Monthly Archive for June, 2007

Nokia N95 availability in Ireland

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 22/6/2007
in mobile
. 8 Comments

I was looking around this morning for Irish mobile operators who stock the Nokia N95.

  • I asked O2 and they said they will be stocking it in a number of weeks and couldn’t give me an idea of a price point. However, I have it from an unofficial source that they will offer it for €399 for the Active Life 250 plan.
  • I asked 3Ireland and they told me that it had failed their network tests and so they wouldn’t be selling it for the moment! and
  • I asked Vodafone and Vodafone are selling it currently. The shop I was in (Oliver Plunkett St., Cork) didn’t have any in stock but can order it in. For the Perfect Fit 200 plan they sell the N95 for €439.

Online it is available from Expansys for €739.95 and from Mobilefly from €619.32

Sky Handling Partners engage in fraud and libel against blogger? - contd

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 21/6/2007
in Blogging
. 2 Comments

Sky Handling Partners have a shitstorm on their hands.

Yesterday someone in their organisation committed computer fraud (a criminal offense)  and libel against Damien Mulley - seemingly in revenge for a post he published where he outlined how poorly they treated him after losing his luggage!

Now, instead of trying to engage with Damien. Instead of contacting him and saying, “Look Damien, we’re really sorry about this - what can we do to make it right?” Or “Look Damien, we dropped the ball and you had a bad customer experience, we know we have issues and are working to address them. Would you like to be a member of our Customer Service Improvement Committee and work with us to create a better experience for all our clients?”

No.

Instead of that, what do they do? They set their lawyers on him, demanding that he take down his posts about them!

Good God, just who advises these people?

First they piss off one of the more influential people in the country. And then they try to gag him when he complains! Clueless personified.

This is likely to be a real Man bites Dog. We are used to hearing stories of Blogger sued by Large Corporation but this looks increasingly likely to be the first Large Corporation sued by Blogger story.

Go for it Damien.

How to increase traffic to your blog

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 21/6/2007
in Blogging and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

One of the questions which comes up often when I am giving talks about blogs is how to increase traffic to your blog.

Well, Trent Hamm has written a 10-step program which he followed to take his blog  from 0 to 12,000 subscribers in six months.

There are some great tips in there - I especially like the ‘Listen to Del.icio.us’ point:

The most valuable content that a blogger can create is the type of content that readers want to come back to time and time again and also that they want to share with others. These pieces will continually provide value to you, and the surest way to identify such content is to know how many people have saved a particular post at del.icio.us. I keep track of this by using Feedburner’s site statistics package and enabling the “flare” that shows this information. Posts that have del.icio.us bookmarks are usually the ones I use as guidelines for what works on my blog - if I try something different and no one bookmarks it, I usually realize that it’s a bad idea. I’ve found that time and time again, del.icio.us is the best barometer of good content.

Absolutely agree, Del.icio.us is a phenomenally powerful filter for quality material. It is another Mechanical Turk in action.

Sky Handling Partners engage in fraud and libel against blogger?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/6/2007
in Blogging and customer service
. 5 Comments

Sky Handling Partners lost Damien Mulley’s bag recently.

When Damien called to complain, they lied to him on the phone and showed a level of customer contempt which begs the question of how they are still in business.

Damien blogged about his treatment by them and their poor customer relations.

What do they do in return?

They sign him up for a load of gay dating websites with, as Damien put it in his own post, “rather interesting profile descriptions” - I can only imagine.

Damien phoned them to ask them about this. When he was getting nowhere he reminded them that:

signing up to dating websites using my details was fraud and I could happily call the Gardai and let them sort it out. Quoting from Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act,. 2001 to the lady seemed to make her take the matter seriously. I also pointed out I felt that posting untrue details about me on at least 3 websites was not on, especially what was written and I said I felt I was libeled

Fraud is a criminal offense so Damien would be well within his rights to call the Gardaí and have them investigate. The fact that he feels he was libeled means that he can sue as well.

Sky Handling Partners have exposed themselves to being sued for libel and a criminal investigation for fraud.

Why didn’t they just apologise?

Using I.T. to add green power to the network

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/6/2007
in Global Warming, carbon neutrality, cix and climate change
. 6 Comments

The problem with wind power is that its production is variable and difficult to predict. From the perspective of a power supply company, such a supplier is unreliable and likely to de-stabilise the power network.

For instance, at 2am in Ireland, when the demand for electricity is near its lowest, if a 40mph wind is blowing across the country, wind can be supplying up to 30% of the demand. However, if the wind picks up to 50mph, the wind farms shut down to protect their mechanisms and suddenly you lose 30% of your supply! The electricity supply companies have to scramble to bring power stations online to meet the sudden fall off.

In CIX, we have come up with a strategy for Data Centre’s to act as a flywheel for electricity supply companies. This will allow the supply companies to greatly increase the amount of green energy they buy. And if the Data Centre’s are burning biodiesel then you are in a win-win situation .

It seems we are not alone in our thinking - Google, no-less, has come up with a similar strategy using cars! Yes cars. You’d think that with all their data centres they’d use them in the way we propose but they have decided to go the ‘vehicle to grid’ route for now.

Google’s strategy is modify hybrid cars so that they can consume power from the grid. These new ‘plug-in hybrids’ achieve 70-100mpg.

These plug-in hybrids take power from the grid overnight at times of low demand, say. Then the batteries in these cars, which store electricity, can ’sell’ electricity back to the grid at times of high demand.

Check out the Google video on this to see what I mean:

A cute idea but one which would have to achieve massive scale before making a difference, I suspect.

Recyclable, transparent ink cartridges

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/6/2007
in hardware
. 0 Comments

As a follow-on from yesterday’s post about hacking inkjet printer cartridges - in retrospect, a much better solution would be for printer manufacturers to make recyclable, transparent  ink cartridges which warn when your ink is running low but only stop printing when you actually run out of ink!

Now what are the chances of that happening?

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