Working on the O2 dongle on the Dublin to Waterford train. If there are any businesses out there which expect a 3G dongle to connect u at fast speeds to anything please take your hope and bury it deep. 400m of the States non-existent cash is being spent to deliver a lousy, lousy Internet service to you (National Broadband Scheme)
Keith
Minister said ICT facilitaing collaboration and pulling on our story telling heritage is the key to our economic future.
Reference to multilateral engagement of this process.
Reference to Japan and ubiquity, available to everyone, across all locations and devices. Open access networks.
Speeds are important, we should provide ahead of demand. Applications important, they are the reason for this speed and will drive demand.
Sitting through a timeline of audio from pirate radio to podcasting in 2008.
Giving me a great context of the developments in this space and how things which I take for granted now evolved.
Keith
O2 banned existing customers from nibbling at the iPhones available online (from their forum: Please note also, for existing O2 billpay Customers wishing to upgrade to iPhone 3G, this can only be done via an O2 Store or a Carphone Warehouse store ).
But one cunning email contact of mine, who shall remain anonymous, sent this to me
Thought you might appreciate this - how to get an Iphone if you are an existing o2 customer? Sign up as a new customer, ask to port your number over, tick the box that says you're a pay as you go 02 customer, pick your phone and voila - have one in my hand. Got on to o2 this morning and had the thing activated
keith
The glowing red light on my modem shows a dud Internet connection. So I am on the O2 dongle and the iPhone for a couple of days - Eircom have a 3 working day turnaround for broadband repairs.
Which for a business service into a SOHO leaves a lot to be desired. My BT service, ordered on 25th August, is nowhere to be seen.
Just as well I am travelling for a day or two!
Keith
Last month I wrote a brief post on iGoPeople, a new startup coming out of Dublin. Yesterday I had an opportunity to spend some time with Campbell Scott who is their CEO and he filled me in on their product and focus. Campbell came over from the dark side (he was in Corporate life for 26 years - he worked with Eircom and O2 most recently) and he has adopted nicely to the nimble and all embracing world of the early stage technology startup CEO.
Useful to know up front that their initial focus is small and medium businesses as well as organisations - larger businesses are further down the road for them. This indicates a pragmatic approach for me - sales cycles into bigger businesses can be long and for the service they are developing it is likely that a large business will already have some elements of it in place.
They offer a place where the noise, issues, talk, commentary and discussion about brands, products, and businesses can be gathered so that a visitor to the site can get both the company pitch and also the feedback and thoughts of customers and consumers. This appears to be a simple proposition - and it is. The price point for a small business to have a presence here is currently under e300 and for that you get a managed solution to allow your interaction with customers/clients to be harnessed and structured.
Yes you could blog, you could set up a website and you could have a forum - however there are many, many businesses who still struggle with setting up a basic site never mind functionality of any kind.
They are also proposing to target organisations - possibly establishing a directory of same for Ireland. The same functionality would be appropriate here.
I quickly understood it and liked it.
On the technical side they have a strong team of inhouse techies and (similarly to dbTwang) they are using Ruby On Rails and working through rapid iterations of the software backend and the user interface.
keith
I like browser based tools and use one called Sitekreator.com for the building your own website training which I deliver.
The object of desire in this weeks Tuesday Push (I am late with this, my Tuesday and Wednesday were taken up with consultancy and dbTwang meetings and work) is such a tool - ewritelite from a business based in Cork.
Gordon and Co have developed a simple system for managing content for small to medium businesses. Up front I have got to say I do not like the initial look and feel of the site - it does not feel like a service which I would ask a client to commit to.
Whining aside the service seems solid and Damien gave it a good review here. The price point is a little bit high for my liking - e200 per annum seems just too much for a small business to commit to. But I am not the target market and I am sure they have a handle on the marketing and pricing.
They do other products as well - an email newsletter service and one for form building and management.
I hope they continue to expand and develop - there is a market for easy to use services at the lower end of the market.
keith
I posted last week about a stealth startup service from Mapflow, it is open to view now and has 56 users.
It is a car sharing service called Avego - I have not looked around the site but here is their intro video:
Good luck to everyone concerned.
keith
May as well start with a relevant headline.
The man and business whose recent mission in life is to bug mobile operators globally (and make frequent travelers happy to boot) has launched V2 of Maxroam on the anniversary of the initial appearance.
100,000 customers will now see significantly reduced data roaming charges - a bonus on top of their savings on voice traffic.
keith
Disclaimer: Pat offered to send me something once. But it has not arrived yet :-)
While Pat mingles at the Techcrunch50 gig the Irish Mapflow team (veterans from the dotcom days) are due to launch something on the eirlift.com domain at DEMO.
It is password protected at present so I guess we will have to wait ;-)
keith
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