As we all know, the future was supposed to be full of flying cars, and that simply didn’t happen.
Maybe they were too busy thinking “jet cars” to think “sail boats that fly”.
Industrial designer Damien Grossemydesigned a hypoththetical flying electric vehicle for Renault that is simply beautiful. The “Zep’lin” has a mostly vertical structure, a large part of which can be covered with solar panels, that resembles the offspring of a seed pod and a sail boat. Its actually possible to imagine that this is a genetically engineered type of maple until you see the elegant rudder / engine combination. True, I don’t see this doing a tight turning circle, and I’m not too sure how it would perform in a high wind take off to work, but it needs no dedicated infrastructure to land.
To park might be another matter.
And I wanna try it out.
It sails rather than powers from one location to another. The promotional video implies a potential around the world Zep’lin race for rich playboys. Which, if the design works, is not as infeasible as an around the world yacht race. So he has his early adopters identified, and can use their attention seeking antics to market the thing while their payments pay for the development of a commuter model.
And they look beautiful.
You may need to click through to see the embedded video.
Apparently the solar panels can tilt toward the sun, but looking at more of the designs I think its the solar equivalent of tacking, getting power in the sail from one angle, while traveling in another.
Renault spent 2 months designing a scale model, and we’ll see if it eventually becomes a working design.
Decisions for Heroes is a project that Robin Blandford has been working on for a while. And talking about it. In fact I assumed that the product has been launched a few months back. I was wrong; today is launch day.
And he’s built something amazing – technology that will help rescue teams save more lives. Its essentially a project management tool combined with an incident reporting mechanism that’s able to monitor team histories and readiness and raise alarms for expiration or under manning conditions.
What makes it different is that it is designed for a particular niche; rescue teams. Are the exercises and training reflecting the actual calls? Or the actually locations? Are there enough cliff climbers on-call this weekend? Are there certifications that are about to run out? This kind of thing actually saves lives. Its been studied, over 1,800 rescuers from Ireland, UK, USA, Greece, and Australia helped to trial and shape the development of the software. But one stands out. Robin is a volunteer member of the Irish Coast Guard (a cliff rescue climber to be precise) so he has seen first hand what is needed, and what is the most useful way to get that information across.
I’m sure that the basis of D4H can be used in more business-like settings, or indeed in logistic based industries.
And from saving lives, we move to a performance management technology that may cost the careers of a few politicians.
Created by John HandelaarKildare Street is, almost simply a database. A database of what is being said in both Houses of the Oireachtas, by whom, when, how often and the complete text of what they say so it can be parsed for content. Based off the UK project, theyworkforyou.com, you can keep an eye on your favourite politician, or all the politicians in a constituency, or even when a particular word or phrase is spoken in the Dáil or Seanad Éireann debates or in written answers or questions to the Dáil.
There are a few bugs still in the system (it is a beta and since Irish addresses are vague it can misidentify a constituency, particularly when one side of a road is in one constituency, and the other side is in another constituency. It happens), and there is up to a 24 hour delay between the speech in the chambers and the text of the speech hitting the system (not a fault with the system but with the source; debates.oireachtas.ie.
Its useful to find out which TD or Senator has stayed quite all along (the records go back to 2004), and finding out how they actually voted on subjects of concern to you. Then you can challenge them when they call around asking for your vote.
Do challenge them. Right now, I’m wondering if there is a version for the MEPs.
Two people who should be praised for being heroes and making a difference.
I think I need to defend myself after you “plucked me out”.
I’ll go with this one example of the Bord Gáis meetup. This wasn’t a scheme dreamt up by a PR firm, this was Bord Gáis doing it themselves. All the bloggers that attended did so out of curiosity. None of us knew what it was going in.
If we did, I suspect a different group of bloggers would have shown up.
If you want bloggers, ask bloggers who blog about your area. For the event the ideal group would be business bloggers, consumer affairs bloggers, green affairs bloggers. Oddly enough marketing and advertising bloggers would have been interested too.
Or to put it another way, would you invite a music journalist to the launch of a new cheese? (No jokes please)
I know that not everyone who attended blogged about it (yet at any rate). I know that it ended up being one of my longer posts.
From what I can tell, it was the first attempt at blogger outreach (not just their first attempt, but THE first attempt following the Collision Course).
Lots of information was freely given. It was interesting to see a “grown up” product that few would describe as “sexy” being used for outreach. Things are changing in the marketplace, bloggers may be invited to more, but that is no guarantee of a write up, let along a favourable one.
The early inviter will get the “well they invited us” posts, but if it becomes more commonplace, the “I was there” won’t be blogged. The “I’m interested in this topic, give me the info” will take over. After all, most (if not all) Irish bloggers are amateurs. They have work, school or other duties in the mornings. They can’t attend a day-time press conference (or film screening). They don’t all live in Dublin (interesting to see how many of these things will take place in Cork, Galway, Kilkenny or Limerick). And bloggers are under no real obligation. A day without posting isn’t going to cause much harm. Not the same can be said about mainstream media.
Or to use your analogy, the swarm of locusts may find the field is empty when they get there.
