Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

IBM to encourage employee blogging – 130k blogs ?

Sunday, May 15th, 2005

So IBM has met the year 2004 and is pushing for blogs. Not really a consolation for all those they are laying off in Dublin though. “Here’s the key to your blog and here’s your pink slip”.

The IBM blogging project is being run by Jim Finn, the former chief of communications at Oracle, and now number two in the corporate communications team at IBM. “We’ve got a lot of experts in their fields and we want to encourage them to become involved in blogging and online discussions,” Mr Finn told SiliconValleyWatcher.

By the way, check out the genesis of Silicon Valley Watcher. Definitely an interesting model. One I’d like to see adopted for the .

Microsoft Wins – Apple, Yahoo and Real lose out. And us.

Sunday, May 15th, 2005

From Russell: Napster, Real and Yahoo! vs. Apple… Winner: Microsoft. Sounds odd? Russell does a run-through of the various online music structures and shows that despite Apple dominating the hardware section of music players and iTunes doing very very well, the fact that Yahoo! and Real are using Redmond’s DRM plus a truckload more companies and that the XBox360 is going to be a games console and a media centre means that MS is gonna kick serious ass very soon. They’ll control the routes for accessing our media. Russell himself is a Yahoo! employee so he isn’t being biased on this.

Choice quotes:

Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop, and soon they’ll have a monopoly on everything else as well: not the OS, but the DRM on which all the media is based.

and:

As the OS diminishes in importance going forward in time, the only thing that’s going to separate one system from another is the DRM which is laid on top of it

and:

It’s like 1989 all over again when everyone was begging to license the Mac OS. Two years later Windows 3.0 showed up and Apple is now at 2% market share. If you don’t think the same thing is happening in the media space, you’re dreaming.

Yeah, this is one of those “Oh Christ we’re fucked” moments.

I’d just like to be in line when they find the guy responsible for cancelling it.

Saturday, May 14th, 2005

Ben Hammersely discovers FireFly and like everyone else that’s sat down and watched it, he loves it. He gives a very English review too

It is, as you all know, fucking brilliant. I mean, really. It’s about as far down my personal trousers as a tv show can get. A Futuro-Sino-Cowboy aesthetic, with courtesans and gunfights? Hold me.

Damned right. My mother was pissed cos they cancelled it. That’s how big an audience reach it has. I look forward to the movie.

Kind of on the same theme. Well no not really. A cool project using jars of artificial fireflies. Shake the jar, the “fireflies” come to life and get noticed by the other fireflies in the other jars. Sweet.

Sun adds MS App Support to SunRays

Saturday, May 14th, 2005

It was hugely futile to try and ignore that Microsoft is everywhere. SunRay Thin Clients will now support MS Applications. Sense is good.

Bollixitician – More and more of em

Friday, May 13th, 2005

What is a bollixitician ? Well I suppose it’s a professional who talks bollox and puts a PC/politico like slant on it. It’s bad enough that our politicians have become adept at non-apologies and answering questions with answers to their own questions but now it is creeping into other realms. We’re seeing it more and more in business, it started with big players doing it as they had whole PR Departments behind them, but now it is trickling down to SMEs and even one man operations. It’s only going to frustrate the general population more.

What’s fun is that it is going to backfire, it’ll reach a tipping point and then people will be shit sick of all this. The people who are going to avail of the backlash are those into open, frank conversations with people. Who be they ? Bloggers I think. Companies and SMEs who start availing now of Blogging and open conversations with customers and people in general will outlast the rest with their 30 person PR team.

Let’s hope that the Blogging for Business Talk in Cork can convince people of this.

Quick links for Friday May 13th

Friday, May 13th, 2005

Nokia comes up with the sensor idea. 2 years or more after bringing out bluetooth they come up with this? What’s the big deal? This is very very unimpressive. A belated welcome to 2002 there lads.

Fold a dollar bill into a shirt. Can it be done with Euros?

Dutch comedy duo who make good use of props. Work safe.

Firefox and Thundebird for USB memory sticks. Handy for net cafes and college computer labs.

Bad Wolf in Doctor Who. Just what does it mean?

Students make their own audio tour guides for museums. This would make a really interesting project.

Noka Zoo Watch. Very sexy.

Christian Telco telling you how evil AT&T are. Scary when you think about it. “United American Technologies: Okay. Verizon, what they do is they train their employees to accept the gay and lesbian lifestyle.”

Fandom shows that file sharing can create “gained fans” not “lost customers”

Business Blogging Coming to Cork

Thursday, May 12th, 2005

An upcoming related event is the IT@Cork talk on Business Blogs. On the panel will be Tom Raftery, Maura McHugh and John Breslin. Now will there be free WiFi at the event so someone else can blog it as it happens, while wearing a “I’m Blogging This!” T-Shirt. I’m kidding. Hopefully Bernie might come down to Leeside for this too.

Mobile Data Costs in Ireland – Total Ripoff

Thursday, May 12th, 2005

Brian Greene on mobile data costs, showing how crazily expensive it is to get online in Ireland from anything bar a landline.

My thoughts:

With the average size of e-mails and files increasing rapidly over time and the slow decrease in data costs from telecoms companies, we will see a trend where net access via a mobile network will become even more prohibitive to users. The last ComReg Trends Report reflects this where on page 32 it seems to show that less people are using their mobile phone for net access than last year. Also on page 21: 48% answered no to: “Do you think there is adequate choice of mobile service providers at competitive prices in Ireland?”

Mobile companies need to encourage widespread use of this technology instead of preventing all but the wealthiest of customers from utilizing this method of Internet access. If the text message services were priced in the same way as the data access services we would never have become one of the most prolific countries in the world for sms usage, something which helps generate one of the highest ARPUs worldwide.

It has been lauded by ComReg and the DCMNR that accessing the Internet via a mobile network is a viable alternative but this currently is not the case and I cannot see this becoming a reality with current attitudes in the mobile sector.

Asked for my thoughts on Internet Banking and Net Access/Broadband

Thursday, May 12th, 2005

A journalist asked for my thoughts on Internet Banking in Ireland from the perspective of broadband and broadband availability. Here are my thoughts:

    1. Internet Penetration.
    Internet penetration is going down in this country, not up. The latest figures from the ComReg quarterly report show this. Perhaps though if they push Internet banking more people will go online. Look how many non-technical people now know how to book flights online, thanks in part to Ryanair making people go online to book flights.

    2. Broadband Availability
    To go online nowadays and stay secure you have to continually upgrade your browser, your operating system and your anti-virus software. The Internet is more dangerous now than ever with worms and viruses becoming very prolific. To combat this we see vendors like Microsoft releasing security patches on a sometimes weekly basis and there are now daily updates for anti-virus scanners.

    Being on dialup and trying to stay secure is an almost futile exercise these days. Security patches range in size from 2MB to a colossal 150MB for a service pack for Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Broadband is ideally needed to stay safe and secure if you want to go online. The online experience for dialup users has been deteriorating for the past few years and the rate of deterioration of quality is increasing.

    Broadband however, is only available to less than half the population. Of the areas where broadband is available, 20-25% of the lines fail the dsl test due to various reasons. 45% of people can get broadband in Ireland right now, leaving 55% who have to suffer dialup to try and go banking.

Google buys Dodgeball – Interesting

Thursday, May 12th, 2005

Dodgeball just got Googled

Dodgeball is like friendster for mobiles but it’s in real time and can be location based. In some bar, tell Dodgeball and it tells your mates. Interesting to see how Google will intrgrate this. Organising the world’s information is what Google does, now this organises the information you don’t share 100% with the world, only friends.