I keep an eye on the Tuesday Push. The aim of the Tuesday Push is to get the bloggers of Ireland, usually the business bloggers or the blog of a business, to promote an other Irish company.
Those getting a push need to be offering a unique product or service, and should be taking part in the push themselves. Think of it as co-operative support. Creating a business community, one where ideas can be shared and have ideas bounce off each other freely. Or in internet terms, a meme gone sensible. Of course making the Irish technology community an actual community isn’t easy, but this helps.
That said, the key word is unique. Another template tweaked, off the shelf package generated on-line store, not for the push. I think new thinking might count, but you may have to explain what makes it innovative.
If you’re an Irish technology company that’s offering something new and have a blog (or other means to promote yourself and others), contributing to the promotional effort and putting your name forward for a Push of your own is worthwhile (just take a look at the feedback of some of those that have had a push). Or just join in, as some day you may be in the position of needing a push. By pushing now, you’re helping others, and may help yourself.
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.
“Shareholder value has quickly become the best excuse for companies to stop thinking ahead and stick their heads into the sand. Shareholders must be complete idiots if their short term value is maximized to a level that it endangers the long term sustainability of the company. And yet we see this pattern recurring time after time.” — Alexander van Elsas on shareholder value and the current recession.
Image via Wikipedia
Alexander’s work is all about creating passion in a workforce and making people more creative, productive and (that dirty little business word) happy at work.
The above quote hightlights some illogical thought processes in a business. Short term profit making over long term survival and production of innovative products or services. Of course the easy way, in theory, to do this is have different groups peaking at different times, but the words “in theory” show that plans don’t always survive their first brush with reality.
Or have a group that will generate huge revenues in a longer term that a quarter, and ask for patience, but reward those patient ones.
With a cash prize of €280,000 to give away to start up companies on the island of Ireland as part of their Seedcorn competition, Intertrade Ireland are looking for start up companies in high growth sectors with investment potential.
And I liked the picture. Somehow I doubt that the seeds caught in the spiders web are indeed corn.
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.
One of the little things that happen at the Cork Open Coffee are the demos. On April 27 the attendees got a pre-release demo of Pat Phelan’s new project … Twitterfone.com
The idea is rather simple. Ring a local telephone number (currently US, UK and Ireland) and leave a 15 second voice message. Be careful what you say (or cough as Michael Arrington discovered), and your message is converted to text in a tweet on your twitter account. In addition a recording is also available (via a tinyurl), which is handy if your message doesn’t fit in to 140 characters of less. Yes we talk that fast in Ireland.
Its a useful service, especially if you are in a crisis situation and can’t talk for long.
At 11am on May 1st three cities are going to be linked in Open Coffee and inspiration.
OpenCoffee Club was started in London to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meet-ups to chat, network and grow. The Cork Open Coffee meetings tend to take place every second Friday, in Dublin, Limerick and Waterford, their meetings tend towards a Thursday. And not only are their three sessions taking place at the same time tomorrow, but they are going to be linked. And New York is joining in too.
The three OpenCoffee sessions are going to be broadcast online thanks to Joe Garde of OnlineMeetingRooms and Bernie Goldbach of Tipperary Institute (Update : And Mary Rose Lyons who is looking after the broadcast from the Dublin end). Also thanks to Chuck Boyce of ChuckTV on Blip.tv finding out about the meet on Twitter (thus proving a business use if ever one was needed) means that the Irish OpenCoffee sessions are going to be part of the wider technology community.
Attendees should have a “Twitter style introduction prepared” (or a killer 90 second pitch ready) and join in. The details for joining the online sessions are on Mary Rose Lyons of Brightspark Consulting’s site. But if you are able to attend the sessions in person, it will probably be worth it.
And be prepared for a little Twitterstorm (and probably a Jaikugale) tomorrow morning.
I’ve asked this question a few times. “We have solar powered lights. Why can’t we have wind powered lights?”. Think about it. These garden lights are not the brightest, but they look good in the garden (which is their entire point). Being powered by a renewable source gives you freedom as to how you place them. But given the amount of light we get in Ireland during the winter, when the lights are needed the most, why isn’t there a wind powered light.
Firewinder is a wind powered light, or rather a series of them in a vertical column which rotates in the wind. The rotation generates power which is used by shining (and pulsing LEDs at the end of the column. Its a little hard to describe but watch the video of the light in action and you can see how it works.