Of course, locust only swarm then their serotonin levels increase. That’s the happy chemical of the brain.
I would love to tell you that I was invited to a cabal of secrets, but in fact I simply responded to a post on Mulley’s blog about a meeting, and then showed up.
What I discovered was, following the Collision Course, that Bord Gáis decided to talk to bloggers. I’m not too sure why (and I don’t think they do either).
You see, they are no longer a gas company. They are now an energy company.
The fact that they decided to talk to bloggers about, well, a deeply un-sexy product is interesting. This is also an internal initiative. Even their usual PR companies (I noticed the plural) told them not to. But think about it. Electricity and gas are not “youth” products. And when someone talks about “doing stuff on the net” the assumption is that the product is destined for, well, kids.
But the net is no longer a youth product. The web has been in mainstream use in Ireland for almost 20 years. There is an entire generation that grew up with the web, but almost everyone under forty isn’t afraid of it (and looking at some facebook photos, they will be at a later date).
Banking, shopping and house hunting are all online. Instead of getting a paper bill in the post, you could get your bill on-line. In short boring adult stuff. Except this point was raised at the meeting, and its not entirely true, at the moment there is dual paper and on-line billing and “in Q2 paperless billing will be available”. On that note, if you switch your power and gas bills will be separate bills (by design). combined billing or “bill shock” and a large bill arriving can scare people off.
Having said that, they have been supplying power for a while. They approached the National Ploughing championships with their offer. Their offer being a guaranteed 10% cheaper than ESB’s prices. So they signed up 15,000 of the 85,000 IFA members, and it seems they’ve been getting power for a while.
The prices are 10% cheaper than ESB for the 2008, and 5% cheaper than ESB for 2009 and 2010. The marketing manager, Nicky Doran, pointed out that its hard to do estimated pricing for more than 3 years. Also, Bord Gáis is regulated as they are the incumbent in the gas market, which means that if they want to lower their prices they have to go to the regulatory body to get permission to lower (or indeed raise) their prices. ESB have to do the same thing as they are the incumbent in the market. However, Bord Gáis is a new entry in the electricity market, so that’s how they can guarantee the price cut when compared to ESB. If the market gets completely unregulated, then blocks on the incumbent go away. So ESB are probably looking forward to competition.
Full disclosure, I just showed up. Apart from a cup of tea, I got nothing for this other than information (if you like I can clean up the notes I took at the session and post them in the comments). Is it worth switching? Well go check your figures and decide for yourself. I know that I don’t want to explain this one to my Mum without the paperwork in front of me.
The thing is, now that Bord Gáis has started talking to the public (well bloggers at least) and they are not only listening but talking (via @TheBigSwitchIRL on Twitter) as well as media monitoring. It means that they can hear.
Personally, I think its nice seeing a large Irish company treating the internet and blogging as something for grown-ups. Now, when are they blogging themselves?
I think the Media Virgins put it succinctly. “Before you fully commit yourself to a social networking site I think that it is a good idea to listen in on what is being said. The same idea goes when you are deciding which people to follow.”
The I, G and O of IGOPeople stands for Individuals, Groups and Organisations. The idea is that this is a network for real people. Not the social media elite (both of them) nor is it aimed at the youth market. The idea behind this site is that it allows individuals to contact organisations (mostly businesses, but there are a few charities in there too) and have the feed back in the public domain. It also allows for groups to form.
And I set up the Pink for October Ireland with the intention of using it as a hub, to allow the photos to be registered with the models and to display some of the finest shots.
Maybe next year.
But as I said, I registered the site, and I want to use it. Join me.
This year.
The Pink for October Ireland site is now an aggregator site. Register with the site and when you post about Pink For October using the category p4oi (that’s a letter, a number and two letters) the software will pick it up. I know its working for Wordpress blogs, and I just know I’m going to have fun with Blogger, Typepad, pix.ie, flickr etc. but I’m going to give this a shot. The registration is moderated (by humans too), but the posts are not.
So King Damien wants us to go and do our own “Fluffy Links”.
I can do that…
On the odd but technical front we have a game of the 80’s classic “Defender”. But an odd twist on it. Ok how about making it really really small. Say 16×16 pixels.? And what about putting it in the favicon of the site instead of in a page. And lets make it playable too? (Knott warning, doesn’t work in all browsers, and I’m sure it won’t work in the iPhone).
On the technical and might just be useful front, how about a “Multicolr Flickr search“? Its a search tool for Flickr which selects “interesting” (their quotes) pictures from Flickr based on colr.. I mean color… I mean colour. Dang this spelling. Consider that my entry in to the Redmum colour post challenge.
Robin Blandord came up with the idea to run his CV through Wordle.net to see what it would look like as a tag cloud. It’s been repeated by Ellybabes, Sinéad Cochrane and Paul Browne. Sorry that it’s in simple black & white and not visually pleasing as the others; I thought about adding it to my physical CV or embed it in the files to see if there was a change in uptake. Given that most (if not all) recruitment agencies parse the résumés they recieve through something similar, it might make sense. Wordle is a Java application which parses text, ignores common words, and creates a tag cloud. The size of the word is proportional to the how often it occurs in the CV.
