Fluffy Links – Monday June 16th 2014

June 16th, 2014

Brunch options Cork. The definitive list.

The media covered this Employment Tribunal story as one where someone that was on Facebook all day at work couldn’t be fired. Her appeal was upheld because she didn’t have a contract at all, let alone one that told her how to behave at work and there was no social media policy and she wasn’t supplied with company disciplinary procedures. Make your staff sign fair contracts and have policies in place and follow them. Not that difficult. Shocking that a company with 35 employees was doing this.

Draw three circles.

Digital Labour conference in NY.

SWEATSHOPS, PICKET LINES, AND BARRICADES will bring together designers, labor organizers, theorists, social entrepreneurs, historians, legal scholars, independent researchers, cultural producers and perspectives from workers themselves to discuss emerging forms of mutual aid and solidarity.

FDIY. Fucking Do It Yourselves. Journalism grads set up their own paper instead of waiting for a job to come to them. You graduated a year ago and have been looking for a job since? What personal projects have you done over that time? None? Have you volunteered somewhere? No? Wow, I so want to hire you because oh how motivated you are. Set up your own data analytics company, set up your own sales techniques company, volunteer, set up your own service that helps people make up excuses. Fucking DIY. Also see: And?

A better approach for trying to get corporate sponsorship if you’re an NGO. “Because CHARITY” doesn’t cut it anymore.

Pixel art Star Trek game. Yes please.

Fuck Coderdojo and their Billie Barrie school of coding where parents want their pension to appear via pressings on a keyboard. Linus Torvalds says steady on. Seriously, you do realise you are pushing for the net decade’s call centre jobs with this attitude, right?

Jeff Bezos doesn’t say much and his measured utterances are always gold. Signal, not a lot of noise.

Marc Andreessen says a lot, a lot. Including calling Snowden a traitor. Still, some great thoughts and his software will eat the world essay is one of my favourite things ever.

The YouTube Playbook for creators and now the Kickstarter handbook.

We really are poor at budgeting even after a long recession.

Posted in Fluffy, irishblogs | Comments Off on Fluffy Links – Monday June 16th 2014

Fluffy Links – Monday June 9th 2014

June 9th, 2014

The Social Media Awards happened on Thursday. They were the biggest and best yet with 600+ people packing into the Bord Gais Energy Theatre, Rick has some photos. Rick and I are still in shock 3 days later at how amazing it was. Thanks in no small part to Bord Gais Energy getting us a killer venue and putting on a killer “sock walk”.

Easy when you think about it, a lot of thought went into making this easy though. 50 Ways to Get a Job. From all the various stages in a job you might be at.

Beautiful design. Microsoft book welcoming Nokia to the fold.

Free yourself from email. Some handy tips.

Not a real live product yet but these stairs slide things look awesome.

RYOT delivers hard hitting news by hijacking another news story. Take the Kardashian/West wedding, infuse it with other world issues. It comes across as rather shitty to be honest. Let them have their vulgar wedding. Sneer. Here’s a proper? story from them.

Nice way of visually measuring jeans on a website. We really need to move away from the flat way we design retailer websites.

Weh weh, when you’re old and wrinkly your tattoos will look horrible.

Genderize. API that scans first names and figures out the gender.

Lovely photography and free to use for commercial and non-commercial uses.

Hello stories, goodbye ads. Well no, they’re still ads. They’re kind of advertorial really.

Posted in Fluffy, irishblogs | Comments Off on Fluffy Links – Monday June 9th 2014

ISME 2014 Survey – Baloney from Banks and Govt on lending to SMEs

June 3rd, 2014

ISME Survey. PDF.

