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.

There were three great demos:

• Decisions for Heros: a shiny web app designed for rescue teams by Robin Blandford, who is on the shortlist for seedcamp. There are a number of directions that this project could go, so it will be interesting to see what Rob decides. Will be watching this.
• SnapScribe: the latest offering from Walter Higgins & Sxoop Technologies (powerful web-based software for “photo books made easy”). I had heard bits and pieces about it on Twitter and elsewhere over the past few weeks, and am amazed to see how advanced it is already.
• Tweet Tweet: a Wordpress plugin by Donncha O’Caoimh:
  

  “Tweet Tweet is a plugin for WordPress that polls Twitter and archives your tweets and the tweets of those you follow so those insightful conversations you have at 1am are never lost.”

  It also supports SMS notification with Meteor and Vodafone. I have it installed on this blog now… very nice indeed. If you are a Twitter user and a Wordpress user, you should definitely install this to keep track of your conversations.

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.

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.

• 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.

And better late than never: another mobile/web app on the way, courtesy of Paul Walsh. Follow Wubud on Twitter to find out more.

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.

Currently, I’m on season 4, and just watched this episode, “Watching Too Much Television”, where Tony and Ralphie devise a “HUD” scam (Housing and Urban Development). Basically, the gangsters buy up some low cost property in a disadvantaged part of Newark, get someone to value them at a high valuation, and then sell them to the government at the inflated price to be included as part of a low-income housing scheme. Tony makes a lot of money out of it.

Fast forward about 12 hours to a discussion I had with my brother yesterday, telling me about this thread on an Irish property website called The Property Pin.

Cork City council has purchased 96 apartments for social housing in a development at Atkins Hall, Lee Road, Cork City for a fee of €25,365,000. This apartment development has been on the market for 7 or 8 years but has had poor sales because it is located in a former mental institution and my fellow Corkonians being a somewhat superstitious lot were none too keen to move into the building. Step forward Cork city council to bail out the developers by buying up all their unsold stock at an average cost of €264,218.75 per apartment.

Apparently Cork City Council’s plan is to house elderly residents in the former mental institution that most Cork people like Rymus wouldn’t live in if they were offered with a free car and a cheque for €300k. And it’s also on a steep hill outside the city with no buses or essential services in the area.

So the council swoops in and pays above the odds for 96(!) apartments that were having a hard time selling. I’m not an expert in the property market, but if I were buying an apartment which has been sitting on the market for years, I would try bargaining to bring the price down a bit. If for some reason I wanted to buy 96 of these apartments, then I would be reasonably confident in my ability to haggle a few grand off the price tag, wouldn’t you? Somebody should tell Cork City Council that usually when you buy in bulk you’re supposed to save money.

Piecing together what I’m reading on the rest of this thread, what we have effectively is this: a developer buys this entire place from the government in the 90s for £900,000. They do up the apartments, sell a bunch of them to private buyers, and then flog the rest of them back to the government for nearly €26 million. You can be sure there’s some crooked valuer in there signing off on the hefty valuations too, and a couple of fat cats lapping it up.

As far as I can see, the only difference between this scam in Cork, and the Sopranos in Newark was that Tony Soprano was dealing on a much smaller scale (haggling over $7,000), and the HUD scheme actually made sense for the residents. Or maybe I’m just watching too much television?

“Note the way they are calling this a “Feta” not a Beta version - it’s part of the overall fun, easy going feel of the site.”

The “Feta” pun is perhaps slightly lame, but it ties in with loads of internet in-jokes scattered around the place that TechCrunch readers would pick up on, ranging from slightly cheesy to very funny: “It’s your turn to mash up” or “I baked you a cookie. But I eated it.”. I actually laughed out loud at some of the testimonial quotes:

Maybe this is a sign that I’ve been spending too much time staring at this monitor, immersed in the world of web 2.0, but this site was genuinely a joy to use. Check out the sign-up form, for example:

I hope there are some web application designers reading who can appreciate this as much as I do. The beauty of the tomato to indicate the required fields. The prompt to enter password again “with feeling”. I have not gone insane, but after the nightmare of Irish-Roots and TV Licence sites, it is so refreshing to come across a project that has been thoroughly thought out. And crucially it doesn’t fall flat by trying to be cute or too clever.

Kudos to the developers Isotoma, it looks like they really know what they’re doing. The design is decent, and I like the company blog, they even list their To Do list and tick off the items as they complete them. If it sounds like I’m gushing with praise, I haven’t even started on the site’s cool features. Best thing is to try it out yourself and let me know how it goes. The only problem for me is that I have no recipes of my own to add so I’m waiting for my neighbour (in the Last.fm sense of the word) to appear so that I can benefit from the service. All the Gastonom.ie folks and Conor, I hope ye sign up and share your knowledge. Which makes me wonder, why isn’t there a hRecipe microformat?