Putting something like a résumé through it might take a bit of tweaking. Plurals are (currently) counted separately, and other common phrases show up. I needed to tweak my CV to stop my address showing up in the tag cloud for instance.
The other thing is how “management” looms large over both “software” and “database” (with “sql” peeking in there). I didn’t expect that, nor expect to see something similar on the other technical people’s clouds.
Does it give an accurate picture which should be used as a reflection or consideration for employment, or is it really easy to “game” the results to create an artificial profile?
And given the full social media treatment, does a tag cloud of a persons delicious account cast a different reflection than their résumé?
The way we interact with technology changes from year to year (and on occasion, something comes along and changes an interface overnight, like TwitterFone). Given that one of the creators of Twitterfone, namely Pat Phelan, posed the question “Have we over innovated?“, its surprising.
The answer is no. I think that Robin Blandford, Damien Mulley and Alexia Golez all agree that we have more innovating to do. Part of the perceived problem is that the innovators produce something for the general person; but the general person doesn’t want it. The bleeding edge early adopters might love it, but not their less technology loving friends and relatives. The early innovations tend to be the “engineering model” with a few unfinished features, bugs and complicated instructions. A remote control which has an individual button for every function the device can do is not the most user friendly of interfaces. The early adopters will flock to it and understand it. But if it isn’t obvious and fast and easy to use, I know my Mum will hate it, and the chances are that the device won’t survive to a second model. Its an innovators dilemma.
The true irony of this dilemma is that its caused by a mixtre of a lack of communication, and too much. After all, some innovations were things that the users didn’t know that they wanted. An “unknown unknowns” sort of thing. This is a want, which is so convenient that it rapidly becomes a need. Sometimes this is generational (e.g. mobile phone uptake), sometimes this just swoops in out of the blue and everyone joins in (grandparents and grandchildren on the Wii). But sometimes they are consigned to the “ideas before their time” bin. Being able to “vote out” unnecessary parts of the solution, means that the idea has less of a problem.
The other type of solutions is the “What if?” caused by the “Why not?”. The “Why doesn’t this exist yet?” type problems. Which is usually what is thought about when people talk about a lack of innovation. The slow incremental kind where the steps seems obvious only after the product comes to market. And these steps are being sped up due to communication.
Now an idea or observation can become a idle tweet, which sparks another’s blog post, which sparks a small blog storm, which sparks a business plan, which sparks a gathering of minds and ideas, which sparks improved ideas and a flurry of research work, which (might) spark a business plan but is more likely to spark a business start-up first. And each step in an itteration of the idea, refining the initial notion with practicalities and possibilities. Due to the wonder of social networking at it’s finest, this allows people who know brightsparks to become involved in an interesting idea and produce something. Because ideas are easy, but the skills to do something specialised are, well, specialised, and few people have them. But knowing someone who knows someone who might be able to help you is a practical possibility due to the sped up communication of social networks. Then your idea moves from notion to production.
But you have to produce something which enables others to know some of your ideas. You have to give in order to get. You have to spend time or talent to get attention. To get communication. And you have to join the conversations, otherwise you are considered the unwelcome gatecrasher that will be ignored. But if that gatecrasher helps out, then he or she is no longer an unwelcome gatecrasher, but a welcomed guest. And this new guest may point out that part of the solution yo are trying to make already exists, so there is no need to reinvent that wheel (or how to avoid being sued by that wheel’s inventor).
Open source projects and wikipedia works this way. Individuals who may never physically meet work on a project in their spare time. And it works for businesses, where one entrepreneur meets another on line, or a third party brings them together virtually and then physically. Perinatal ideas get defined through this virtual iteration and idea refinement so that not only is a full bodied idea born, but the creation process creates a bit of interest in the idea itself. Enough interest, and there might be interested funders.
Can we over-innovate? Only if we are willing to accept it as (science) fiction, but science fiction frequently sparks the research to become science fact. Is innovation over? Not as long as others can spark ideas and collaboration. As for a visual representation of this collaboration, see the video below.
A long time ago, at MashpCamp I thougth about combining a Google Map with the geodata of pubs and a ratings system to generate a “Rate-my-pint” type application, which I’m sure a brewery could use for customer support and ensure that their product is being served properly. This is probably more useful.
I have no idea who made the Dublin Pub Crawl map, but I’m impressed. Essentially it’s a Google map with route calculations which allow you to create your own own pub crawl through Dublin City. However I’m not too sure how to get the data off the computer and in a format which would survive a “12 pubs of Christmas” tradition.
Choose an area, like Temple Bar or Dublin 15, pick some pubs you’d like to include, if you like. And you can edit the maps and add other pubs.
Like those outside of Dublin?
I suppose it’s all about how intelligent the routing code is, but would adding a bunch of Cork, Limerick and Galway pubs just mess things up, or make the map more useful for those who don’t want a pint of plain in the pale? And it it works, then we could have “centres of excellence”, in drinking.
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