Inside View from Ireland

The Paper.li Connection

SOMETHING ABOUT PAPER.LI works well for me. It might be its layout or perhaps the way it grabs text, avatars, key frames, images and short summaries. It’s one of the most useful ways to elegantly offer news and information that would have passed me by. I set up my daily paper but don't remember what I asked Paper.li to consider when sourcing stories. I know the daily result is often a list of serendipitous short stories that prompts me to read more about those who I follow on Twitter--not because of their tweets but because of their curatorial skills. Paper.li summarises the kinds of content that several dozen people in my own Twitter community find useful or interesting. All they have to do is offer a link to interesting content and those links cause Paper.li to churn away and produce an easy-to-read daily product. In many cases, Paper.li finds things I would like to discover myself but time constraints prevented me from seeing the stories as they broke. Paper.li reaches across more than 2000 people when producing my daily newspaper. It's like getting a daily freesheet but without the Page Three girls. It's like reading news I can use instead of listening to drivetime radio shows about predictable topics emerging in Irish mainstream media. I've received more happy texts from people who Paper.li fingered than from any sort of Follow Friday routine on Twitter. I'd rather follow the AT-links to some of the Twitter followers cited by Paper.li posts because that's actually the way I decide who to follow. And since Paper.li tweets the nics of the first three contributors to each daily newsrun, it increases the chances for others to retweet each Paper.li release, bringing your paper to the attention of the communities of those who retweet. Because I like all of these things, we're going to review the social value of Paper.li in the Social Media module taught at Tipperary Institute.

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Neville Hobson -- "Connect your community with a Twitter Daily Newspaper" on Neville's blog, 29 Aug 10.

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Recharging Batteries in Your Tumble Dryer

SEEING HANNAH HAYES' ground-breaking method of recharging batteries has me thinking about buying a tumble dryer. Hannah's a 16-year-old student from Midleton College in Cork. Her unique method uses a rotating ball placed inside a tumble dryer. The system works by harnessing the kinetic energy of a household appliance. According to the thesis I read at the 2010 Young Scientist Exhibition, her research involved both electrical and mechanical experimentation in the process of building her prototype. Along with fellow researcher Beth Wardle, she visited Shanghai with their "Kiwi 3" project and won one of the 13 major prizes during the 2010 Shanghai International New Science and Technology Expo. Well done!

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Direct link to YouTube video on "Tumble Charger at the BT Young Scientist 2010".

 

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Venture Capital in Ireland

AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF the New York Stock Exchange, the Irish government announced a new €500m innovation fund. The plan is for half the money to come from the Irish Exchequer and the other half from venture capital groups. As conversation like at Irish OpenCoffee shows (image from a Cork session at right), lack of finance kills entrepreneurs on the vine. I'm still paying off more than $15,000 of personal debt that arose from my involvement in two Irish start-ups that failed to attract investment. When in New York to announce the Irish fund, Taoiseach Brian Cowen spun positive news out of the Irish recession, claiming it was over. I don't think small businesses in Ireland agree with that conclusion. Nor do I think small start-ups in Ireland would give a rosy appraisal to friendly bank managers who are willing to float a line of credit for young companies. The start-up ecosystem in Ireland remains fragile. An ambitious government programme is welcome, but the fix involves more than just throwing a matching fund together.

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Sent mail2blog using my Nokia E90's O2-3G Typepad service from the D Hotel, Drogheda, Ireland after reading on scaling for innovation.

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Threaded Audio

I CHATTED WITH Mark Rock and several Irish users of Audioboo yesterday and think we enjoyed a eureka moment about threaded audio conversations. Audioboo takes the idea of radio chats to new level. Christian Payne is showing how this can be a very effective community tactic. I also think Audioboo represents the active layer of podcasting because you don't have to know how to spell the word "podcast" in order to create your first shareable audio snippet with Audioboo.

Thoughts about Audioboo

Like many people, I listen to audio conversations on the air several times a week. The liveliest are people arguing in conference calls on Joe Duffy's Liveline at 1345 every weekday on RTE Radio One. Afternoon drivetime radio also offers conversations between differing opinion-makers. In both cases, the radio stations connect the voices through phone calls and broadcast masts. Most of these broadcasts become podcasts where the conversations reach another audience, some listening to the time-delayed conversations as podcasts on their phones.

Skyscraper Farms

ONE OF THE JOYS THAT I associate with New York City is looking down on rooftop gardens. Columbia University Professor Dickson Despommier takes rooftop gardens to a whole new level. In The Vertical Farm: The World Grows Up, he envisages city centres with entire buildings devoted to growing fruits and vegetables. The illustrations in his book should be required viewing for city planners because 80 per cent of the world's population will live in urban areas by 2050. Despommier argues, an area of land 20 per cent larger than Brazil will be required to feed all these city dwellers. Where is all that arable space? In his online writings and in his book, Despommier suggest that multi-storey buildings could be designed as giant hothouses used to grow food year-round on an industrial scale at the heart of cities. And if a skyscraper occupant doesn't want to get his hands dirty, the space could be let out as part of a multi-storey allotment scheme.

