Archive for the ‘Sunday Tribune’ Category

Fail fast, fail cheap, fail smart

Tuesday, February 20th, 2018

From the Sunday Tribune

Fail fast, fail cheap, fail smart

Failure is an option that is finally getting explored in Ireland. It’s now starting to trickle through that trying something and failing is not the sin it once was. Many have been saying for years how in Silicon Valley people are trusted almost more if they have previously done something and failed. It’s not the failure per se but it’s the experience gained from work and being at the coal face. In Silicon Valley it’s “hard luck, what are you doing next?”. In Ireland it’s been a case of “Oh that guy failed, should you really do business with him?” It still exists too. Lots of companies merged or were acquired in recent years to save face.

There’s a definite culture thing at play here. Good old Catholic guilt probably contributes to this. Communities via the pulpit have always been encouraged to knock anyone that rises about their “station”. Possibly tied to that is the excuse about bankruptcy laws in Ireland. I’m not convinced strict bankruptcy laws are holding people back.

If struck off it’s hard to start new business yet there are plenty who never go as far as being struck off. Plenty of people have risen above being struck off and have done well for themselves. If bankruptcy laws are holding you back are you not creative enough or are you too risk averse?

It seems like years ago but at a conference in March Dylan Collins amongst others talked about embracing failures and mistakes and learning from them. “We have to be proud of our mistakes – It’s how we learn.”

Any fans of James Burke and his Connections programmes will know of the way discoveries throughout history were more to do with lots of trials and their errors moreso than eureka moments. A “good” failure allows the lessons learned to be applied elsewhere and lots of these combined becomes a new discovery.

Just like the scammers swarmed into seo and social media though, now I wonder will the acceptance of failure see the spirit of it twisted to: hard luck, what grant are you going to try and nobble next?

Failure when you and others/the collective learns is important. Selfish failure does not help anyone, it encourages skewing of data, hiding results and outright lying. Going back to companies merging, many that invest in companies including organisations like Enterprise Ireland and VCs have plenty of companies on their books that are probably already dead but to save face, are not publicly wound down.

I do wonder has this culture of fear of failure not only slowed or progress and experimenting but also created an even worse scenario where you can have worse failures because of the level of secrecy that happens. And what of all the things learned in them. A secret failure means others will have to trudge through the same stuff too. Can we have a Wikileaks for this stuff?

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Me on Google Drive, Dropbox and Cloud Computing in 2008

Tuesday, January 30th, 2018

Also, I have CloudComputing.ie if you want to acquire it from me.
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Sunday Tribune Jan 2008

At the recent Steve Jobs lovefest known as Macworld, a new super thin laptop was unveiled by Apple – the MacBook Air. While the laptop is just a piece of hardware, it revealed the future of how we will use computers and where we keep our data.

While it was expected Apple was going for a lightweight and thin laptop, many were surprised that the laptop didn’t contain a port to plug it into a computer network and didn’t contain an optical drive. Apple billed it as the thinnest laptop ever. While the Apple fans reacted like pavlov’s dog to the announcement, many others were sceptical and the scepticism grew over time. “We need to plug our laptops into our network.” said the sceptics. “Pfft, it has a wireless connection, connect to the network that way” said the fanboysandgirls. “Laptops still need a drive so you can load software on” added the naysayers and the fanmob pointed out that Apple provided software that allowed you to access the dvd or cd drive of any PC or Mac over a wireless network, once the software was installed. The laptop too doesn’t allow you to eject the battery, something many of us are used to doing if nothing else makes our computer shut off. This laptop was more like the iPod than ever before, a device which really doesn’t want you having a peek at what does on inside.

Apple was one of the first computer companies to drop the use of floppy drives and the rest of the computer world followed eventually. It now seems they think the CD and DVD drive are also dead. With the amount of data we use and store each day increasing drastically every day, even the CD isn’t capable of holding even a fraction of a percentage of our digital data and now too it seems that DVDs are the same. You’d think then that Apple would offer Bluray drives which can store much more on one disk. Apple though is probably thinking a few steps ahead. They now are kings when it comes to distributing music digitally. They’ve made the experience easy and cheap and they have now started to do the same with TV shows, movies and movie rentals. If your hard drive dies, Apple will even allow you to redownload your purchases, though sometimes it might take a little arguing. If Apple help impact on movie piracy by creating a better alternative, the studios and their bottom lines will be happy if media drives which allow the sharing of pirated media are obsolete, that too is a win. But what about moving our data?

A big switch will probably happen down the road thanks to Apple’s links with Google. Google’s CEO sits on the board of Apple and they have worked together on small projects but nothing substantial yet. There’s long been talk that Google will release their internal online storage system to the public. They already allow the public to store 6 gigabytes of email with their Gmail system and the upper limit increases every day, meaning most people will never fill their space. Google too are doing the same for Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents with another Google documents. Apple have very good backup and file-syncing software, so how long before there’ll be an option to backup to your online storage space while all your media goes to your iTunes Google backed storage space?

The MacBook Air is another step closer to what is now being billed “cloud” computing where our data will reside on servers, somewhere on the planet and very probably in Ireland judging by the amount of data centres being built here by Google, Amazon, Microsoft et al. Goodbye cables, scratched disks and virus infections and hello to total data portability. Once we have quality broadband of course.

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And here I am predicting the Facebook Ad system

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2018

August 2007 in the Sunday Tribune:

Google are one of the most powerful technology companies ever and are the undisputed King of search with many pretenders to their throne. So why is a social networking site slightly better than mySpace or Bebo going to potentially be their most serious threat ever and not Microsoft, Yahoo! or Ask.com?

