Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Bringing Silicon Valley to Ireland

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 11/2/2008
in Technology
. 8 Comments

I received an email the other day from xCell Partners, a consultancy firm one of who’s stated aims is “to help bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and Irish tech start-ups”.

They have put together an event that will be on in February, 27th & 29th, in Dublin and Belfast respectively which is all about Bringing Silicon Valley to Ireland. Chris Gill, the President of the Silicon Valley Association of Start-up Entrepreneurs (SVASE) will be hosting the various panel discussions, as well as other people from the various companies and associations.

According to Gareth Coen:

This is the first event of it’s kind in Ireland and we hope that it’ll help facilitate the growing number of Irish Web start-ups. The full details of the event as well as tickets can be found at www.xCellerate2008.com

There is a special coupon code which gives a 20% discount for readers of this blog (”TOM”). The discount is available for the forst 10 readers who sign up with the code.

In Seville for EBE 07

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 22/11/2007
in Conference and Technology
. 2 Comments

I arrived in Seville early this morning for the Eventoblog España 07 (EBE) conference.

My old friend Shel Israel is here with with his (much) better half Paula! Shel is presenting at the conference. I’m really looking forward to catching up with them socially as well as professionally.

This next few days will also be very useful for house hunting and networking for when we move here permanently next year.

Posting will be light for the rest of the week I suspect!

Another device?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 19/11/2007
in Technology
. 6 Comments

Amazon are set to release an electronic book reader called the Kindle today according to NewsWeek.

The device sounds cool, in theory (built-in wireless over EVDO, email, long-life batteries, search, lots of storage, etc.) but do we really want another device to be carrying around?

Especially at the price point being talked about ($399).

I’m already carrying my phone, laptop, iPod and sometimes my dSLR camera. I say sometimes because at this point I often make a choice - which one can I manage without.

I can’t imagine forking out for a Kindle. Especially not when I can get much of the promise of the Kindle on my iPod (and more besides).

Having said all that, I think Tim O’Reilly makes a great point when he says:

I’m rooting for Jeff and the Kindle. I’m not sure that he’s going to win his bet that people will use a single-purpose device rather than reading on a multi-function device like the iPhone and its successors. But I’m also not sure he needs to. Even if some other device becomes the reader of choice, Amazon will still become one of the leading sources of the books that feed it. All Amazon needs to do here is move the industry forward, and I think that’s already been accomplished.

YouTube to serve hi-def from their website

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 15/11/2007
in Technology
. 2 Comments

I see Rafe Needleman is reporting that YouTube are going to start streaming video in hi-def imminently.

According to Needleman:

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, speaking at the NewTeeVee Live conference today, confirmed that high-quality YouTube video streams are coming soon…. the service is testing a player that detects the speed of the viewer’s Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if they want it.

Chen also confirmed that YouTube stores the native quality of the originally uploaded video - this is no surprise to iPhone or iPod Touch owners who have a hi-def YouTube service already.

Is Facebook’s Search function useless?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 12/11/2007
in Technology
. 6 Comments

I met the CEO of Telligent Systems, Rob Howard in Barcelona. Telligent are the company who make Community Server amongst other things.

Rob and I had a great chat and decided to hook up on Facebook. It turned out to be a lot easier to meet in person then in Facebook! I typed Rob Howard into Facebook search and got back over 500 results! I gave up after paging through 15 of them!

Ok Rob, I said, Raftery is an uncommon name - try searching for that. Rob eventually found my profile on page 21. Over 500 Raftery’s? Who knew!

The Advanced Search in Facebook is no help in this scenario because that is limited to your existing network.

With over 50 million people signed up to Facebook, if you get 500+ results back on every search, is their search function now broken (or at least badly in need of tweaking)?

Cubic Telecom wins an it@cork Leader Award

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 2/11/2007
in IT@Cork and Technology
. 1 Comment

A big congrats to Pat Phelan and the Cubic lads on Cubic Telecom’s winning the it@cork Leaders Award in the Emerging Company category.

Pat was up against some very stiff competition and I am glad I wasn’t involved in the judging ‘cos I know Tom Keane of Nitrosell and Paul and Frank from YouGetItBack as well as Pat and any of them would have been a great choice for the award.

The Awards night was a fantastic success and I think I can safely say that this is set to become an annual event.

Other winners on the night include Treemetrics, TCH, and Abtran.

John Collins did a really professional job as MC - his look back over the last 10 years brought waves of nostalgia.

If I had to criticise anything about the night it would be that the talks dragged a bit in the middle of the evening but this was due to the fact that it was a double celebration, the Awards and the 10th anniversary of it@cork’s inception. As such this is unlikely to be an issue in the next nine Awards nights!

[Disclosure - I am on the Steering Committee of it@cork and Pat is a client of mine]

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