Archive for June, 2007

Charity link meme

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/6/2007
in Personal
. 4 Comments

I hate tag memes and rarely participate in them as I see them as little more than chain letters and time wasters (yeah, I know, bah humbug!).

However, I’ve been tagged by Gavin and Bill to add to this charity link meme. The idea is to improve the page rank of charities in Ireland. If ever there was a good reason to join a tag meme, this is it.

The list of charities so far is:

And the charity I am adding to the list is the extremely deserving
Debra Ireland

Who to tag next? How about -
Pat
Damien
Frank
Ina and
Justin

Foxmarks to launch next great search engine?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/6/2007
in Search Engines
. 2 Comments

Google had a great idea. Order your search results based on the number of times a site is linked to. Brilliant! A link to a site is counted as a vote of confidence in the site’s quality/veracity. And it works because people generally only link to interesting sites.

Foxmarks is a nifty little Firefox plugin which uploads your Firefox bookmarks to a central server, so you can synchronise your bookmarks across machines. Again brilliant - if you typically use more than one computer (one at home and one at work, for example).

I read today on TechCrunch that FoxMarks is going to use the bookmark information which users of the plugin have uploaded, to create a new search engine. Privacy concerns aside, I love it!

This is the 1,157th blog post on this site. I don’t have any numbers on the amount of outward links I have created in those posts but I imagine two per post would be a conservative estimate. So I have created, in the order of 2,300 links on this blog. And I write in and contribute to other blogs as well. Let’s say I have created (again conservatively) a total of 2,500 links.

Now how many sites have I bookmarked? About 160. Therefore, any site I go to the trouble of bookmarking, must be significantly more important than one I simply link to.

Foxmarks are taking the Google model of a link as a vote of confidence and replacing it with the bookmark as a vote of confidence. Will it work? Well, according to Mike Arrington, who got a demo recently:

it definitely has a “wow” factor. Searches for most things ended up with incredible results.

Foxmarks also shows if the results appear on Google and Yahoo, and on what page in the results they appear. For many of the queries, the top result on Foxmarks was quite obviously the perfect result - but it appeared, if at all, deep on the result set for Google and Yahoo. Terms that are likely to have a lot of SEO pollution (ecommerce in particular), the results were strikingly better on Foxmarks v. Google.

Having said all that, Google have their Google Browser Sync application which has similar functionality to Foxmarks currently, so fine tuning their search results with bookmark info should be trivial for them.

I hope they do because getting 1,210,000 results for the search term “Microsoft Hotmail deletes email” is just ridiculous, even considering how bad Hotmail is!

Nokia N95 initial impressions

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 25/6/2007
in Nokia, Telecoms and mobile
. 8 Comments

Courtesy of Paul Giltinan of Choice Communications, I have a loan of a Nokia N95 to try out for the next couple of weeks - excellent!

The first thing which strikes you when you pick up the N95 is how light it is. It is quite bulky (99 x 53 x 21 mm), so you expect it to be heavier than its 120g.

The next thing which hits you is the quality of the 2.6″ screen. At 240 x 320 pixels and up to 16 million colours it is the same resolution as my E65 but because of the larger size, it just looks way better!

A lot has been written about the poor battery life of the N95 but I haven’t found that to be the case. That may be because the N95 and the E65 use the same battery and I am used to its short life (!) but I suspect it has more to do with my not having the Wireless Scanning enabled.

The one time the battery levels did drop sharply was when I was following my Twitter Stream over 3G (instead of the usual WLAN at home).

The GPS application which ships with the phone is of limited use as it can never seem to find the satellites!

I tried a Fring call using the Skype client on the phone today to Conn O’Muinechain but the call quality was appalling and we had to revert to a normal call. This is more likely a problem with Fring, or Fring’s Skype implementation than the N95.

The camera in the phone takes very high quality pics (see photo below) and video but be aware that the 160 onboard memory will run out quickly. You will need to supplement it with a Micro SD memory card (it supports up to 2gb).

The bi-directional slider and the way the screen flips from portrait to landscape automatically is very impressive.

Overall, the N95 is a lovely phone and if I could afford it…

N95 test pic

Apple’s iPhone launch - a disaster in the making?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 25/6/2007
in Telecoms and apple
. 34 Comments

iPhone

The new Apple iPhone is a very desirable bit of kit, no doubt about it. Even at the $499 (4GB) or $599 (8GB) asking price.

