Monthly Archive for September, 2006

Yahoo’s open hackday

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/9/2006
in Web 2.0
. 1 Comment

Yahoo’s first open Hackday is starting this coming Friday (29th) in Sunnyvale California. Upcoming.org has more details including details on how to register.

Michael Arrington is MC’ing the event and good friend Salim Ismail is one of the judges.

Apparently there is a surprise band showing up as well - no I can’t confirm it is U2!

The irony of it

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/9/2006
in Mac, Windows and mobile
. 1 Comment

James has a post extolling the virtues of the new Nokia N95 - me, I’m sick and tired of Nokia’s lack of support for non-Windows platforms.

Any Nokia you buy only has Windows apps for synchronisation and any firmware updates need to be done over a serial cable (ruling out Macs).

The hilarious thing about Nokia’s slavish devotion to the Windows platform is that Microsoft themselves has banned their employees from buying Nokia phones. Microsoft encourage their employees to buy smart phones using Windows mobile edition and Nokia uses the Symbian OS.

Really disappointed

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/9/2006
in Personal
. 5 Comments

I’m gutted.

A job opportunity I have been cultivating for about four months now, fell through today. It would have been really sweet too.

Ah well, can’t win ‘em all. Back to the drawing board!

Jajah launches half-baked mobile product

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/9/2006
in Technology, Telecoms and voip
. 7 Comments

Jajah launched a new VOIP product for mobile phones overnight.

The story was broken by our own Pat Phelan and followed up by BusinessWeek and Mike Arrington.

There are a number of problems with the product (I suspect they launched to deadline rather than launching when they had fully tested). The most obvious one I have heard is that the download link doesn’t work for the mobile client application and indeed when I tried to download the version for my Nokia N70, it attempted to download the wrong file type (.sis instead of .zip).

Jajah download error.

I did make a call to another Jajah user using the web interface but the call dropped after around 20 seconds - presumably ‘cos I had burned up my 50c credit. 50c in 20 seconds of a call (or $1.50 per minute)? That doesn’t seem like much of a cost saving to me - quite the opposite. Especially considering calls to other Jajah users are supposed to be free.

I suceeded to download with the OTA option (over the air). The app installed successfully on the phone but now I don’t know what to do next. Nor can I find anywhere on the site to tell me how I configure which calls go out over Jajah and which go over GSM. Seemingly Jajah decides that for you - well, if my Jajah experience so far is anything to go by, I’d prefer to be making those decisions myself, thanks.

My advice, wait until they get it right (could be a while yet!).

Noel Dempsey - Ireland’s minister for broadband suppression

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/9/2006
in Broadband
. 1 Comment

This is the face in incompetence in Ireland. This is the face of Ireland’s Minister for broadband suppression.

Ireland's minister for broadband suppression

This is the face of the minister of communications in Ireland who has presided over Ireland’s languishing:

14th in the EU15 for broadband penetration. That’s the same place we were in 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002 etc. etc.

Congratulations minister. Under-achievers everywhere bow down before you in awe.

[Update] - Just came across this great site about the minister.

52mb broadband for <$32 per month?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/9/2006
in Broadband
. 5 Comments

Damien posted the following table of international broadband data from the ITU

International broadband comparisons

Notice Japan has 50mb broadband for less than $32 per month?

According to Damien the comparable Irish figures are:

eircom broadband business plus - 4MB - €107.69 inc vat
eircom broadband business enhanced - 5MB - €204 inc vat

Digiweb Metro Plus - 5MB - €78.65
Digiweb Metro Xpress - 8Mb - €163.35

The Irish minister for communications broadband suppression should be shot or at least fired for gross incompetence.

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