Copacetic

I took a lot of notes at the recent Web 2.0 conference and transcribed them from my own awful handwriting. I had great plans to write it up properly but work and buggy software conspired against me. So if you can stomach my disjointed and staccato note style you should browse over to Enterprise Ireland Web 2.0 : Conference Notes for my transcribed notes. All errors and omissions are mine and apologies to any of the speakers I misquoted.
Reminder of the speakers,

• Judy Gibbons, lately of Accel Partners, a tier 1 silicon valley VC, previously head of MSN at Microsoft.
• Marc Canter, CEO of BroadbandMechanics and founder of MacroMedia.
• Adam Green, founder of Andover.net.
• Jeff Clavier, founder and partner at Softtech Ventures.
• Daniel Waters, sector partner at 3i.
• Nasser Batley, VP at Dresdner Kleinwort Wassterstein in charge of M&A activity in the media and Internet markets.

Robert Cringely’s latest article Google On is more about IBM than Google. My IBM contacts tell me its burning up bandwidth all across IBM. Further to quote one insider (from an Irish perspective at least) ‘He nailed it”.

Here’s how he describes whats happening at IBM,

The heart of a company culture can be discovered if you look at the compensation system. IBM’s major incentives right now are for signing business and cutting costs. In many IT firms, IBM included, billable hours are important. This results in a system where little is done to improve service efficiency, because doing so would lead to fewer hours and less revenue. Efficiency kills, so at today’s IBM it is generally avoided.

You may have come across this by now, but check out the guy’s (sic) expression just as the interview starts. Its priceless…

David McWilliams predicts downbeat (but realistic) economic future as China focuses inward.

Tom Raftery reports this amazing Decision by Amazon to stop shipping a whole range of products to Ireland.

This is on top of not providing an English speaking website priced in Euros.

Best ever deconstruction of the phrase, “And monkeys will fly out of my butt”.

Good news from Infoworld for all us Python developers out there.

Excellent advice with data to back it up.

Building a Web App? Don’t Forget the Premium Plan! – Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

Michele exposes the IEDR in a excellent post. I register domain names pretty regularily (well once every six months or so). On GoDaddy I can whip up a name in next to no time, no questions asked. But for our IEDR no amount of bogosity is a bridge too far.

Their attempts to police the Internet for Ireland have meant that I only ever register a .ie domain when there is absolutely no other alternative (and there is usually an alternative).

The IEDR policy is a classic example of optimising the process to handle the exceptions rather than the common case. So everybody has to jump through the same mind numbing justification process to register names that in any other jurisidiction would be a click away.

How many Irish specific services have .com names just because its cheaper and easier to do it that way?

Check out the Google Stock price over the past few days. Its just batty….