Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Google’s OpenSocial to become the platform’s platform?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/10/2007
in Technology and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

One of the biggest problems with Social Networks is that your information is never synchronised across them if you are in more than one and if you are in only one, the time you invest adding in information, is time you are investing in locking yourself in. You can’t get your information (profile, friends list, feeds, etc.) exported and you therefore need to start over when you join another network.

Google, it is being reported on TechCrunch, are set to launch OpenSocial (url to go live tomorrow (Thursday)) to help with this.

OpenSocial will be a one-stop-shop for APIs for developers to add applications/information to a number of Social Networks. This one-stop-shop will become a de-facto platform for Social Networks. According to TechCrunch:

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

* Profile Information (user data)
* Friends Information (social graph)
* Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

The participating Social Networks, so far, include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle while the application developers (who developed some of the most popular FaceBook applications) signed up include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.

FaceBook is conspicuous in its absence. This is a massive challenge to its dominance by probably the only player who could take them on head-to-head.

As you can imagine Marc Canter, who has been hammering away for more openness for Social Networks for as long as I can remember and whose PeopleAggregator product has been an open network aggregator since it launched in June 2006 is very impressed with this development. As marc said in his own post on this:

Man oh Man - this is getting fun.

For the record - we at Broadband Mechanics will be supporting ALL THIS STUFF and making it available to OUR customers. Though right now I’m in NYC making those customers happy and actually building systems using PeopleAggregator.

So there you have it - the future has arrived and it rocks. Thank you Google (and I have to admit I never thought I’d be saying that.) Now what about Apple?

Cork tech scene

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/9/2007
in Technology
. 0 Comments

There’s a nice write-up on the Cork tech scene in the Silicon Republic today

“In my language”

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/9/2007
in Technology
. 2 Comments

This is one of the most unsettling, powerful, thought-provoking videos I have ever seen.

It doesn’t make for easy viewing but to fully appreciate it, you need to watch it to the end.

From the description on YouTube:

The first part is in my “native language,” and then the second part provides a translation, or at least an explanation. This is not a look-at-the-autie gawking freakshow as much as it is a statement about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not.

Congrats Ruth and Bernie on the arrival of Mia

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 24/9/2007
in Technology
. 0 Comments


Mommy Calling, originally uploaded by Irish Typepad.

Bernie (Goldbach) and Ruth gave birth to baby Mia Rose overnight.

Congrats guys!

The New York Times discovers how free pays!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 18/9/2007
in Technology
. 8 Comments

I was listening to George Hook, Karlin Lillington and Simon McGarr on The Right Hook yesterday discussing newspapers’ online business models.

They referred to the New York Times and how it charged for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives (what it perceived as premium content).

Overnight the New York Times abandoned this model in favour of free access to all its content.

Mark Evans has looked at the numbers and shows how free could make financial sense:

TimesSelect was an pretty interesting experiment that attracted about 227,000 subscribers and $10-million in annual revenue. But the growth clearly wasn’t there to justify the status quo…

Let’s assume, about 20% of the NYT’s content was behind the walled garden. Now that it’s free, the NYT could added another 2.6 million unique visitors. Let’s assume, the average online NYT reader consumes a healthy 20 pages/month. This would give us 52 million more page views a month.

If you can generate $20/CPM per Web page from these additional page views, that’s $1-million of revenue per month or about $12-million a year

Anyone want to put a bet on how long before the Irish Times changes its model to entirely free? This lifetime? The next lifetime? Not in a million years?

Irish Times subscription page

First iPhone photo editor app?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 18/9/2007
in Photo Sharing, Technology, Telecoms and Web 2.0
. 6 Comments


Pixenate on the iPhone, originally uploaded by pxn8.

Having recently successfully deployed their Pixenate FaceBook app (a photo editor for Facebook), it looks like Sxoop Technologies are now out to be the first company to deploy a photo editor for the iPhone!

How cool is that? There is a beautiful fit between the iPhone, which people will be using to take pictures, and photo editing software.

Go Walter - woo hoo!

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