Watching the video, it occurred to me that these things look like they could cause epileptic fits (hence no embedded video). So beautiful, but might be deadly after all. Given that I’d like to plant up a medieval style poison garden (medicine garden doesn’t sound anything as good), I might as well have dangerous lights.
Pity I can’t afford version one, but by version three I might have the readies.
There seems to be an alternative, Seth Godin brought it up (pictured right), and it seems to be one that Aaron Strout of mZinga is looking at. Namely don’t send in a CV or Résumé (either in the post or as an attachment). Since they ale looking for a community-centric person person, contact them via Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn or what ever social network they both use (its not clear if he willing to join a new social network just to look at a job applicant. I really should do more in making one). Then (or beforehand), blog about why you should get the job. I presume that they have media monitoring in position (or at the very least, Google Alerts).
Unfortunately for me, the job is in Burlington, MA, USA. But it is an interesting way to pick someone. Essentially it is a try before you decide exercise, which ends up benefiting both parties.
However there is a downside to all this. As Virginia Miracle explains, it is very time consuming. I suspect that if the person’s profile and blog is interesting, you could stay there far too long.
But is anyone trying this technique on this side of the Atlantic. Did anyone try this in Europe let alone Ireland? And how did it work out?
By now everyone has heard the old story about people giving up their passwords for chocolate. Although Bruce Schneier has pointed out that he would gladly give a fake password for chocolate. Which is a little better than loosing a lot of information about your customers. Yes I’m typing about Bank Of Ireland.
This is an interesting problem for the Bank. In 2006 Bank Of Ireland agreed to refund phishing losses suffered by customers of their internet banking service. And later updated their terms of service to include
13 Indemnity
13.2 Without prejudice to the generality of Clause 13.1 above, the Bank shall have no liability whatsoever in respect of any loss suffered by the Customer as a result of their breach of Clause 4 [jm: Security/Authentication] by way of knowingly, negligently or recklessly disclosing the Security Devices or any of them.
Richard Burrows, Governor of the Bank of Ireland, has declared on a news report that
monies lost will be refunded and that
the laptops were secured with a password.
However I reply
What hoops do victims of this loss have to jump through? After all some of the stolen information was not from BOI customers, but also those who had approached the bank for a life assurance quote. Besides, the usual procedure is to create a new account somewhere or getting credit cards in their identity, not touching the victims bank accounts directly, but ruining their credit rating in the process.
This concerns data not the laptops. Its possible that the OS requires a password to be provided, however it is quite easy to remove a hard disk and attach it to a separate machine. Completely by-passing any password requirements of the OS. Either encrypting the customer data on the disk (as happened in the IBTS incident) or making the entire disk an encrypted file. The data was unencrypted.
The information on the four BOI laptops contained the names, addresses, financial details and some medial records of its life assurance customers. Gosh that is a goldmine of information for identity thieves, phishing operators and even the odd blackmailer (if the medical information reveals things). I’ve written about this before, and I don’t think things have gotten any better.
And it happened some time ago.
Bank of Ireland said the four laptops disappeared between June and October 2007 and contained the names, addresses, bank account details and medical histories of about 10,000 holders of the bank’s life insurance policies. Ireland’s second-largest bank made the admission after the chief regulator, Data Protection Commissioner Billy Hawkes, told Irish broadcasters RTE he had been informed of the lost customers’ data only last Friday.
It’s the silence that is slightly worrying. The Irish Banking Federation hasn’t said anything. True that these were probably €900 laptops. But the information on them do open up the bank for potentially billions of damages; not that, given the statement by the Data Protection Commissioner, such punishment is likely to happen.
Now I’m hearing rumours that the banks are now encrypting customer data, but do you trust a bank with your data that can’t even link correctly to the page with the information about the incident on their own site? Hopefully someone will notice that correct things sooner than they noticed that the missing customer data might be important.
take care of your data,
Will
UPDATE – April 28 2008 Number affected by BoI laptop thefts trebles – “The technical investigation has identified that details relating to 31,500 policies, policy applications and a small number of mortgage customers were contained on the stolen laptops.” So the numbers are worse that previously announced, and the fact that not all of those at risk are customers of the BOI. If the Data Commissioner can’t deliver punishment via a 4×2 then his remit should be altered.
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