Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

70 Funded places for unemployed graduates on ICT course at UCD

Friday, August 14th, 2009

via the Mulley inbox:

Seventy funded places for unemployed graduates are available on a Graduate Certificate in Information and Communications Technology at UCD, as part of the announcement by the Minister for Education of 1,000 part-time postgraduate third-level places for unemployed workers. Successful applicants will have €2,500 of the €2,750 fee funded by the Higher Education Authority.

The deadline for receipt of applications is 24 August 2009.

There are also four other Graduate Certificate programmes, in entrepreneurship, information technology, sustainable agriculture, green technologies, or nanobio science. See here.

No Techcrunch I won’t delete my Twitter message

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

After I retweeted something from Pat Phelan about James Whatley quitting Spinvox I got this email from a Techcrunch staffer:

Mate would you mind deleting that tweet? We wrote a pre-emptive story based on an unconfirmed rumour. No idea how it ended up in our RSS feed and James could lose his job.

All best,

Techcrunch who published all those docs on Twitter yeah? And made a big deal about them being allown-up journalists yeah? Yeah, fuck off. Others seem to have gotten shut down on this. Not here. Screenshot too:

No thanks techcrunch

More detailed screenshot.

Google has it too, I expect they’ll get a DM too from Techcrunch.
No thanks techcrunch II

Update: The Techcrunch apology to James Whatley.

BT Ireland pulls out of consumer biz, Vodafone takes customers

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

BT Ireland and Vodafone today confirmed that BT Ireland is moving their consumer division to Vodafone while they will remain working on what is their core businesses these days, which is infrastructure and managing network builds and networks for other companies.

Details from the press release:
BT will transfer its consumer and small business broadband and voice customer base to Vodafone and will also provide wholesale network services to underpin Vodafone’s business over a seven-year period.

Agreement positions Vodafone as the clear no 2 in the fixed market with over 170,000 fixed customers and a 15% market share of the fixed broadband market

Over 84,000 consumers and 3,000 small businesses currently with BT will transfer to Vodafone over the next several months. (Small businesses are those with 6 telephone lines or less)

BT plans to unbundle another 58 exchanges in Ireland

A small number of BT employees are expected to transition to Vodafone under the terms of the agreement.

The Irish Times had this story last Saturday and some details from it include:

The transfer would involve BT’s residential fixed-line customers and broadband subscribers. The company has a 13 per cent share of the fixed-line market and a 9 per cent share of broadband, according to the latest statistics from ComReg.

BT’s consumer business accounts for just 6 per cent of revenues but delivered a “strong set of results”, according to the British company at the publication of its full-year results in May.

Analysis:
It’s long been rumoured that BT Ireland would pull out of consumer and this deal is comfortable for them, their customers and for Vodafone.

BT Ireland are very good at building and running networks. Infrastructure and services is what makes them nearly all the money in Ireland. Despite trying the consumer area and merging Esat Clear, Oceanfree and IOL into a consumer division, they never made huge inroads. It didn’t help that the margins for these services are absolutely tiny, almost zero, and there have been years of constant battles with eircom and the regulator to get better prices and probably more importantly, better switching provisions for potential customers. I’m sure there’s huge relief now in BT Ireland.

It’ll be interesting to see how Vodafone runs with this now as Perlico under the Vodafone ownership still appeared to be very independent. Will BT Ireland broadband packages remain unchanged, will Vodafone and Perlico packages change to be the same as BT Ireland ones?

Update:
Some questions and answers too:

Will any jobs be lost with the moving and merging of the BT consumer operations with Vodafone?
No – all Rep of Ireland employees working in the transferring businesses will transfer across to Vodafone under the TUPE process.

Will BT Ireland still unbundle exchanges and if yes and manage them or will Voda do this in future, if BT then will Vodafone be the one reselling the services exclusively or will BT offer them to others?
BT will be unbundling and managing up to 58 new exchanges (to add to the current 22), offering a competitive wholesale platform for the first time in the Irish marketplace, which covers up to two thirds of the available broadband lines.

How long will the BT packages customers are on, be honoured for?
Nothing will change for BT’s customer base in the short to medium term – BT and Vodafone will be managing a smooth transition of the base over the coming months, enabling an improved portfolio of converged products and services to these customers.

Future of manufacturing in Ireland – All digital

Monday, July 6th, 2009

Knowledge Economy. One of the most abused terms by the Government in the past few years, spouted out in press releases and speeches in a form of buzzword bingo. From the cribsheet of a jaded civil servant to the mouth of a politician without any brain work.

Traditional physical manufacturing in Ireland is a dying if not a dead industry. Grunt work done in Ireland is expensive. When trees are cut down, shipped to another country and then sent back here as building supplies, you know something is amiss. Physical labour alone to make something can be done anywhere and mostly now it’s done in India, China and some African countries. That this was going to happen was obvious for at least a decade yet people are surprised and shocked.