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Dickson Despommier -- The Vertical Farm ISBN 978-0312611392

Columbia University -- "The Vertical Farm"

Previously: "Green Roof Fringes", 3 January 2008.

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Android Voices

VOICE-OPTIMISED SOFTWARE stops me dead in my tracks. I'm finding more and more of Google's shadow in the handheld voice space whenever I look at free voice-activated offerings for my SonyEricsson Xperia X10 phone (shown with some battle scars at left). Dan York's reports from places like the Mobile Voice conference gives me an appreciation of Google's impact on the speech industry. Google's speech offerings feature strongly in the Android Market. Google clearly has the attention of all the speech vendors and many text-to-speech developers whose work I've followed during the past six years. Tim O'Reilly wrote about the emerging Internet Operating System, capturing the growing importance of networked applications that rely on massive amounts of data, some accessed by telling your phone what to do. For a relatively low cost of entry, we're now equipping college students with the ability to talk to their phones and to get results. In my case, I'm watching a legally blind student use spoken content on the Xperia X10 when studying for his final exams. Next year, he'll use voice controls to find information related to his course work and his phone will read back the relevant information. His Android phone will be a centrepiece of his academic success. This is really exciting stuff for me.

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Disclosure: SonyEricsson gave me an X10 to dropkick and use for creative multimedia development at Tipperary Institute. Punters have to pay €359 to O2-Ireland to get this same piece of kit.

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You Pay More Because It's Not a Commodity

I REMEMBER MOVING UP from green text on black screens to real colour with a fast mouse when we got our Apple II GS. We paid more for that computer because it was not a mere commodity. Apple continues to get its margins from a consumer market that appreciates elegance, user experience, and stability. Those attributes are not commodities; they are values worth extra payment. Around my desk today, I think about the space I could fill with an iPad while reading about alternatives that cost several hundred euro less. If we have a tablet or a slate or an iPad in our sitting room in five years, it will probably be a commodity decision, one we reached by discovering a way to connect several of our media sources into one pleasant experience.

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Reusing Electric Car Batteries

UNDER THE BONNET of the electric Mini is a battery box (at left). Until recently, I was a little concerned about what would happen to used electric car batteries but now I've found several battery recycling schemes that are supported by some of the world's biggest carmakers. Their initiative could slash the cost of green motoring. Old electric car batteries are a lot larger and more efficient than the simple car batteries of the past. The recycled electric car batteries could store power generated by wind turbines at off-peak times, when it is not required by the national grid. The batteries cold also be used for emergency power supplies. Finding a second use for them, once they are no longer strong enough to power a car, could help drive down the cost of battery box replacement. That's good news for me, because it will be difficult to get even 10 years service from an Mini E battery array.

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Ray Hutton -- "Used electric car batteries bound for wind farms" in The Sunday Times, 11 April 2010.

Photos of Mini E

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My iPad My Saviour

KATHY FOLEY WRITES a thoughtful piece on the place the iPad (or its clone) will occupy in my home by the time my daughter gets bored with primary school. [5 MB PDF] Some observers think I won't have my newspapers or news magazines anymore. They think I'll have at least one tablet to consume my information. Maybe so. But for my neighbours (and at least one Irish person on Twitter every hour) who complain about slow internet connectivity, I wonder if this brave new world of always-on, swish-refreshing, dynamic content will really take over the time slots enjoyed by the broadcast spectrum. I'm an avowed aynchronous infomaniac. I record stuff and play it back. I prefer taking my Twitter by RSS, not on the public timeline. I like my audio books in my earbuds, not as a page-turning experience. I also like handsome bound editions because three generations of my family have grown up learning arts and letters without needing a glowing screen. We'll have some sort of electronic tablet because I don't want my daughter carrying a heavy bookbag. But I don't think my sit-back couch potato mode will revolve around a tablet.

Happy Birthday Gravity

I STARTED USING Gravity around a year ago. Back then, it had a limited but useful set of features for Twitter and it kept me abreast my Twitter conversations without bogging down my overstressed laptop. Things have evolved in that year's time and now Gravity has become a fully integrated social networking client with additional support for Foursquare, Google Reader and Facebook. I can use it one-handed while hanging on street corners. I can let it auto-update while perching my phone in my car's instrument cluster and it shows interesting things like dynamically-refreshing Twitter search results. In my experience, Gravity lets me tag in and out of Facebook faster than with any other client. This sweet little program cost me 10 euro so I bought two of them and run them on different Nokia phones.