  • 52% of companies who applied for funding in the last three months were refused credit by their banks, a slight improvement on the 54% refusal rate, seen in the previous quarter.
  • 32% of respondents had requested additional or new bank facilities in the last 3 months, a reduction from 39% in the previous quarter and lowest demand since June 2011.
  • On average, the decision time has increased to just over 4 weeks and the wait to drawdown has increased from 3 to 5 weeks.
  • 11% of respondents who required bank finance did not apply for various reasons, a decrease from 17% in the previous quarter.
  • Of those 42% were actually discouraged by bank from making application and another 33% were afraid of a reduction in existing facilities.
  • 50% of respondents are customers of their bank for over 20 years, while 85% are over 5 years.
  • Of the 48% approved for funding, only 43% have drawn down the finance either fully or in part.
  • 46% of requests were for term loans, with 34% for overdrafts, or alterations to existing facilities, while invoice discounting/factoring accounted for 5% of requests, with 20% requesting leasing.
  • 60% of respondents had increases in bank charges imposed, while 20% have suffered increased interest.
  • Reductions in overdrafts were demanded of 23% of SMEs, down from 35% in the previous quarter.
  • 71% state that the Government is having either a negative or no impact on SME lending.
  • 74% of owner/managers are in favour of an alternative Strategic Investment Bank.
  • Only 32% of respondents are aware of the code of conduct for business lending to SMEs.

Posted in business, Ireland | Comments Off on ISME 2014 Survey – Baloney from Banks and Govt on lending to SMEs

Fluffy Links – Monday May 26th 2014

May 26th, 2014

What a weekend. For Labour. What a weekend. For hypocrites and hangers-on to be punished.

Ryan Tubridy and women.

Product Hunt is like a league table of new startup ideas. All of these are real! But such bullshit bingo with their pitches.

Dark Patterns. Creepy, sneaky, shady ways websites get you to share too much of your data.

This piece on subscription TV not actually performing well has a nugget that to me is far more interesting. YouTube buys Twitch, a site where you can watch video game plays. For a billion dollars. A whole sub culture that a lot of industry types seem to have missed.

The youngins on Twitch would rather watch live videogame action. About 18 million U.S. viewers watched the final game of the 2013 World Series. But Twitch drew 32 million for the “League of Legends” world championship last fall, according to SuperData Research. Boom!

Mistakes Made. Startup-type lessons. Insightful.

New mini feature on Facebook Pages for cafés and restaurants.

Water leak reporting using social media in Brazil. Could work here too.

“A quarter of all songs on Spotify are skipped within the first five seconds” Jim on the Attention Economy.

Pick something to obsess about. It shows you have passion and it allows you to unwind outside of work. Just not My Little Pony.

A conference on email and messaging. Would love to go but U.S. only for now.

Basement Jaxx – Unicorn

Posted in Fluffy, irishblogs | Comments Off on Fluffy Links – Monday May 26th 2014

And now the board of Trinity commissions their own app

May 19th, 2014

After the well received reaction to Trinity changing their logo. Oh right. It now seems that the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin (get used to that) want an iPad app just for their board meetings. The Public Tenders site lists iPad App for Board meetings.

Informally asking and those who dabble in this area think it could cost anywhere from €15k to €25k based on how difficult the “cloud” backend will be.

From the Trinity College iPad app tender

Background & Project Overview

It is desirable for a number of reasons to move to an electronic system of organising and circulating documents for the College Board meetings and for meetings of the Executive Officer Group. Such benefits include environmental gains, financial gains and more efficient use of College resources and staff.

There are a number of ways that the organisation can securely circulate documents. Both commercial options and in-house options can result in savings versus the current processes. Best practice in other educational providers was explored and it was agreed by the Executive Officer Group (EOG) that the purchase of a hosted solution should be explored.

Reminds me of Dave Morin and the “bespoke app” he had made so he could communicate with his secretary.

I guess an app is needed because nobody has already made one. Oh. Hang. On.

But hey CLOUDCOMPUTINGAPPBUZZWORD!

Here’s one take on that new Trinity logo too from Conor Walsh.
New Trinity Logo

Posted in business, technology | 4 Comments »

“Square acquired by Visa” – Will Secret, Whisper influence the news?

May 19th, 2014

Woke up this morning to this:
John Wilshire Square bought by Visa

How can you trust a system that allows any rumour, lie or planned defamation to be published? Well, American laws for one. It’s a hot startup and has millionaire backers for two. Plenty of startups that do very dodgy things are left unchecked for a while in case there’s a chance they make money and others can profit from it. Ireland would knock and attack an idea like this, bludgeon it with negativity until we kill it. The American way is to encourage success so you can come in later and try and get a cut too.

Valleywag loves Secret. And some really good information has been leaked out through the app. And crazy fun stuff too. It was a Secret post that eventually unraveled the toxic truth behind how Github operated in such an anti-woman brogrammer way.

