BT Ireland probably wouldn’t have moved out of consumer if LLU worked well. This latest court trouble is deja vu.
In 2005, Comreg proposed a Line Share Price of 39 cent which was successfully challenged by Eircom
In July 2008 eircom appealed ComReg’s direction to set Line Share price at €2.94. ComReg subsequently withdrew their direction.
And now we have the latest court challenge to a regulator that never goes to Court but jacks it in on the steps.
The hope on the horizon is that we seem now to have a Department of Communications that despises eircom when once it wouldn’t really challenge them. And whatever the sentiment of the Department, we get the same from the “independent” regulator. Interesting times. I’d like to see a day in Court as some kind of precedent might finally be set.
Ian Healy’s take on filesharing. This is your consumers talking dear record company.
The IDA had a blogger’s briefing about their new campaign last week. The Business Post covers the €2M ad campaign they showed us. (Diclaimer, their ad agency and I worked on the briefing) Resulting from this though the IDA are starting to embrace online communities. First stop is a LinkedIn discussion group they’re facilitating called Innovation Ireland. Name is a clue to the content. Contributions welcome.
Modest Mouse are back to Ireland in December. Nothing on ticketbastard yet but soon…
Rosemary Maccabe‘s site is live and a-kicking.
Phantom of the Opera (the old movie), in a Church with an organist. In Bandon.
Ogra Fianna Fáil do a Ronseal on Lisbon.
Entreprenural Internships with NDRC.
Nice tips on how to maintain being inspired.
Love it. Enterprise 2.0 sounds so rough but Social Business explains it better.
Genius. Wispa uses their advertising spaces to allow customers to have fun with messages.
This is a Coke Can I want.
Readers of FoodFight.ie say this is their fav Julia Child clip. Julia and her chickens:
Hockey – Song Away (Looking forward to seeing them tonight)
This blog post on design houses have entrepreneurs got me thinking about businesses and how they should always be in an adapting frame of mind. It made me think of dancing and specifically of dancing at weddings. We start off with the bride and groom and the traditional waltzy dance and move there to the “classics” and pop hits with the wedding band and then as the DJ comes along we wobble our extremities to all different songs, rhythms and so on. Some businesses are perfect at the traditional stuff, no stamping on feet at all while others are shit and do their best not to crash into others as they spin about. The ones good at the waltzes sometimes find themselves in foreign land at this “modern” stuff and leave the dance floor.
I often think that while being fantastic at one style of dancing is great, the ones that are rough around the edges and will stand in the middle of a dance floor and give it a bash have the better attitudes. Trying different things out, being game for something new is a survival skill. I’m reminded of this by three tech companies in particular: Odeo, Seesmic and Game Neverending.
Photo owned by edenpictures (cc)
Odeo created a tool called Twittr which became Twitter and Odeo the shell got sold on. Seesmic started as a video service and now their main product is an aggregator for Twitter and more and Game Neverending had a photosharing tool that turned into Flickr. Sometimes if you do join the dancefloor after watching the ebb and flow and studying the dance moves you’ll be grand, sometimes the music changes without notice and you’ll need to improvise and adapt.
It seems this year more companies than ever had to adapt and yet still haven’t. Taxi drivers are a great example. All complaining there are too many plates. That can’t be changed but they won’t adapt in other ways. Offer premium services. Create a driving standard way higher than the regulator enforces and push that as a selling point. New music, they sit in chairs and grumble. Any other examples of Irish industries that are not dancing to different tunes when they could be?
You dancing? I’m asking. And an all too serious video to end the post with:
Coming to the 2009 Realex Payments Web Awards? Register in advance. Tickets on sale soon.
On that topic. Pat O’Neill has a list of hotels on the night of October 10th that are cheaper than the rest.
This post from Karen is my favourite in a while. You are the best at what you do. If you like it, send it around to others.
Lots of camps, now this one from IBM Ireland. SmartCamp Ireland. Money and support for companies.
Everyone and their droopy ass are writing posts about NAMA but this post on the Property Pin (best site evar) will anger and sadden you as it gets to the facts.
Twitter and those selling it. Badly.
Via Paul Watson: TOG is a hacker space in Dublin.
New blog(to me): Farmer Simon.
Situations Vacant – Irish movie about job hunting
Julia Child on David Letterman:
Want some Julie and Julia books? Partake.
Loving the website for McCann Erickson.
New blog. White Rabbit.
And another: The Mire.
National Campaign for the Arts.
Good reasons why all councils should get involved in online communities.
Facebook Advertising Webinar on September 29th.
Anarctica in January, fly from Ireland. Only 6-7k or so…
Charlie Higson has a new kids book on zombies, loving trailers for books:
So a good while back now we had the Princess Bride #asyouwish event on Twitter. The basic idea was that you could be part of a group experiencing an event, even if you were not physically near the group. People watching the Eurovision, Rose of Tralee and texting back and forth. Now we’re on Twitter doing it.
We tweeted, we had a liveblog. SoundCheck tuned in from their event. Simon McGarr stuck up some LiveBlog.ie stats too: Total visitors: 409 Number of posts: 885 Number of comments: 281
Mostly super positive reaction to the event and some negative ones complaining that if you want to watch a movie you shouldn’t be tweeting. Or maybe eating. Or moving. And maybe on your own. But you don’t watch Princess Bride for the 5th or 10th time in silence. It’s very participatory. Even on first viewing.
People who have never gone to a concert and sung along to some songs probably would find this foreign and shocking. Maybe people who didn’t partake in a Rocky Horror night with all the props. Shared experiences are here to stay in digital format just like they’ve been around in analog for possibly thousands of years. Christian masses are like this when everyone sings and claps, right?
Then we see this from Fox and Fringe.
On Thursday at 9 p.m., the penultimate episode of Fringe will be accompanied by Twitter commentary from two of the show’s cast and producers.
If you’re a Helge Tennø fan you’ll know his take on marketing and earned media and how companies now need to not broadcast or disrupt and instead contribute and provide. I think vehicles like running shared experience events is one way companies can work with the general public and people from various online communities and have a little bit of fun in the process. Much better than advertising/spamming by asking people to mention your company name on Twitter.
So Princess Bride was the first in a series. People want another Twitter Movie Night soon and we’ll have one alright but also on the way are other participatory events using online communities.
An article in the Business Post a while back covered the fact that RTE, Today FM and the regional radio stations are uniting to do an ad campaign to promote radio ads. This is the first time ever it’s happened. Shame it took a recession and many of them on deathwatch for it.
Why aren’t companies in the same industry doing this? Why aren’t hotels in a certain tourist location uniting and talking up their area? Why are so many companies now doggedly fighting over a smaller and smaller patch instead of making the patch bigger? Cooperation works if you want it to. The businesses in Washington Street in Cork did this a while back as did a number of other pubs running “decades’ nights in various pubs.
Do businesses in Ireland take things too personally so much that they couldn’t be a uniting force to build their whole industry? Thoughts?
Photo owned by comedy_nose (cc)
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