Inside View from Ireland

Knowing you need a new laptop

CLONMEL -- The biggest justification I have for a new laptop is my current workhorse does not have a Centrino chip inside. It used to be mandatory to upgrade when my laptop could not toggle between memory-hungry applications. Now that hardware capabilities are so far ahead of software requirements, I have stayed off the upgrade path and never missed a beat. The need for mobile computing changes all the ground rules.

Foraging for produce

KILKENNY -- Produce shelves in Kilkenny supermarkets provide a social welfare function. That's my conclusion as I watch elderly pensioners and bratty urchins help themselves to grapes, apples and pears at my local Dunnes Stores. They look over the fresh selections, grab something to munch, then walk around the shop while eating their choice.

I used to be appalled at this behaviour until I realised that it was very Darwinian. Fruits and vegetables have been responsible for about as many reported cases of food poisoning as beef, chicken, fish and eggs combined. But in Ireland's litigous society, some shoplifter is probably going to sue Superquinn for failing to wash its produce.

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Wi-Fi Bike

NYC -- One of the most unexpected things I saw in New York City was Yuri Gitman's Wi-Fi bicycle at the Union Square subway station. Gitman teaches at the Parson School of Design and he has figured out how to strap a Wi-Fi access point onto a bicycle. The bike sits at the top of stairs and sends a weak Wi-Fi signal down two levels to the N, R, Q, and W lines. The single installation sucks up battery power faster than a rack of boom boxes.

Gitman told the New York Times that New Yorkers need free Internet access in the subway and everywhere else. I don't know if the pasengers will expose their gear to this connectivity--you see many more laptops on Dublin's DART trains than you do in NYC subways.

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David Gallagher -- "Using a bicycle to uplink on a downtown platform" in The New York Times, 15 Dec 03
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O2 Numbers

KILKENNY -- Judging from the nine minutes I spent waiting for assistance when ringing O2 Customer Care (1909, +35361203501 or fax +35361203510), it sounds like the company did a fair amount of Christmas sales. I heard sales associates flogging cameraphones in every electronics shop I visited in December.

While waiting for help to activate O2 data services, I noted some useful numbers pertaining to O2.

International Politics in Kilkenny People

KILKENNY -- Consecutive editions of The Kilkenny People have featured coverage of Saddam's capture. First, front page coverage was given to a local man who is stationed in Iraq. This week, it's nine inches in a letter to the editor bemoaning US foreign poicy concerning Saddam's capture.

Kilkenny Internet Cafe

KILKENNY -- Thanks to flat screen monitors, affordable DSL and the presence of a hallway, Kilkenny now has a reasonably-priced Internet cafe. (Well, it's actually an Internet access point like it says above the shop.) It's run by Powers' Newsagent and it's prominently located in Johns Street just off the eastern approach to the well-known John's Bridge. You can access the Internet for €3 an hour, which means it's cheaper to check your mail now than it was in 1999. All the Irish broadsheets are at least 14% more expensive than in 1999. It's good there's value-added with easily available broadband.

FACT: All three of the flat screen PCs have Kazaa installed. That's news to Tim Power, the shop owner. It's old news for Yahoo, where more people looked for Kazaa than anything else on the Internet in 2003.

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BBC -- "Music sharing tops file searches"
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Personal Stores

KILKENNY -- I teach a database course to third level students and although all of them have music collections, most have CDs, tapes, or MDs. Most of them have not been converted to digital media even though MP3s have become mainstream. Personal sound collections have become a bunch of 1s and 0s. They can be stored in any of the economical hard drive formats, on CDs, MDs and flash memory keys. These personal stores are likely to dangle from necks or be stuffed into backpacks alongside CDs swappped with friends. But at the moment, most of the personal stores of music I see while lecturing aren't MP3 collections--they're copies of CDs. And that should comfort the RIAA.

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Irish Technology 2003

BOTH FERGUS CASSIDY¹ and Matthew Magee² contribute to a full page in The Sunday Tribune that looks back on technology in 2003. [UPDATE: 10  March 2007. This blog ("Inside View") won "best Technology Blog" of 2007 at the Irish Blog Awards.]

Pillars of Irish economy

SUNDAY TIMES -- The edifice of Irish "prosperity rests on a number of pillars. But the three most important are the buoyancy of the construction sector, the ability of domestic tourism to prosper and our capacity to attract inward investment which is higher up the value-added chain than was the case in the past."

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Damien Kiberd -- "Engine of economy feels the pressure" in The Sunday Times, 28 Dec 03
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Irish Dotcom Survivors

SUNDAY TIMES -- In a full page story, The Sunday Times describes the work of three Irish entrepreneurs who have survived the dotcom era.

1. Colm Lyon, who I met in the Manor Business Park two years ago, runs Realex, which builds and manages online payments systems for businesses, online retailers and banks.
2. Michael Veale is sales and marketing director at Buy4Now, Ireland's premier online shopping site.
3. Tom Kelly, CEO of Netsource, is leveraging its network and SME customer base to entice applications providers to become part of the company.

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Douglas Dalby -- "Dotcom Superheroes" in Sunday Times, 28 Dec 03.
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