It has been a busy few months. Since September I have spent more time abroad than in Ireland, which I’m assuming is a very good thing considering how things have been. In January, I came home to chaos and ruptured roads layered in the Grade ‘A’ grit (specially imported from Spain). The huddled masses of Cork like a scene from ‘Children of Men’, mumbling obsessively about government incompetence and Judgement Day weather conditions.
Leaving the dazzling Cork sunshine behind
Singapore
Saigon
Bali, do not make eye contact with the evil monkeys, especially the small ones
Sydney, just a quick look around
New Zealand. Fly-fishing in the sunshine on Christmas Day in Tongariro park. Helicopter trip to White Island (greatest thing ever). That green lake in the middle of the crater is one of the most acidic lakes in the world.
The rest of the time up north (inset of Cork just for comparison).:
Back to San Francisco where I found myself surrounded by Kiwis once more… first day was a rugby match between San Francisco Golden Gate RFC vs New Zealand Universities on Treasure Island. Both sides full of New Zealanders and a surprisingly high standard of rugby. Treasure Island is certainly a strange place, a run down man-made island between San Francisco and Oakland. Formerly part of a navy base I think, it has deteriorated uniformly since then. With one notable exception – the shiny new Gaelic Athletic Association grounds and 7,000 square foot clubhouse (here).
And back to Cork via snowy Boston. Luckily, no burst water pipes and the car started on the first attempt.
Congrats to The Veil Collection on the launch. The site looks good – I can vouch for their reliability. These are the same veils that you would find at a much higher price in the wedding shops, but cheaper to buy online from The Veil Collection. It is nice to see Irish companies chipping away at Rip-Off Ireland mentality by selling online.
Monday, September 8, 2008 Congrats to Cubic Telecom and Pat Phelan on MAXroam V2.
Bigger and bolder MAXroam hurts the feelings and pockets of telcos even more than before 100,000 customers, $1Million in savings in 10 months Up to 90% discount on USA roaming rates Data roaming in 75 countries and much lower than carrier prices Coverage now in 175 countries with over 450 partner carriers
I’ll be in the US myself this week so if I’ll try to track down MAXroam phone and save a few quid.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008 Too often I intend to write something on here, but settle for a 140 character light version instead. I’m a few days late in thanking Anton Mannering and everyone involved in organising Techludd Cork. It was a very nice event in the Cork Airport Hotel – some mini reviews here by Robin, Damien, and Donncha.
There were three great demos:
There is definitely a good web 2.0/tech buzz in Cork at the moment. There has been some great stuff cropping up locally this year, like SnapScribe, Teamwork PM (a project management site along the lines of Basecamp), Twitterfone (which launched v2 recently), LouderVoice (which is always evolving), and I know there is loads happening behind the scenes that has not made it to a press release yet. Not least at Glandore Systems where it has been a busy few months – we’ll be looking for some beta testers soon enough!
It was this creative buzz that inspired a few of us to put our heads together and do something productive with the web in our spare time, to experiment with new technologies and hopefully launch some useful applications. The big news last week was Tweetrush, an implementation of the Rush Hour analytics engine. We got some great coverage, on TechCrunch, The Irish Times, and elsewhere. “Tweetrush” was even the hottest word on Twitter for awhile (screenshot). AJ has chronicled the launch nicely on his blog.
Tweetrush was intended primarily as a sneak preview of Rush Hour, but it revealed statistics that could not be found anywhere else (except maybe at Twitter HQ), including the total number of active users within a given time frame, or the total number of public tweets. It is great to see that so many people were able to find their own uses for the service, and even ask the question Tweetrush for Enterprise?.
There has been a lot of interest since in Rush Hour Analytics, but this is still in closed beta, so stay tuned to Gogoza for more information on that.
What comes up? I get this when I search for “James Galvin”.
My LinkedIn profile:
A page from my blog… about Bosnia, for some reason:
And a post from my blog about that whole Eircom thing.
That axe-murderer you see there is actually James Galvin the poet.
I can understand Cuil’s launch problems. As Mike Arrington said on Techcrunch, getting wiped off the face of the earth as soon as you launch is like a rite of passage. Not a lot of startups can stay afloat during the first wave of publicity, and Cuil certainly got a lot of publicity when it launched. But these misplaced images could actually be damaging. I don’t care if people search for me and think that I’m some axe-murdering poet, or Highway to Heaven guy look alike. But other people have not been so lucky with the images that come up alongside their results. Check out this NSFW post on The Register. Cuil would have done themselves a favour and saved themselves some load by keeping this feature behind the scenes bumps have been ironed out.
Listening to Newstalk (quoting from my feed reader, because their website is broken):
- Beaumont Hospital was found to have spent three-hundred and eleven-thousand euro on an I.T. system described as totally useless.
- The Irish Blood Transfusion Service lost three quarters of a million euro on another I.T. system when it abandoned its rollout.
- FÁS shells out €1.7million on the Jobs Ireland website.
It is so infuriating to see the public’s money wasted so blatantly like this in Ireland, knowing that there’s nothing we can do about it. I recently covered the black hole of funding known as Irish Roots, but it gets worse and worse.
It is safe to assume that any technology project remotely linked to the government will involve scandalous overpayment. It is due either to gross incompetence or blatant corruption – either way, heads should roll.
The guys on Newstalk mentioned the possibility that the FÁS Jobs Ireland contract may have been sewn up before ever going to public tender. Regardless of whether that is true or not, the trend is sickening. There is no accountability, and with a wink and a nudge, a state-agency doles out millions for nothing. And they get away with it. More often than not, we don’t even hear about it. Even the few instances that do make the news amount to almost nothing.
Pat Phelan has announced Twitterfone. Great design, and a nice handy app for anyone who uses Twitter a lot. A particularly good one for long journeys in the car. Now all I need is a hands free kit, and a text to speech plugin for my phone.
And better late than never: another mobile/web app on the way, courtesy of Paul Walsh. Follow Wubud on Twitter to find out more.
Moviestar.ie DVD rental by post; Ireland’s answer to Netflix. It’s none of my business but, if everything is done through their website, then step 1 is to make a website that works.
Consider the amount of resources that Netflix have spent in developing their site to improve search and recommendations. Now consider Moviestar.ie, where you enter the exact movie title into the box, select “search by title”, and your search string is then processed by a team of retarded blind dwarves who return a thousand random Gregory Peck movies for you to choose from. So you spend ages searching by director or by year of release to assemble your queue of movies, and a week later they send you Terminator 3.
I like Moviestar.ie – the free trial is a nice bonus. But seriously, and this is something I see with nearly every new Irish web initiative, please speak to professional web developers who know what they’re doing. Ask Irish-Roots – it doesn’t matter how good your database is if you can’t search even search it.