The hottest tech website this year so far has been Facebook. What once was a website dedicated to American college students proudly displaying their drunken pics and videos has now gained so much mindshare that even Rupert Murdoch, owner of Facebook rival mySpace has publicly stated he wishes mySpace were more like it. Individuals and businesses are flocking to join the latest online hotspot but the site isn’t so hot with search engines.

Unlike other social networking sites, Facebook does not allow search engines to come in and snoop around and catalog all the media being created and consumed inside this massive online community. For search engines like Google who are proud of their ability to monitor the web for newly uploaded content and display it in their search results as quickly as 15 minutes later, the inability to access a vibrant and energetic community creating millions of new pieces of data every day makes Google less powerful and less useful. Google’s motto of “organizing the world’s information” might need to add “except the data of 50 Million Facebook users”.

As with all social networks, their shine fades and people will move on to the next bright young thing. Being accutely aware of this, Facebook started giving developers access to the technology behind the site, allowing anyone to build applications which could plug directly into the Facebook. In one bold move Facebook turned itself into the web’s version of a lego set, where anyone could build any kind of creation on top of it. This new open “platform” is only around a short few months but already 1000s of new web applications have been built for Facebook which in turn has attracted millions more people to the website, causing them to create even more content Google can’t get to but the Facebook search engine can. Search companies see Facebook as a giant blackhole on the web because these Facebook applications suck in the world wide web but no data ever escapes back. Facebook now offers all their own content on top of everything you can get elsewhere online, so there is no need to leave.

If facebook offers everything to their users, then people will spend less time on the open web, which will naturally impact on Google and their ad revenues. With Google properties and partner sites getting used less, this is going to impact on Google ad revenue. Google as well as being a search company is the most successful online ad company ever and much of this is down to their relevance technology which matches the most suitable ad to whatever webpage is being viewed.

If Facebook emulated Google’s history and used an ad system like Google’s but tied into the detailed profiles of millions of Facebook people, they would easily out-Google Google. Ads on Facebook could be far more relevant than anything Google could offer, ecnouraging ad companies to flock to Facebook and pay a premium on ads, netting Facebook a fortune and hurting Google yet again.

With Google bloodied and battered from losing market share and ad revenue, Facebook could do one final thing to seal Google’s fate: Enable outside search. Facebook could build their own Google clone into Facebook offering internal and external search, tailored to the preferences of each individual with ads equally tailored. People currently speculate that Google might buy Facebook but maybe Facebook will end up buying Google?

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Me on the iPhone in 2007

Tuesday, January 16th, 2018

Found some old articles I wrote for the Sunday Tribune and ENN.
This is one about the iPhone before it came out and whether it will decide telecoms standards and destroy the competition.
May 2007:

So far just Steve Jobs from Apple and material girl Madonna have Apple iPhones but that still hasn’t stopped people from deciding that the iPhone is better than their own phone. The iPod generation has a lot of faith in the Apple brand. Apple has yet to disclose what wireless broadband option will be in the European release of the iPhone in November. Could a brand alone decide whether WiMax, Wifi or 3G is going to be the most popular wireless technology in the next few years?

In a survey done recently by Strategy Analytics, 90% of mobile phone owners said that the Apple iPhone was superior to their current handset. While the iPhone does appear to have some superior aspects such as a large display, a built-in iPod and a touch-screen interface, the startling thing about the survey was that nobody surveyed had actually used the iPhone but just watched a video about it. Apple predicts they’ll see 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson were already worried about the iPhone but this survey has probably helped give more of them sleepless nights. Phone manufacturers shouldn’t be the only ones to be worried. Billions of euros have been invested in Wifi, WiMax and 3G broadband which are all types of wireless broadband and if Apple becomes the most popular phone manufacturer it will mean they could call the shots on wireless broadband in Europe and delegate the other two technologies to the could-have-been section in the history books.

In America, Apple has signed an exclusive deal with AT&T to be the mobile provider for the iPhone. The wireless options for the iPhone are WiFi and EDGE wireless broadband. EDGE is also known as 2.75G network technology, an inferior version of the 3G broadband that is on offer in Europe. For the launch of the European iPhone, Apple is keeping their cards very close to their chest on what wireless technology they’ll use. Europe’s biggest mobile phone networks have been courting Apple to get an exclusive deal with them for the iPhone. Vodafone, 3, O2 owner Telefonica and many others are all jumping up and down shouting “pick me”. While 3G technology is the most popular form of wireless broadband in Europe, WiMax technology is also being used in some locations in Europe. WiMax also has considerable backing from Motorola, Intel and Clearwire.

3G has been available in Ireland now for a few years and consumers are set to benefit from a looming price war between o2, Vodafone and 3 after 3 dropped the monthly cost of their mobile broadband service to €19.99 a month. WiMax still hasn’t taken off here though Irish Broadband and eircom have been trialing it of late. eircom also have a 3G licence which they recently acquired so their options are open. Digiweb have also been talking about using yet another technology to offer mobile broadband. If the Deus ex Machina that is the iPhone impacts on the telecoms market the way the iPod forced massive changes in the music industry then fortunes could be won or lost on the whim of Apple.

A few decades ago, a format war occurred between betamax and VHS and betamax ended up losing despite it being a superior format. Once again we could have a war of technologies where it is not about which is the best technology but about the power of a brand, the twist this time is that the brand that decides the fate of these technologies is a total outsider. While Apple must be a waking nightmare to everyone in telecoms, have you heard that Google is building a phone…

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