Constraints are good, really good. Legendary Apple designer Susan Kare shares two nuggets of advice.
Freebooting. Stealing content and using it as your own. Mostly without attribution. Those “Lad” Facebook Pages are a great example. Though you see it on Twitter wholesale too. Your tweet “quoted” instead of Retweeted so the freebooter gets the credit.
Telepathy. A comms app for iPhone, iPad without the need for a mobile network or Internet connection. So when they shut down our phone networks when we rise up, they can’t stop the comms.
How To Destroy The Web – Bruce Lawson
Crazy scary robot cutters
Posted in Fluffy, irishblogs | Comments Off on Fluffy Links – Monday January 26th 2015
That new Bjórk album, was expecting to end up in a dark hole with my mascara running because of the sadness. It’s some album but I think I need to listen to it lots or read the lyrics sheet that came with it.
And I just wanted to get that headline out before anyone else.
Posted in irishblogs, music | Comments Off on Björken hearted
2012: €80,000 ex VAT
2013: €140,000 ex VAT
2014: €100,000 ex VAT
The below is for a press conference and networking event at the 2014 Summit. From IDA “Our networking event in the National Museum which had over 200 clients and potential investors present. We also had a press announcement with national and international media in the building to coincide with the event.”
TLDR: €265k in 2014, €175k in 2013, €144k in 2012 : €584k over three years
I did an FOI request in December:
1) Grants, fees, payments made to the Web Summit / Founders
2) Web Summit/Founders costs paid by EI such as speaker fees, travel costs (if any)
3) Costs for the EI for stands, marketing and running events around Web Summit / Founders
This is what I got back:
The Income column is money EI made from subletting their stand at the 2014 Web Summit.
The column on the right includes travel and accommodation costs for overseas buyers, investors and media.
Via Justin Mason Man saves the life of his wife with the help of 3D printing and an open minded surgeon. He did a 3D print of her skull and tumor. Imagine when it will be the regular thing for a surgeon to do “test runs” on brain ops with a perfect copy of the brain and the tumor.
In between sending hundreds of people to their deaths by drone strike, some candid moments from the Whitehouse.
Watching Harry Potter and this popped into my feed, nice juxtaposition. iPhone, Arduino and a few other bits and you have a fairly fast M&M sorting machine.
Magic Leap wants to bring magic back into the world. It has half a billion of funding to do so. John Graham Macnamara is one of those involved. Sounds like an Irish or Scottish name.
Kickstarter coaches. As Kickstarter becomes more and more popular, it makes sense to get an expert in to ensure your campaign works. Same in every other marketplace.
Search for symptoms on Google and you might be able to connect directly with a Doctor. Google is testing this right now. Lots of positive uses, think about it too for mental health issues.
Posted in Fluffy, irishblogs | Comments Off on Fluffy Links – Monday January 5th 2015
My ones to watch are entirely subjective, they’re based on people I know or know of, these people are mostly Irish or they have a link to Ireland that’s weaker than the criteria to play for our soccer team. I do not link to people hoping I’ll get gratitude from them or get links, retweets or future business from them.
Play
Read:
Marie Duffy was featured in these Ones to watch about two years ago. In 2014 she has been directly affected by mental health issues and she wrote about it from hospital. This felt like watching storm coverage on TV and the person in the middle of the storm pausing the scene and talking directly to you, explaining what’s going on. I worked with Marie when I was on the board of Spunout and am really proud of everything she’s done and will do. If there’s one new thing you’d like to read as 2015 starts, read this short piece from her. “Can you guarantee your safety?”
In no particular oder, here are some people to check out and see what they’re up to in 2015.
Matthew Mulligan
Deputy Editor of tn2 Magazine and Editor-at-Large of Trinity News for the 2013//2014. This is his LinkedIn. A very boring place for someone that is not. I first encountered Matthew from various tweets to his writing and retweets of his commentary. A very talented writer who I hope to read more from in 2015. His Twitter, far more interesting than LinkedIn.