Yet, it’s all going to happen again with tech jobs in this country because so much of it is grunt work. High-tech according to the Government and their spindoctors is localisation, sales and tech support. That’s far from knowledge work there. And when the grants dry up, those jobs too are off elsewhere. It’s just another Shannon stopover. Yet we’ll all be shocked when this happens, why? Many of the software manufacturers in this country now outsource work to India and China that once was done here. We should actually welcome that. Any vacuum created should be filled with real knowledge economy jobs. We’re not drones yet all these jobs are drone work. We’re relying on borrowed time.

Suzzallo Library, one of the great libraries of the world - studying here embues you with a feeling of scholarly history, Seattle, Washington, USA
Photo owned by Wonderlane (cc)

I think Ireland, despite the shit broadband and the lies about it being good, can overcome that and be a core part of all things digital. Ireland should take in digital raw materials, work them, add value by reworking the digital bits and produce something that can be used elsewhere. A new form of manufacturing and processing that merges various bits but very importantly uses the greymatter in our heads to improve these things. We could make a lot from Government data too. Some are suggesting that Ireland becomes the project manager for outsourcing. With our GMT foothold and our culture of being good diplomats, we can be a bridge between the Western world and the world where outsourcing takes place.

Certainly this is one future but with our talented kids we pump out from colleges and a history of creativity, Ireland could own the space in digital where value is added. Britain is getting it. I wonder will we see it or will we just pump out more and more java developers who invariably end up training up some lad in China on how to replace them?

Not in top 3 in Google? Using Google Ads? Ruh roh

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Mulley Communications had a survey carried out on how people react to Google search results and Google ads.

The survey results are here.

In summary:
If you’re not in the top 3 results, hardly anybody is going to pay attention to you.
Google Ads? What are they? Seems they get little attention.
People are not using the address bar to type in website addresses, they just ask Google.
Women are a little bit better than men at considering the data presented to them.

I can see a future where Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” will be the default. Type in your query, get a single result.

There are videos of the heat maps generated based on the movement of eyes around a webpage:

Irish Times article on this (not shown on Times website oddly)
Silicon Republic Article on this.

Big thanks to National College of Ireland for doing the research and Enterprise Ireland for their Innovation Voucher scheme.

App School – Learn to make iPhone applications

Friday, June 12th, 2009

App School

One of the things that kept me busy of late was getting a new project ready. We press released about App School this morning as well as getting it mentioned in the Irish Times. Patrick, Daniel, SQT Training and myself will be involved in training people in how to build and market iPhone applications over 5 days.

If you can handle C++ or Java then this course will suit you, the first run of it is July 20th. App school is on Twitter too, naturally.

More from Patrick.

Fred Wilson talks disruption at Google

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

Show and Tell with Sony Ericsson, Tuesday 26th of May, Dublin

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

The Show and Tell series of tech meets as previously mentioned will kickstart next Tuesday evening at 7pm at the Odeon in Dublin with Sony Ericsson showing off some of their gear and telling us of upcoming products. Given it’s the first event we don’t know exactly will the format work or not but it’s worth trying. No sales pitches, just geeky goodness.

If you have questions you want to ask of Sony Ericsson in advance, leave them here or email me.

If you want to attend, leave a comment below. We’re limiting places to 25 people.

On the phone @ Manchester, UK
Photo owned by timparkinson (cc)

Want a discount for the iQ BootCamp?

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

iQ Content have offered those that read Mulley.net a discount of 20% on tickets to their Bootcamp. This is probably the best web training event in Ireland every year and covers everything that a business that’s serious about the web needs.

So you get 20% tickets for this three-day event but because there is an early bird offer on right now, you can actually get a 40% discount. The event is on June 9th-11th 2009. I think I might be doing something at it too, not sure, if not I’ll still be going.

To avail of it all you need to do is enter Fluffy as the discount code when booking online.

eircom innovation fund 2009 – Get your idea in before April 30th

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

100k split between four companies/ideas:

1. €16,000 cash sum;
2. One-day business mentoring session from senior eircom execs to the value of €3,000;
3. €1,000 per month for six months post-launch management fee

Full details on the eircom Labs page.

Areas to consider for a pitch:

  • Content (e.g. video, short films, animations, UGC)
  • Movies and TV (e.g. programme recommendations, listings application, information aggregation, content search, fan communities, recommender systems, discovery tools e.g. data visualisations))
  • Games (e.g. Flash games, game communities, platforms, multiplayer games, persistent worlds, avatar-based social networks, game creation tools, ratings, reviews, gambling)
  • News (e.g. personalised news gathering, news aggregation, news submission tools, communities of interest, domain-specific news services)
  • Music (e.g. Internet radio, streaming / OD services, search / recommendations / personalisation, community tools)
  • Sport (e.g. communities, results aggregation, fan communities, results prediction, betting, games)
  • Widgets (e.g. any widget(s) based on the above or additional categories)