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.

Sea Lions at Pier 39:

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.