Lukulu : The website provides a brochure for the lukulu service which sounds very innovative. Something similar was availible at the Nokia Tends lab at the electric picnic. The problem with this venture might be that in normal circumstances people have bluetooth switched off and personally if I had it on I would find the service intrusive, but thats just me.
Tourist republic/Touristr: It’s hard to compete against the established tourist websites but to read location reviews from peers is a refreshing change. The format that Touristr uses gives a good sence of the location in question. I hope this site does well.
Pixenate: My favourite so far. I’ve always struggled with photoshop and it’s definately nice to stay online for the entire process. Putting the example photograph and the controls on the homepage is a stroke of genius too.
It’s Monday evening already so I’ll try and stick to my word and give the Demobar sites a quick once over….
LouderVoice: I like this site, very user friendly and not too much fanfare before you can get going. The thing that review sites need is scale, if you can’t find what you’re looking for on a review site then you’re gone. Loudervoice has a good chance of achieving this with the twitter interface, the blog review redirect feature and the mini-reviews, all of which are good ideas (with the possibility of being integrated into other sites?).
Mysay: Time will tell with this one. it is very professionally put together, the widget works excellently( I am familiar with it from the Irish election Blog). The question is whether the functionality that Mysay offers is relevant or not.
Nubiq : This looks really exiting. Mobile apps have been around in various guises for years now but I finally think the right blend of mobile phone/mobile connection and application exists now so that something truly usable can be delivered. The screen shots provided look smart and I’ll definitely be investigated this further in a few weeks when I get my N95.
JustRoutes: I could have used this last week but there’ll be other occasions I’m sure. It works really well and the bus fare feature is clever. I would definitely send people here before google maps. One thing I miss from Googlemaps is dragging the location marker but it’s no biggy.
I’ve just given these sites a really quick scan, they deserve much more which I will do after the demobar. I hope to preview the other sites tomorrow.
I was working last Monday, closing up the family bar we have near Dundalk when at about 1 o’ clock a resident from the B&B turned up for a late drink. I was pretty much finished so I wasn’t averse to the idea of staying up for a late drink either. The conversation started off with the usual banter of what took him to the area, he was supervising the building of a house nearby. At some point the conversation changed and the fact that he used to be a psychiatric nurse came up. The conversation then took an unexpected turn as he proceded to tell me that he was a whistle blower against abuse that took place in various mental hospitals. He told me how after he and a colleague of his brought this abuse to the attention of authoristies that the two men began to get verbal abuse from fellow colleagues and worst of all an official garda statement he made was leaked to a local drug dealer with the express purpose of putting his daughters in danger(their addresses in Dundalk were included with the statement). He went on in much more detail about his struggle against the very institutions of this country who should have been protecting and how they persecuted him over the past number of years including being jailed for 10 days in relation to a suspected drink driving incident.
While I didn’t doubt for a second what he had told me I did try to find out what press coverage his story had received by Google-ing his name. I found this recent article in SBP.
I forget many of the other details he told me and wouldn’t like to approximate such serious incidents, but wish him the best in his continuing fight for these patients who could not defend themselves
I’ve just read an interesting post on Damien Mulley asking whether or not Enterprise Ireland are helpful in fostering start-ups in Ireland in the long run. I think they probably are a necessary part of the process but may not be suitable for every type of venture. By going with enterprise Ireland entrepreneurs are certainly exposing themselves to a greater amount of monitoring activity by EI, however this is not necessarily a bad thing. By having a set of metrics or criteria to conform to an entrepreneur might retain a better sense of realism that might abandon him if unchecked.
For start-ups who want more freedom there are several options such as the incubation centers in Cork, Killarney, and at UCD. There are also a number of venture capitalists who are keen to hear from Irish entrepreneurs, Benchmark capital particularly spring to mind. I attended a talk by Barry Maloney who surprising said that he would easily invest in a person with nothing more than an idea and some self belief.
I don’t think EI are affecting the rate of new firm formation over here, I think why silicon valley is so successful is due to the proximity of the VC’s to the entrepreneurs and the confined nature of the entire process, making it all more tangible to the aspiring entrepreneur.
I have been getting some unexpected invites for Facebook lately and am curious as to the universal appeal of this particular site. I has definately finished off Linked-in as far as I’m concerned with the few contacts I had there now on facebook. It has not however caused any migration from my Myspace people.
Damien Mulley gives a good synopsis of the evoloution of social media sites as they all take there turn being flavour of the month. What Facebook has done that is different for me is to root out a huge number of old and unexpected acquaintances. This must be due to what Damien calls the Honeytrap, facebooks automatic scan of your address book was the first thing that struck me when I signed up, it found people on facebook that I forgot were in my email address book.
As far as the other social media sites go they have there place too but some of them can be reminiscent of schoolyard politics with some kids having the cool trainers and a swearword shaved into their head while Facebook’s single skin does away with all this and discards that Juvenal element that can be off-putting to some.
A very interesting statistic from Naked conversationns was that television advertising only requires a success rate of 2% to be successful. This is surprising considering the expense of mass media adverising. The difference between mass market advertising and blogging is that television ads are pitched at a middle ground type of person that does’nt really exist but blogging engages customers personally and gives respect to individual differences, which in turn leads to positive relations between companies and customers.
Charlie Brooker sums up the problem with advertising very well……….
Andrew Keen who has written the cult of the amature has been on every radio show I’ve listened to in the last week. I don’t get his argument. He reckons that blogs are leading people away from reading and writing for repuatable newspapers, but just as there are trustworthy blogs and less trustworthy one there are also newspapers which cannot be belived(national enquirer etc.). All blogging does is vastly increase the volume of material published, people are still going to have to use there own intelligence to decipher the trustworthy from the nonsense.