And the Evernote acquisition rumour was so far untrue. If you read this hilarious Tumblr, most of the rumours are untrue. Yet every now and then… Something like this too would be a perfect hoax, it’s well known that Square is trying to sell itself and is failing to do that. Visa is already and investor and of course the Square founder is already well known for running Twitter. Hoaxes have to have reality as a base.

For hunting stories though, tiny bits of information, rumours that are mostly untrue but with a tiny amount of truth are things you can use to chip away at a story. A lot of investigative type stories are almost negotiations or trades. Approach a source with a little bit of information, see will they give you a tiny bit more when you offer than tiny slice of truth. Take that, move on, uncover more with that and chip away even more until eventually you have a solid foundation for a story and then are confident to approach the main sources you can use/you want for your story.

An hour after the Twitter chatter, nothing has happened to that Square piece. An hour with a rumour or bit of information is a long time in media and a very long time in tech media. But the Paltrow/Martin marriage on the rocks rumour was weeks on Whisper before the conscious uncoupling became a reality. Nieman Labs even goes through the use of apps like these for journalism. Journalism with a small j, mind. Buzzfeed has even inked a content deal with Whisper. Well it certainly won’t be old-skool media would would find that distasteful and would take two years to come to that decision too.

Posted in business, irishblogs, newsroom.ie, technology | Comments Off on “Square acquired by Visa” – Will Secret, Whisper influence the news?

Fluffy Links – Monday May 19th 2014 – A media special

May 19th, 2014

Oh, a very media heavy Fluffy Links this week.

Had a post in draft about the UTV annual report but last night the Sunday Times tweeted they had a story about the same in their Sunday edition. So I put the post live there and then. I was holding it for the Monday when it would reach more people but maybe I need to cop on given I keep talking about ignoring news cycles and the like and to get things out correctly and first yet here I was holding on to it.

And on that. An NPR journalist tweeted out some great information about the firing of New York Times editor Jill Abramson. First out the traps, great. Just tweets, no link to a holding page or page at all. So Vox “storified” the tweets instead of NPR and in a way got the traffic/views for it. NPR wrote a post about things they learned from this. Read it.

An internal report on the future of the New York Times and that was critical of their digital work also leaked out this week. At first a crappy scanned in version appeared, then a full proper digital version. This post highlights 30 points that everyone that works in digital and cares about the future of all types of media should read. To be honest for those already working in digital, this is already obvious. So lots of new unseen ideas for Irish media!

The home page is dead. Well actually, the home page compared to all traffic to your site is dead but it’s no without a heartbeat.

Meanwhile, Eoin Purcell isn’t hugely positive about the physical book market in Ireland.

via Rick. More media thingies. The Beeb are using Whatsapp and Wechat for news distribution to the public around the Indian elections.

Web app to allow you to connect directly and pitch stories to journalists. Just Reach Out.

Guardian highlights great iPhone photo apps that can really make your photos better quality. Catch more in a photo with them.

Posted in Fluffy, irishblogs | Comments Off on Fluffy Links – Monday May 19th 2014 – A media special

Whither Simply Zesty? When £3M turns into £200k valuation

May 17th, 2014

Update: This is in the Sunday Times tomorrow so publishing this now and not Monday.

So the Simply Zesty blog is dead since April as is their Twitter account. This week UTV’s 2013 report came out and it was all very positive, mostly but…

So it looks like UTV have written off close to £3M in “value” from their Simply Zesty acquisition. The shareholders got the initial £1.6M in cash and then the other £3M in consideration was written down in 2012, 2013 and moved to zero for 2014. Last year UTV bought the remaining shares off everyone for £200k and didn’t wait until 2017. They were bragging about the savings from that in the report. Uh lads, you were the ones that agreed a £4M valuation.

Report:

From the page numbered 104 in doc but is actually page 106

“The acquisition of the rights from the previous corporate shareholder On 14 January 2013 the Group entered into an agreement with a previous corporate shareholder of Simply Zesty Limited to pay a cash consideration of £200,000 in settlement of their rights in relation to the estimated contingent consideration arising on the acquisition of Simply Zesty Limited. The fair value of the related estimated contingent consideration amounted to £1,031,000″

Simply Zesty £3M write down

Other “highlights” from the report

As outlined in the Strategic Report, as part of the restructuring the Group bought out the contingent consideration rights of the remaining stakeholders within Simply Zesty for nominal sums. The estimated fair value of this contingent consideration amounted to £1,760,000.

