Stop SOPA Happening in Ireland
Sign the petition now.
Please have a look at the following posts and take action at Stop SOPA Ireland.
- TJ McIntyre’s FAQ on Ireland’s SOPA
- The Business Post’s article on it
- Michele Neylon’s rallying call
- Karl Monaghan has written about how it sucks
Sign the petition now. (thanke to IrishStu for the list of links).
Investing where the startups are rather than where they aren’t
EI is doling out another pot of money to the South East. Now I am a big fan of EI. I think they are the best agency of their type in the world, bar none. But this regional development plan is a dissipation of scare resources. It also makes no sense for startup policy in Ireland.
Here’s how it plays out. Money is ring fenced for the South East. Now instead of competing against all the startups in Ireland the South East is competing against itself. If you expect to win a grant based on your ability to export and you can’t beat out the local competition in Ireland, how in the wide world of sports are you going to compete on a global stage?
It would make much more sense to widen the global pot for Ireland and make the South East stand up and be counted.
I know for fact that they have the talent to do so.
A Social Network with Aged Groups
Image via Wikipedia
I read Fred Wilson‘s post on Explicit vs Implicit Groups tonight. It struck me that the right model for Google Plus (and any group based social network) is the concept of “aged groups”. So I can toss anyone into a group but over time a lack of interaction or engagement “ages” them out of the group. So groups remain small and focussed on the active members. The asynchronous nature of Google+ groups is ideally suited to this model and could be an option for users to set on their accounts.
With aged groups I’d be much more likely to allow Google+ to parse my address book and add members based on groups I already have setup or even suggest groups based on email conversations I’ve had in the past.
The key issue is for the groups to reflect the dynamic nature of relationships. I work in a company and then I leave, guess what? most of those relationships die within a year or so. I don’t want those (now) strangers still shot through my Facebook and Google+ account.
Why HTML5 should be the Cornerstone of Your Mobile Strategy
I wrote a post about HTML5 over on the company blog this week.
Good Ideas – 10 Dollars a Pop
Good ideas are great, but there comes a time when you have to be an execution fanatic. So put a jar in the middle of the office and every time someone has a good idea they have to pay $10 (or €10 in EuroLand) to tell someone about it.
Why do this? Because at a certain point in the life of a startup you need to focus on the problems in front of you. Good ideas, even great ideas become a confusing distraction. Its an old saw that 70-80% of your product development effort should be focussed on honing the features that are already in customers hands. Everyone loves the new new thing but most of your customers would quite like the current functionality to work just dandy.
Dropbox is an excellent example of a company who have stuck to the knitting and been 100% focussed on delivering their core vision, stupidly simple desktop to desktop file sharing. Do as they do.
So before you shout out “I have a great idea”, utilise some of these questions to triage you idea before it distracts everyone else in the company.
- Is it better or is it just different?
- What’s the effort to implement?
- Does the user need to be educated?
- What is the cost to remove it?
- Can we test its utility without building it?
- What’s the competition for this feature?
- Has a customer asked for it?
- Does it suit the design context of our service?
- How will you price it?
- Is it in the market place already?
If you can answer these questions should be more than happy to pony up the $10 to share it with other people 
Super Slow Motion on Canon IXUS 115 HS
Here is an example of super slow motion using the new Canon IXUS 115 HS (HS=High Speed). Any golf pros who want to critque my swing, well thats what the comment box is for 
Future Internet Forum – Kilkenny Castle – 1st June
The TSSG will host, on behalf of the IFIF, the 3rd Future Internet Forum at Kilkenny Castle on June 1st. The Future Internet is one of the key research areas for Europe and is also identified by SFI as one of their 4 core ICT research areas. This conference will support knowledge sharing between Irish policy makers, funding agencies, industrial players and academic researchers. In doing so, this Forum will address the challenges and, more importantly, the opportunities associated with the emerging Future Internet. Two of the key themes for this years conference is Identity and Privacy in a digital world. We are delighted to have a number of world expert speakers including:
Kim Cameron – Chief Architect of Identity in the Identity and Access Division at Microsoft.
http://www.identityblog.com/?p=360 (blog)
Malcolm Crompton – Previous Federal Privacy Commissioner of Australia and current Director of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (view blog)
http://www.linkedin.com/in/mcrompton (LinkedIn)
http://www.openforum.com.au/blogs/malcolm-crompton (blog)
Michel Riguidel – Head of the Department of Computer Science and Networks, at ENST (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications)
http://www.iaria.org/speakers/MichelRiguidel.html (website)
The full agenda is attached. Can you please circulate the information to your staff, and of course it would be great to welcome you to Kilkenny if you can attend.
Registration is via EventBrite:
http://irishfutureinternet2011.eventbrite.com/
Google Storage Available to All
Google made its Google Storage API available to all today. This is the service that is likely to make Google AppEngine useful, as the existing BigTable storage system was just too painful for words and not designed for large blobs. Its certainly feels a bit slicker in execution than AWS S3 and has a more polished user experience from a getting started perspective. It was several months after S3 launched before somebody built a third party browser that would allow you to look at you buckets online.
They use a similar model to S3 of unique bucket names, so get in quick in you want a bucket called “test” or “src” The naming conventions for objects are restricted, so you cannot expect to upload an arbitrary directory of files and expect it to succeed. The uploading process must perform some kind of name mapping process that converts illegal names to legal ones.
The do make a big deal about allowing developers to specify whether buckets and their contents are located in Europe (where in Europe?) or not but read the T&Cs carefully. Section 2.2 makes it clear that Google can process your data just about anywhere including the US. It’s only “data at rest” that can be specified as stored in Europe. So all your data is essentially available to US agencies should that choose to take a peak. The most lame restriction in the T&C’s is the restriction on using Google Storage to create a “Google Storage like” system. Let’s put a layer in front of Google Storage that is like Google Storage but slower and less resilient and costs more, oh I definitely want to sign up for that service
They provide a version of the excellent Boto library that has been repurposed for use against Google Storage, this is the best indication yet that the Google API’s must be pretty close to the S3 APIs in structure. The main difference is the use of OAuth to give fine grained access to the storage objects. This is the biggest win for Google and I hope to see Microsoft Azure, RackSpace CloudFiles and AWS S3 following suite fairly quickly.
It would also be great to see the Boto changes for Google Storage rolled back into the Boto mainline.
