Ooops, what a fuck up.
Hello Evening Echo Readers
May 18th, 2006Yes, I do look like a langer in that picture.
You can read more Cork bloggers at Corkblogs.com (site currently offline it seems!)
Some other Cork bloggers are:
Ryan
Dave O’Neill.
Gavin Sheridan.
John Handelaar.
Branedy.
Treasa.
Tom Raftery.
Adam Beecher’s blog.
There are lots of UCC Bloggers too.
If you’re interested in learning about blogs and podcasts and other tech stuff then perhaps sign up to an IT@Cork tutorial.
IT@Cork Geek dinner – June 7th, any takers?
May 18th, 2006Before the June 8th IT@Cork conference there’ll be a geek dinner on the evening of June 7th. Anyone wish to go? It’s a Wednesday evening. Shel Israel, his wife and Salim Ismail should hopefully be about too for this. Nothing too formal. Location and time will fit into place as we get more exact numbers. By the way, the Radisson Hotel has a health spa so bring along the spouse to the day event and treat them to the spa. If any semi-loaded company wants to pay for the meal, or a round or two of drinks then let me know.
Thursday 18th May fluffy links
May 18th, 2006I should get some kind of pink background with feathery borders for these:
Really clever advertising on ATMs, drinks machines and photo ID Machines.
American Govt gives advice to “pre-pregnant women.” Very odd.
Pictures, lots of em where the word “Ooops” gives a good summary of them.
100s of links to music videos from the 80s.
Nice screen casting app for the Mac.
Multipurpose apps that have RSS feed reading capabilities don’t appear to be used much.
Top 10 social network sites and their growth. MySpace is exploding in usage but bebo isn’t anwyhere in the list. Maybe next year.
Do we need an environment more like SiliconValley? Forget Boston or Berlin.
May 18th, 2006Tom Coates gives a summary of the main points from a keynote from Paul Graham called “How American are startups?” and described his views on how SiliconValley breeds success and whether it can be replicated. The main points are below, but I wonder how many of these Ireland has already and do we need to adopt the rest to allow for better entreprenurship?
1. Allows immigration
2. Isn’t a poor country
3. Not a police state
4. High quality universities
5. You can fire people
6. Attitudes that don’t associate ‘working’ with being employed
7. Not anal about business regulations
8. Huge domestic market
9. High levels of funding
10. People comfortable with career switching
Read the comments though. Some very interesting ones including:
And if there’s one giant difference between the Bay Area and London that accounts for the differing startup climates, I’d say that it was cynicism. People in the Bay Area are optimistic about technology to the point of being starry-eyed and they possess a completely unabashed sense of ambition. In the years since I moved to London, I’ve felt a palpable cynicism about technology and about ambition: anyone who says anything grandiose about technology and what you might do with it is apt to be greeted with eye-rolling and pedantic, picky objections.
…
By contrast, the mantra of the San Francisco geek is more like, “Technology kicks so much fucking ass I am about to explode. Soon everyone will realize this.”
…One other major contributor to California’s technology success (especially as compared to Route 128) is that noncompete agreements aren’t enforceable in Cali. That has led to a culture of aggressive poaching and promiscuous job-hopping through which the best and the brightest go from company to company, spreading the best ideas from each. That’s kept things growing very fast in California indeed.
Some of the biggest Web 2.0 success stories have started with no VC, no backing and people working in their spare time to create something “because it’s cool”. In at least some of them, they went live (or at least beta) for months before they ever needed to talk to rich people. Bootstrapping is the new burn rate.
So where do you find people who no longer have to spend their entire life trying to survive? Because isn’t it that which always acts as the trigger for civilisation to move forwards?
Silicon Valley seems to me to have an incredibly interesting social environment – I don’t mean pubs and parties, I mean that you’re surrounded by other people “making a go of it”, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, but trying.
…
The financial and general business-helping ecology seems a lot more diverse in California than it is here. More kinds of venture capital, from the risk-friendly to the risk averse, more places to partner with, more ways to set up, more ways to do business.
100 Best companies to work in Europe – 15 from Ireland, 2 from Ireland in Top 10
May 18th, 200615 Irish companies were in the Top 100 companies to work for in Europe list.
Two of these Irish companies, DePuy and O2 Ireland were in the top 10, with 02 coming tops for Irish entrants.
Special awards included:
Best practices in creating a fun place to work went toGoogle Ireland.
Best Practices for Internal Communication went to Brightwater.
Best Practices for Work-Life Balance to Intel Ireland.
Best Practices for Diversity Management to Abbott Laboratories Ireland Ltd.
Best Practices for employee involvement in Corporate Social Responsibility to GE Commercial Aviation Services.
Other companies in the Top 100 were:
Aitricity.
Children’s University Hospital, Temple Street, Ireland.
Clontarf Castle Hotel, Ireland.
Deloitte Ireland.
Diageo, Ireland.
PEI, Ireland.
Tourism Ireland.
Additional link: The top 100 Irish companies to work for.
Thing is, this is another one of thos pay to play awards. 100 companies entered it in total.
Spam spam spam spam
May 18th, 2006The amount of spam over the past three days hitting the comments is really starting to annoy me. I think I need a better anti-spam plugins.
EDIT: I think in total yesterday I got about 1000 spams on my blog. The spam software picked up most but I still had to manutally kill off a few 100.
IT@Cork to do tutorials on blogging and podcasting and wikis
May 17th, 2006IT@Cork are considering doing tutorials on blogs, podcasts and wikis. Great idea. I wonder is there a way of doing screencasts of these?
Fluffy links for 17th May 2006
May 17th, 2006Feedburner moves into blog ads, not just RSS ads.
See Irish Job alerts on Google Earth and now Irish jobs on Google Maps.
Enda Kenny pisstake posters. Some are even funny.
Via BoingBoing – Get your own customised jacks roll. Anyone’s face you want to wipe your ass with? The possibilities…
India decides to do something about the rural/urban digital divide. Villages who don’t even have reliable electricity are going to get kitted out with broadband. Are we listening DCMNR?
Small Business Forum Report released – More angel investors on way?
May 17th, 2006Executive summary. (PDF doc). Funny thing is I couldn’t find their website SmallBusinessForum.ie with a Google search. That url in fact redirects to a section on Forfas.ie
Some of the recommendations include raising the standard of management capability through the establishment of a Management Development Council, providing knowledge acquisitions grants, making innovation vouchers available to small business and developing a national entrepreneurship policy. They also gripe about broadband!
In an older post I was asking about angel investment in Ireland. Today’s report seems to address this although I have not read all the small print:
Further develop networks of Business Angels in order to encourage investment by private individuals in seed and earlystage businesses. (pg5 of Exec Summary.)