Jane Ruffino
Well there’s someone that won’t shut up. Won’t be quiet when some bro has his mansplaining to share with the world. Won’t play the game of “all is well in techland” as everyone feeds from the trough. Good. I’m glad Jane has her weekly slot/shot in the Business Post. You should read it. This is her site. This is her Twitter. She did archaeology, she knows how to dig up the stuff that other people buried. Oh my, isn’t that clever writing from me? Punarific. Jane is also the token woman on the list so I can now go back to talking up the menz, right? All of the menz.
Mark Coughlan
Good journalists weave. They take various threads and bring them together and give you a tapestry. Weaving. Mark has put in the time to craft his skill, put himself out there and worked hard which has made him skilled. It wasn’t family dynasties that got him to now. In 2015 though they’re going to replace that pen in his hand with a swankier one.
Vicki O’Callaghan
I’m sure she’ll get awkward reading this. Vicki is a digital champion for Landmark Digital who look after all the digital properties of the Examiner. What’s great about Vickie is there’s no being able to bullshit her on anything digital. Same goes for a few others in there. The Examiner publications have seen major changes in the past few years and their digital offerings have been doing really well in 2014. I’m not privvy to the way the Examiner works but 2014 seemed to be a year of things settling down with debts, layoffs and office moves so given some good enough digital gains in 2014, I think 2015 will be very interesting for the Examiner group and it will be worth seeing what Vicki and her colleagues will be doing. Plus you know, Cork bias from me.
Mat Morrison Mat’s Irish now. He’s stayed in Dublin at least three times. So yeah. Mat has spoken at the Measurement.ie conferences from the very start and made them successful as a result too. He’s finished up in his last gig and is off now, wandering the land like an episode of Kung Fu. 2015 ought to be very interesting for this very insightful chap. His blog.
Ciara King
Yer wanno from Chris and Ciara on 2FM. If she doesn’t kill him, their show is going to grow in 2015 and you may see them get more attention for the work they do. Ciara’s youth diary entries are a recently uncovered gem. Even if she did kill him, she’d get out in a few years anyway and can resume what she does. Ciara King on Twitter.
Aoife Clarke Aoife and Caitriona and the other Lidl comms staff seem to be always on social media looking after their brand. Lidl did well in the 2014 Social Media Awards and it’s because of an in-house team that obviously like what they’re doing. For such a massive brand, the Lidl comms are a bit of fun. Looking forward to what happens in 2015 with whatever Team Lidl will be doing.
Deborah Maguire Deborah is the bosslady of Irish Made Gifts, a growing company in Cork that sources well produced Irish crafts and sells on behalf of producers. One of the ways to pay attention to a company, technology or person is having three different sources come to you talking about the company/person and I experienced that a few times in 2014 with Deborah.
Jim Carroll
The Banter Boy. Jim has been piloting Banter for a good few years and it’s expanding out and out each year too. It’s almost, but thankfully not fully become “the establishment”. And when other outlets report on what happens at them, good stuff is happening. Again, not privvy to his plans but with Banter, Agility HQ, that Irish Times gig and other bits n baubles, 2015 could prove very interesting. New shirt for those bigger arms or something.
We say true things so we’re outspoken. We call out mistruths so we’re angry. We do this repeatedly and we have an agenda. Truth is some kind of social faux pas these days. 2014 was another year of Snowden “leaks”, Wikileaks “leaks” and Sony email leaks. Truth being released is now controversial. Let’s see what 2015 brings for all things true.
Will the T in LGBT, no longer be a silent T?
Transparent from Amazon was a well received show on a parent transitioning to being a woman, surrounded by her completely batshit insane family. What was fantastic to me was a lot of the crew and cast were trans themselves but the show didn’t need a giant flashing yellow arrow to point them out in the show.
Laverne Cox on the cover of Time. And not a trans show but the BBC airing the Boy in the Dress this Christmas was a fantastic way of moving society forward even if by a few millimeters.
T was just tacked on to LGBT for many years, T issues were skipped or attached to being mental health issues. I’ve been totally ignorant of it, comfortably so for ages because just like fighting for equal marriage, it’s easy to ignore those you don’t know of. I remember only a few years ago the near violent protests when some college LGBT societies wanted to add on the T to their swiss army knives of letters. Some of those most against it then I note are very vocal campaigners for marriage equality now. I’m sure that’s LGBT equality. So maybe with a few things like this, things will change. The creator of Transparent equated her show to Will and Grace for gay rights, I thought that show was awful and very stereotyped but it was a start to having gay characters regularly on screen.
2FM came back with swagger and I find myself listening to it a lot more than before. Nicky Byrne is perfect for that radio slot with Jenny too. And Chris and Ciara. The music has upped a gear too.
TV series:
Fargo, Breaking Bad was good but just good. Hannibal went a bit too grotesque but man what an ending.
Rick and Morty maybe my fav show. Black Dynamite was good but too formulaic. Archer over-extended. It was not Wired Season 2 if that’s what they were going for. Come back Venture Brothers.
Books:
Mostly factual books with me taking lots of notes. 100 years of solitude though. Damn. Currently reading The Peripheral. Not sure what’s happening. Read Iain M. Banks’ last one. Sad it was all over, goodbye The Culture.
Being Mortal will stay with me for a long time and has already changed by 2015 plans about things I wanted to research. I was looking at looking more into things related to sleeping and better sleep but ageing is probably something to consider too. Look after your older people. Falls are their biggest threat according to that book.
Fav site:
TravelPirates, LowCostHolidays, Ryanair. Holiday porn. I know, holiday porn.
Bookdepository for books, too many books. I need to stop looking at Bargain Alerts on Boards too.
Posted in irishblogs, personal | Comments Off on Quick notes on 2014 flipping over to 2015
You know the way when you do a proper tidy of an office, bedroom or whole house, you rip everything out, pile it up and then find a way of re-ordering? While doing so you find things you forgot about and you might decide to dump them or find a use for them again?
You then reorganise things in patterns comfortable to you. Adding some new bits to an existing pattern/pile or removing some, merging others and of course then there’s the detritus the remains and you shove that away somewhere in a box labeled Misc, misc boxes are drafts on this blog. Some drafts are 9 years old now.
When you’re done, all is tidy once again but you know that it isn’t 100% perfect but pretty good. The tidying, acquiring, moving is how I see myself putting proper long form blog posts together. Here are some lovely insights on how to distill ideas and find new ones:
These are all kind of linked. Reading the tea leaves, pulling things together.
Kazuo Ishiguro: how I wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks. 4 weeks of hell where it seemed he was almost hallucinating at the end. He does point out 1) He had done a tonne of reading before he started off on this journey and was satisfied with the amount he researched 2) After the 4 weeks he had the raw material for the book, not in any way a finished book.
I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere – I let them remain and ploughed on.
By allowing yourself time to reflect on your story, you see things that you hadn’t realized initially. You form connections you hadn’t recognized, and you identify the patterns that you couldn’t see before. And, more to the point, you let the story simmer for as long as it needs to.
Posted in business, irishblogs | Comments Off on Pulling things together
On January 13th in Dublin I’ll be giving 29 short lectures on digital marketing. It’s nearly free to attend this. Nearly as if it was free people wouldn’t feel obliged to turn up if they got a place.
Mailchimp Snap is a nice idea. Take a photo, send it to your mailing list or part of it with a little note. All from your phone.
A list of courses UCC will be doing mostly in the evenings come January. So many I’d love to go to but work travel means no.
Laghdú by Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh & Dan Trueman. Album of the year say so many people and they’re right. Do see Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh live too if you ever have the chance. A gent and a slow-motion explosion of talent in front of you.
The Jack Lynch Tunnel has its own app. You can connect to the CCTV streams too. Obviously only as a passenger but you could watch yourself drive in and out of the tunnel from your phone. The future has landed but we won’t realise it until it’s the past.
Anti-social (media) publications. Let people read the content and not see Twitter and Facebook begs. You may get less traffic but people that do consciously share your content are more bought in to it.
You can just tell that the people in Reuters, stuck on Queen and started singing “I Want to Break Free”. Reuters says good luck and fuck you to commenters.
The Philosophy of Aristotle
Posted in Fluffy, irishblogs | Comments Off on Fluffy Links – Monday December 29th 2014
