Monthly Archive for May, 2007

Just arrived in Copenhagen

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 30/5/2007
in cix and speaking
. 1 Comment

I have just arrived in Copenhagen for Reboot 9.0.

I’m giving a talk tomorrow at 12:20 on “Reducing Information Technology’s ever-increasing carbon footprint”. This is in the context of the work we are doing building a hyper energy-efficient data centre in CIX.

There’s a meetup organised for tonight which I will be going along to. If you see me there, come up and say “Hi!”

Just published second video podcast!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 29/5/2007
in PodLeaders, Podcast, Podcasting, review and video
. 8 Comments

I have just published my second video podcast - an interview with Jan Blanchard of touristr.

I got loads of great feedback on my first vidcast and I tried to take as much of it on board, as possible.



Click To Play

As always, please feel free to leave feedback in the comments.

Callpedia

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/5/2007
in Web 2.0
. 6 Comments

I came across Callpedia the other day.

It is an interesting idea -

  1. you text a query to CallPedia’s text number (+353873204111)
  2. you wait a minute or so and then
  3. you phone CallPedia (+353766020331) and it reads out the WikiPedia entry for your query term

I can see this being great in a situation where you are away from your laptop and need to get info quickly (sales meeting, in the pub chatting someone up, etc.).

However, the voice at the other needs a bit of work. At the minute, it reads out the Wikipedia entry in a complete monotone giving no modulations for grammar so it can be difficult to discern the meaning of the text. And don’t get me started on their excuse for a website!
Still with a bit of work…

There is a reason I rarely use Xing

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/5/2007
in social networks
. 12 Comments

Xing is the new name of what was openbc - it is a business networking site analogous to LinkedIn but with a more European focus.

It should be useful for me then. I should be using it all the time. I don’t. I use it extremely rarely.

Why? It has one of the most anal login reminder systems I have yet come across. I can never remember the random password assigned to my account so I have to go through a series of emails with the site to get a new random password. Why does it take more than one email to do this? And why not include info in the emails on how to change your password on the site?

Come on guys, this is not rocket science. Other sites have solved this issue.

Make your login procedures easier and people might start using you more.

As it is, I’m off back to LinkedIn.

How to get a Nokia N95 for review

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/5/2007
in mobile
. 11 Comments

I saw a couple of Nokia N95’s recently and they look like a really nice handset.

I’d love to do a review of the N95 and maybe even a comparison between the N95 and my E65 (a bit like I compared the E65 and my old N70 - except more detailed!).

Does anyone know how I would go about getting an N95 for review?

Startup 2.0

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 25/5/2007
in video
. 1 Comment

Startup 2.0 concluded last night with the awards followed by good food, great conversations and a drink or two (ahem!).

If you haven’t already heard, the results were:
1st Sclipo
2nd 5min
3rd Properazzi

and joint 4th placed were Trivop and 11870.com.

All the finalists had fantastic offerings and choosing amongst them would have given Solomon a headache! I went out with the guys from 5min.com afterwards (amongst others) and had great fun with them. I love their application and think they are going to do really well with it.

One interesting observation was that four of the five finalists were either entirely video based or had a strong video element to their product.

All credit to Jose Antonio del Moral for running a superb event.

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