Tag Archive for 'IT@Cork'

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!

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?

Marcio Galli’s talk in Cork

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 9/8/2007
in Browsers, IT@Cork and Open Source
. 5 Comments

Mozilla's Marcio Galli speaking at it@cork

Fair dues to Damien Mulley and it@cork for putting on a great Firefox event last night.

Marcio Galli is a Consulting Software Developer at Mozilla Foundation based in Brazil. He gave a fascinating talk entitled “Talk: Read, Write, and Recycle the Web with FireFox 3“.

Watch the it@cork blog for a detailed review of the talk later today.

UPDATE - Mark Crowley’s detailed review of the talk is now up on the it@cork blog.

Blog training course discussion area

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 13/5/2007
in Blogging and IT@Cork
. 9 Comments

Paul O’Mahony is one of the people sitting in on the Blog Training Course I am running for it@cork. Paul has been blogging for a while now and I first met him at the Irish Blog Awards earlier this year.

Paul made a suggestion in the comments on his own blog that I put up:

something up on your blog about the course, so that people on the course can have a place where they could comment. I’m thinking that I may not be the only person on the course who would like to keep track of how I’m getting on with loading RSS for example. If there was one central place where we could put reports on progress, we could thereby learn from each other. I don’t mean set you up in a Q&A situation - that would be outside the remit of the course - but give everyone an opportunity to experience social networking

Initially I thought a wiki might be more suitable for this purpose but as this is a blog training course, let’s do it through the comments of this post. So, as Paul suggests, if you are on the course and want to share thoughts, suggestions, criticisms, whatever about the course, use the comments of this post to do so.

Cork - the ideal location for your IT business?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 19/4/2007
in IT@Cork
. 1 Comment

it@cork has published the results of its member survey. 165 members completed the survey giving a detailed insight into the how I.T. is faring in Cork.

The main points are:

  • 70% of respondents indicated that their businesses achieve average-to-excellent value from recently qualified IT graduates
  • 30% of respondents indicated that their organisations had openings for IT graduates currently and
  • in excess of 80% of respondents do not consider IT staff turnover to be a problematical issue for their organisations

Despite the doom and gloom headlines around the likes of Motorola’s pull-out, it seems the IT industry in Cork is very healthy.

Employers are getting good value from their IT graduate employees. Many have openings for more. Not only that but employee churn in the IT sector is not a significant problem for companies in Cork.

From these results, it would seem that Cork is an ideal location for an IT business. The only cautionary note is that

94% believed that the low levels of applications for places on third level IT courses, evident in recent years, could have a negative impact on their ability to build upon the success achieved to date.

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