At 31 December 2013 the contingent consideration was valued as £Nil

“it also involved the buyout of the contingent consideration from certain stakeholders within Simply Zesty which resulted in a credit on the release of the remaining fair value of this financial liability. The overall impact on the Group’s results for the year was not material“

“Free cash flow from operations decreased by £1.7m to £15.7m (Restated 2012: £17.4m), reflecting the decrease in EBITDA of £3.2m, and a £2.9m non cash gain arising on the buyout of contingent consideration rights held by the previous shareholders in Simply Zesty as part of Group fundamental restructuring, the costs of which are included within EBITDA also realising significant gains on the buy out of contingent consideration arising on the acquisition of Simply Zesty in 2012.”

“This restructuring also saw the merger of Tibus Digital Agency with Simply Zesty to deliver as a full service digital agency under the Simply Zesty brand. The integration of these businesses resulted in a change in the management within Simply Zesty and consequently the value of customer relationships was deemed to be impaired and the remaining carrying value of £188,000 was written off.”

Posted in business, irishblogs | Comments Off on Whither Simply Zesty? When £3M turns into £200k valuation

Fluffy Links – Monday May 12th 2014

May 12th, 2014

A very businessy Fluffy Links today.

Mixtapes, not dead, the media is different though. How teens discover music.

How easy it is to get a fake story in to the news. With every news org copying from each other, this is textbook media manipulation. Course social media will get blamed for it.

One sheeter summaries of books. Summarist. Only 3 books summarised so far

The Peripheral by William Gibson is on the way.

Wrote this back in 2010. The C words that get engagement.

Big fan of MediaRedef after Jim Carroll recommended it. Here Media/Forward suggests ways it can make money. Hint hint to other online and offline publications. Can an email newsletter make money? Yes it can.

The future from those that are building and investing in areas that will define it. Education really needs to be disrupted. Just in tim training and just in time certification please for business skills, old skool university education to ground us for life. All these college courses dictated by bureaucratic industries doesn’t help at all. Now we have a generation of those that can program in Java and have no idea how a programming language can actually work.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s biz partner points out three things that have made them successful over a whole generation of business.

1. Hire good people and trust them.
2. Quickly admit mistakes and scramble out of them.
3. Remove your ignorance by always learning.

8Radio back on air for a few weekends this Summer.

The 12 basic principles of animation from 1930s Walt Disney Studios. Yeah, 1930.

“Many of the ecological  principles found in adaptive cycles  could also be applied to  competitive market environments.” How markets really do follow the same path as natural ecosystems. The Slidedeck really is awful looking but the content is excellent so persevere.

Posted in Fluffy, irishblogs | Comments Off on Fluffy Links – Monday May 12th 2014

Coming soon: Top up your Leap Card with your phone

May 6th, 2014

From the Government Tenders website is a bit of revealing information. A tender has gone out asking for companies to build an NFC system for the Leap Card. The Leap Card is the “integrated” ticketing system, mainly for the Dublin area. The idea with this tender is that you can now top up your Leap Card with your smart phone.

Well, not with all smart phones. Not the one used by most in Ireland – the iPhone. iPhone has yet to support NFC, instead going after iBeacon. But NFC may be on the way. While Android phones are bought more, iPhone users use their phones to do the smart part of the smartphone more. Your website stats will show that. So we could hail this tender as visionary if Apple goes ahead with using NFC in the next while or short-sighted if it does nowhere. Mad how one company can distort perceptions like that.

So here’s the tender:

The National Transport Authority requires an enhancement to introduce the ability to read Leap Card from Smart Phones, and to purchase top-ups and tickets from Smart Phones and then apply the resultant ticket or top-up to the smart card via the NFC functionality on the Smart Phone.

More detail:

The transparent NFC solution aims to provide Leap Card holders, which also have access to a mobile device with suitable NFC capability, a means to:
• Read information from their Leap Card
• Perform a top-up to the electronic purse value on the Leap Card
• Collect a ticket which was purchased on leapcard.ie or taxsaver.ie.
• Collect a purse top-up which was purchased on leapcard.ie.

Great to see smart phones becoming the core of public transport transactions, more of this.

Posted in irishblogs, technology | 2 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »