Archive for June, 2006

Geotagging photos in Zooomr made simple

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 22/6/2006
in Technology
. 0 Comments

Via Thomas Hawk, I found this handy tutorial on how to geotag your photos for Zooomr.

This is useful if you want people to be able to see where your photo was taken. In Zooomr geotagged photos appear with a Google map (including satellite imagery) of the location the photo was shot.

For example see this shot I took of a Red Panda in Fota Wildlife Park.

Any questions for Thomas Hawk?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 21/6/2006
in Interviews, PodLeaders, Podcasting and Technology
. 3 Comments

Thomas Hawk is an investment advisor in a non technology related field but it is not for that that he is known. Tom is far better known as a digital media and technology enthusiast - specifically, Tom is extremely well known for the photographs he uploads to Flickr. Tom posts several photos a day, all of professional quality. Last time I looked he had 5,599 photos uploaded. I thought I was doing well with my 200 photos! How he does that and keeps down a day-job is beyond me!

Now Tom has announced that he is going to work for zooomr. Zooomr? Zooomr is the new competitor to Flickr. It is pretty feature bare at the minute but Tom promises more features to come:

Zooomr is nowhere near where it needs to be today. Much of the best functionality is coming in version 2.0 due out early next month.

Tom also says that this does not end his relationship with Flickr - he will still be posting photos there.

I’m interviewing Tom this Friday evening for a PodLeaders podcast. We will be talking about the future of digital photography, digital media in general and anything else that may arise in the questions! If you have questions you’d like me to put to him, feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll ask him.

Where angels dare to tread!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 21/6/2006
in Technology
. 4 Comments

At the recent IT@Cork Web 2 conference, reference was made by Fergus Burns to the difficulties startups have raising funds in Ireland. He asked the question “how many VCs are in the audience?” - there were none. As Fergus said, that tells its own story.

Things may be starting to change however. In his post on Irish Entrepreneurism Shel Israel noted that

The venture issue is another story and it is the one where I see change happening sooner and faster.

Now I come across an organisation which seems like a perfect fit for this need - Business Angels Partnership. The partnership works with startups to put together a business plan to present to its panel of business angels. The partnership is a not-for-profit so they don’t take any of the funding from the startup.

The funding provided is seed capital (100k-300k) early stage investment. No customer is required of the startup (although I assume it wouldn’t hurt the proposal!).

It sounds like an ideal proposition. For the angel investor, the partnership presents them with a qualified set of business proposals to look over and for the startup, they receive help putting the proposal together and get introduced to angel investors.

Win, win! Anyone know of anyone who has gone through this and did they win the lotto get funded?

Blueface won’t let me make outgoing calls

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 21/6/2006
in RSS, Security, Technology and blueface
. 7 Comments

I have an account with Blueface - Blueface is a VOIP provider. For €19.99 per month I am supposed to get 1,000 minutes of calls to over 20 countries. All good, so far. The only issue is that for some bloody reason, at the end of every month my credit is deleted and I can no longer make outgoing calls.

Two problems here, in the first place, I should be able to carry the unused minutes I have paid for over into the next month and second, since I have signed a direct debit form, the money should go out of my account, pay for the next month and there should be no interruption to my service.

Come on guys, get with the program or lose a customer. Fast.

UPDATE:

I received the following email from Blueface support:

can you switch off the modem and ATA for 30 secs and then switch them back on and leave them for 5 mins.
if it still doesn’t work thrn let me know.
everything is connected fine and your ATA is registered on our server.

Of course that tells me nothing. I tried turning both the router and ATA off several times today and that didn’t fix it then - why was this time different?

Shel Israel loves Cork!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/6/2006
in IT@Cork and Web 2.0
. 3 Comments

And why wouldn’t he? It is where all the cool kids go. Dublin is soooo 1990’s!

Shel was in Cork recently at the IT@Cork Web 2.oh! conference. He has written up his impressions of the state of entrepreneurialism in Cork (mostly good) and has now started to sport the People’s Republic of Cork t-shirt that Pat Phelan gave him - dowtcha Shel boy! Corcaigh Abú!

Photo credit Brian Oberkirch

Podcasting partnership

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/6/2006
in Podcasting and Technology
. 3 Comments

Ed Byrne sent me a mail a few days ago to let me know about an rft (request for tender) on the Irish Government’s procurement website etenders.ie. Ed sent it to me because the rft is for a Podcasting Pilot for the East border region and Ed is aware of my significant involvement in Podcasting.

This does sound like an interesting proposal (and I note Paul in FirstPartners has also posted about this tender). However, I think it is beyond me alone (I’d need a partner to do this), if only to deal with the amount of paperwork required by government agencies.

Anyone interested in doing loads of paperwork while I swan around the country recording stuff?

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