Via Mozilla Links A survey from Xiti Monitor has shown that Firefox usage in Ireland is growing at an impressive rate and that Ireland is one of the top users of Firefox in the EU behind the top users of Slovenia, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Croatia. At 38.6% usage, it is a comfortable 10 points above the 28% European average. The actual growth rate of 55% is the highest this quarter for all of Europe too.
Pity there’s not better stats for Nintendo.
So why are so many Irish people moving over to Firefox?
any problems at Oxegen are not Oxegen problems, they are social problems. On Saturday night, we got the bus back into town from the festival and arrived on O’Connell bridge at around 3am. And as Neil remarked, the only difference from the behaviour of the people at Oxegen and the people on O’Connell bridge was the mud.
Chatted to Pat Phelan last night and he showed me and others the next version of Roam4Free. I had some doubts about version 1 of Roam4Free and version 2 removes all doubts and then some. This could be a very big thing in my view. I can’t wait until they officially launch this and then there are all the other projects Pat has up his sleeve, which I can’t talk about but again, they’ve impressed me.
Posted in blogs, irishblogs | Comments Off on Auctomatic gets more attention, Roam4Free has grown up a LOT
As I posted on Twitter and Facebook, looking for someone that wants to do a video for me that I’ll be putting on YouTube. Would suit a multimedia student or enthusiast as I’ll have SFA money to give to you for it, but if done right, it should get you some recognition, so consider it padding for your portfolio.
It’d be a fictional and slightly satirical corporate sales video. I’d like to stress that I am not looking for suggestions or ideas. I know exactly what I want. It would be along the same ideas as this video, in that there’ll be a voiceover and some graphics, no need for actors as such:
Dave Davis’ RedFly Marketing is after releasing the egotastic Google Global Firefox Extention which allows you to do a search on Google and then switch to the results lists from all the country specific Googles that exist. For example I am 4th on Google.com for “damien”, currently 1st on Google.ie for “damien” and 5th on Google.co.uk for “damien”. It’s not just been made for us ego nuts though, it’ll be a nice tool for those that optimise their websites in search engines and they can see how they are performing on a country by country basis.
I blogged previously about the HP Event in Lisbon and briefly mentioned the MScape technology that HP are working on. I’m going to give it a little more coverage as I think it is worth looking at and could be used for a lot of things in Ireland.
Mscape is HP’s location based software which adds a layer to the landscape around you via your mobile device. Right now you need a Windows Mobile device with a GPS signal for it to work. In Lisbon, two applications they built for us were a giant version of whack a mole and a tourist guide to the park we were going around in. With the tour guide, as you walked into an area an mp3 would load and it would display pictures, but over time this could trigger any kind of software application I would guess. Loads more details about their Lisbon escapades on their blog.
There’s a good deal of hippy thinking with this from HP with a community building up around their forums, they have a blog and the software and dev kit is free to download and use. There’s also a wiki.
The attitude I got from the really friendly HP Labs staff was “here’s a new type of platform we put together and please be our guest to play and fiddle and try new things with it”. Now i’m not comparing it to the web, but it does seem to have that attitude where it is maybe not up to them to create the killer app, but us and they are happy for us to use their layer. Some people have already made interactive art installations with the software, the usual tour guides will be in abundance and I can see special guides for those with learning difficulties, helping them do their daily tasks and it might finally get the kids off the couches and way from the XBoxes while still allowing them to play digital games. I wrote about this in the Tribune last week. Imagine sending the kids down the park to play with the dinosaurs.
I think future versions of MScape will hopefully seem them embrace more operating systems and other location aware technologies and not just GPS. RFID, Bluetooth, GSM etc could also be used for interacting with landscapes too. I’d love to do a few walking tours of say Fota Gardens and maybe old World War 1 battlefields in Flanders.
Here’s what other people have to say about MScape:
Patrick and John Collison who I mentioned previously here, are featured in the Irish Times this morning. Link. (sub required) Patrick talks about how they started Auctomatic and what they are up to with it. Nice to see something about young tech entrepreneurs in the papers. Might inspire others as well.
Some quotes:
They rented an office in Limerick for three months but had no luck in securing funding in Ireland despite applying to Enterprise Ireland and other sources of seed funding.
“From my limited experience, organisations in Ireland are much more risk-averse and very credentials-oriented,” says Patrick.
The pair applied for funding to Y Combinator, a specialist seed fund established by Paul Graham.
Paul Buchheit, the architect of Google’s Gmail application and the man who suggested the company’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto, has invested, while Evan Williams, creator of Google’s blogger platform, sits on the board.
Well done on the coverage lads! I say we visit the lads when we’re over for Paddy’s Valley, distract them and steal their Blackberrys and get their contacts lists. 🙂
Another day, another mention of Derek from Blogorrah. If in Donegal, check out his “Faraway, so close” video installation blurb:
Created by New York resident Derek O’Connor (of Bloggorah fame), this installation brings six Irish residents back home, by way of intimate video portraits that candidly capture them going about their daily duties across the water.
Any bank which will put up a website showing the operational status of its ATMs on a Google map, with usage frequency, broken-ness and tendency to insist on dispensing fifty euro notes displayed, will earn my everlasting gratitude.
Liam says:
I want an rss feed that alerts me when someone submits a planning application which impacts on the area where I live. I want the local council to provide a Wiki attached to planning applications so that locals can easily comment and enter into a discussion on the merits or otherwise of said development
Can’t you just route around them and hack something together that could do those things, without neeing to plug into those two different by similar bureaucracies?
This is a nice and inspiring post from Rick Perlinger, who works with the Internet Archive to archive old industrial films and so much more. The post is from a talk and is called On the Virtues of Preexisting Material. Nice take on copyright and remix culture.
Remember the TV show “Bertha”?
And a lesson on user interfaces from Bertha:
Via Walter is the display in Fremont Street, take a few nati-overthetoppatriotism pills first though:
In the last thirty days, 7.65 million unique screen names have successfully made it into meebo. Yikes. When you guys get in, you spend a long long time. You all spend, on average, 60-70 minutes per login.
Bloody hell! I’m still waiting for them to turn their interace into a complete online OS. Meebo storage next please.