I spoke to a contact in Apple about the iPhone which they are launching with AT&T this coming Friday and, from what he said, the launch sounds like it has all the makings of a disaster in the works!

First off the phone is sold brick-locked - in other words the iPhone is dead when you get it. You have to bring it home, hook it up to an Internet connected computer , and activate it online.

Remember, there are 1m of these puppies pre-sold. What happens when 1m people all try to log in to the site to activate their phones around the same time. How well will the activation server infrastructure hold up?

Presumably, if you have a PC, this process also involves the installation of iTunes and Safari (Macs come with these installed).

Then there is the issue of the iPhone being sim-locked. And I don’t just mean that the phone is locked, nope, the sim is locked physically into the phone! It can’t be removed.

Seemingly there is a way to map your existing number to the sim in your iPhone - this will be part of the activation process. But you can’t take your sim out of the phone for any reason. What happens when you want to upgrade to a new phone? No idea. Presumably this will be straightforward if your new phone is another iPhone - but if it is not…

Joy, oh joy, I can see lots of potential for support issues right there.

Keep in mind also that the phone is not being sold to business customers - the AT&T shops are only going to sell the phones to consumers.

Consumers with a good credit record. If you have any history of bad debts, you can forget about getting an iPhone! They won’t sell you one.

Why is the credit record important? Well, if you buy an iPhone, you are signing up to a two year AT&T contract with a minimum spend of $60 per month! $60 per month for two years is $1440. So, after the initial purchase, you are committing to give Apple and AT&T at least another $1440.

So, if you are a technically minded consumer, have access to an Internet connected computer, can logon to the activation site, have a good credit history and a steady income for the next two years, it should be no problem.

I’d hate to be working for AT&T or Apple’s support next weekend!

UPDATE: - I see AppleInsider are reporting that the first shipments of the iPhone have arrived in the US under unprecedented security.

Further Update: Apple have confirmed that activation of the phones is done by the consumer “in the comfort and privacy of their own home or office, without having to wait in a store while their phone is activated” as I mentioned in the post above and that the price plans start at $60 per month, again, as I said above.

LinkedIn to open api - are they too late?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 25/6/2007
in Web 2.0, social media and social networks
. 4 Comments

I wrote a post last week mentioning Facebook’s open api and contrasting it to LinkedIn and today I read that LinkedIn CEO, Reid Hoffman has said that LinkedIn will be opening their api to developers in the next nine months.

This is a necessary move on LinkedIn’s part as they are seeing their users desert their platform and move en masse to Facebook.

Nine months though guys? Come on, surely you can get something together before then. What kind of lead will Facebook have achieved in that time?

Irish mobile broadband becomes more compelling

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 22/6/2007
in Broadband and mobile
. 33 Comments

Several of the Irish mobile operators now have mobile broadband offerings and the offerings are getting more and more compelling!

Irish Mobile Broadband offerings

All the operators are using the same Huawei external USB mobile broadband modem. O2 claim that unlike their competitors, their version will have drivers for Windows Vista when they launch.

The data for O2 is speculative as their offering won’t be officially launched until July 2nd but their roadmap, according to O2 spokesman Kevin Heffernan, is to ramp from an initial 3.6Mbps to 7.2Mbps by year end and then 14.4Mbps next year! Also, initially they were to roll out with a 6Gb download cap but it is now looking increasingly likely that this will be revised up to 10Gb.

O2 are saying that they are positioning this to compete with similar offerings from Vodafone and 3Ireland but if I compare these figures to my current Eircom DSL broadband connection, it is: 3mb, €40 per month (ex VAT), and a 40GB download cap. The biggest difference between the two is the download but I don’t download that much so that shouldn’t be an issue.

As I see it, the O2 mobile broadband product could easily start to replace DSL connections either for home users or for Solo Soho setups. The mobile broadband obviously has the advantage of being mobile so you can take it on the train, for example and work away while traveling! And with Ireland having the most expensive line rentals in Europe (€9 per month more than the EU average), this is one more nail in the coffin of fixed lines here.

O2 are also rolling out an EDGE network which should be fully rolled out by q1 2008 according to Heffernan. This means wherever the 3.6Gb HSDPA (or 7.2 or 14.4) is unavailable, the modem should fall back to EDGE’s semi-respectable 256kb. This is at least twice as fast as GPRS.

Finally, starting in 2008, O2 will start on building a HSDUA network - this will give upload speeds of 14.4 Mbps eventually!

Are DSL’s days numbered in Ireland

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