Archive for the 'IT@Cork' Category

Phew!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 11/10/2007
in Conference, IT@Cork, Web 2.0, cix, data centre and speaking
. 3 Comments

These next few weeks and months are manic busy.

I think I need to clone me!

Congrats to the guys in Jaiku

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 10/10/2007
in IT@Cork, Web 2.0, social media and social networks
. 3 Comments

I see Jaiku were bought by Google yesterday. What is Jaiku? Jaiku is what Twitter would be if it worked reliably and had neat functionality. I’m delighted for them.

If you don’t currently have a Jaiku account then you may be out of luck because in the notification email sent out by Jaiku last night they said:

In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now. But fear not! All our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will continue to be able to invite your friends to Jaiku.

I’m not sure what happens to people who are invited in this period, do they go into a holding pattern, or are they left in but the amount of invites is limited. The faq is no help there.

This is great play by Google who are demonstrating that they have their finger on the pulse. I can’t wait to see what other announcements they are going to make in this space - Robert Scoble is hinting at big news in the Orkut arena in early November.

Jyri Engstrom, Jaiku’s founder gave a great talk at Reboot and I tried to get him to come to speak at the it@cork conference this November. Unfortunately he was busy (now I can see why!). Maybe next year Jyri!

it@cork conference program announced

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 3/10/2007
in IT@Cork
. 3 Comments

As Chair of the organising committee for this year’s it@cork Technology in Business Conference, I’m delighted to announce that the program has been announced and registrations are now open.

The conference is on the 28th of November in the Radisson, Little Island. This year’s theme is Connect and Innovate and we have a spectacular line-up of speakers including

  • Hans Rosling, who’s presentation at the Le Web conference last year was the best I have ever attended, bar none
  • Graham Whitehead (the renowned futurologist who works for BT Exact, the research arm of BT), and
  • Anthony Williams, co-author of the award winning, bestselling business book Wikinomics.

Early registrants will have their name entered into a draw for free copies of Wikinomics.

Monster steals email addresses and spams it@cork membership

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 1/10/2007
in IT@Cork and Referrer Spam
. 6 Comments

This morning one of it@cork’s members forwarded us an email conversation he had with John Burns, Monster’s Business Development Manager in Ireland. We were incredulous when we read it.

It started with an email from Monster’s John Burns to 189 recipients and CC’d to our member (!). Our member replied to John that this was spam and

…coming from Monster, most unprofessional. Worse, you exposed everyone’s email address to one another without their permission

Unbelievably for someone working in an online organisation, Monster’s John Burns seems to be unaware of the data protection legislation and responded to this saying:

These email addresses are part of a networking list from www.itcork.ie and are all available for everyone to see.

I do appreciate your concern chris, (i will keep my eye out for the bloggers!!!)

The legislation surrounding this kind of behaviour is very clear, data can only be used for the purposes for which it is obtained. We in it@cork were obviously naive in publishing the members directory (since taken offline) but that doesn’t confer on anyone permission to harvest that address list and spam them.

The Irish Data protection Commissioner takes a very dim view of this and has the power to levy fines of up to €3,000 per address spammed (so potentially €570,000 in this case).

it@cork is a not-for-profit, IT professionals networking organisation, based in Cork. I am on the steering committee of it@cork, helping out with the running as much as I can in a voluntary capacity.

Congrats Jeff

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 11/9/2007
in IT@Cork and RSS
. 4 Comments

I was delighted to see Jeff Nolan has started to work for NewsGator.

Jeff, who has previously worked for Teqlo and SAP was one of the best speakers we had at the it@cork annual conference last year.

NewsGator, the company he is joining, are the leading RSS client company, powering FeedDemon and NetNewsWire as well as NewsGator. I have used and evangelised NetNewsWire (RSS Reader for Mac) for years until my recent conversion to Google Reader.

To paraphrase Jackie:
Jeff, well done on finding an interesting company to work for. As someone who hasn’t found that yet (hence the continued consultant status), I can imagine how much that means to you.

Delighted for you.

Embedding Google Calendars

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/8/2007
in IT@Cork
. 5 Comments

Spectacular!

I’ve just noticed that it is possible to embed Google Calendars in a blog post or website!

This is going to be very useful for events like the it@cork conference, or multi-week events like the blog training course I delivered a few months back.

I’m sure there are lots of other applications. What would you use it for?

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