Inside View

Value for New Media

A REPORT FROM the Comptroller and Auditor General John Purcell has criticised the Irish employment authority Fás for failing to achieve value for money in its dealings with its web design agency. The website project, a new Jobs Ireland portal, provides functions that were already being supplied by existing systems.

In monthly sessions at Irish Open Coffee, we exchange views and offer sanity checks to small businesses thinking about building a sophisticated online presence. Last week, I recommended a new start-up reduce its web development outgoings by €3000 and divert that grant-aided line into Google Adwords. Last year, I attended a regional meeting where the Jobs Ireland site was profiled but at that meeting, peer reviews were untolerated.

At the very least, I think State agencies should seek professional reviews of their commissioned work and not wait for the Auditor General to review the results. In the case of Jobs Ireland, "the website cost €1.7m and an audit suggested it may have cost €1m more than it should have." [1]

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1. Colm Keena -- "Comptroller's Report Slates Fás for failing to get value for money" in The Irish Times, 10 May 2008.
2. Sent mail-to-blog by Nokia E90 using O2-Ireland 3G service on the M7.

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Five Months First Concrete Impact

AFTER FIVE MONTHS of daily use, I transferred my Nokia E90 to another piece of clothing and that hurt the phone. Because it was the first time I wore my photographer's vest in 2008, I failed to check the integrity of the velcro fasteners and within 100m of breaking into a fast canter after an Aircoach Bus, the E90 ejected itself from an outside pocket and split itself open in front of me. This is the first of many concrete impacts the phone will survive in my care. I normally get three years of solid use out of the largest phones made by Nokia and I demand that the phones can be dropped from shoulder height onto hard surfaces. After a few untimely impacts, the phones start to misbehave. They drop calls faster than they should, their voice pick-ups deteriroate markedly and the integral earpiece becomes unusable. But if I am lucky, this text-to-blog post will send and upload quickly and the E90 will continue serving into the next decade as my primary means of communicating as a blogger.

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Sent mail-to-blog using Nokia E90 over O2-Ireland 3G to Typepad.

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Times 15k Twitterfone

TODAY'S IRISH TIMES says "more than 15,000 people have applied to use Twitterfone, a new web application launched by Cork telecoms entrepreneur Pat Phelan this week, despite the fact the technology is still in private trial."

As explained by several Irish bloggers, "the software allows people to ring a local phone number and leave a short message which is then automatically posted to their account on the Twitter micro-blogging service."

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Business Technology In Short -- "15,000 are all of a Twitter" in The Irish Times, 8 May 2008.

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Trawling All The Time

THERE WAS A PIECE on national morning radio in Ireland about the website of the Data Protection Commissioner being hacked and a report being taken from the website. I did not hear about the incident on Morning Ireland but a little cross-talk on Twitter led me to buy the Evening Herald where a small piece appears about the incident. Fiona Dillon reports it as "an embarrassing security breach after a hacker accessed its annual report the day before it was due to be published." [1]

In a former life, we would "release" materials into the public eye much the same way--by putting them on the website but not linking to them. Sometimes we got column inches when enterprising reporters broke stories that we could not have promoted through press releases. It's hardly a data compromise when publicly-accessible material goes public. In the case of many Irish government websites, all you have to do is iterate the URL number sequence by one or two or three and you can find all sorts of material in draft or embargo. You can do the same thing on my blog as well.

If your job depends upon getting drafts of policy documents or you just want to be amused by the random musings that appear on corporate websites, you should set up crawling routines with Copernic or consult with Zenark in Dublin for some eye-opening trawls of information that you might turn into business intelligence.

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Evening Herald, 8 May 2008.
2. We use Zenark to gather web intelligence.

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First Look at Twitterfone

TWITTER WORKS BEST for me when it's fast and the new Twitterfone speech-to-text service fulfills that mission requirement nicely. Being able to talk tweets would help the iPhoners who have to fumble around while trying to text on the touchscreen. It would also make tweeting easier to do while driving. I played around with Twitterfone, calling its Irish landline number six times in a half hour, watching Twitterfone post five of my six messages within three minutes of my phone calls. The missed post probably was a result of my phone losing its signal, not Twitterfone failing to convert my talking to text for publishing. My first impression is that Twitterfone's simple and easy-to-use method will help me in the field of education technology. It will assist dyslexic students in their submission of assigned work and it will facilitate me in making a river of audio feedback available to students.

Review of MotionFlash Multi Card Reader/Writer

My office chair seems to run over card readers so I buy a new one every four months. Based on the speed of read/write access on the MotionFlash multi-card reader, I plan to buy another within a fortnight.

This is quite possibly the fastest card reader I have ever used. I saw the speeds most dramatically when using the MotionFlash multi-card reader to transfer sound files from a Sony Memory Stick Pro to my laptop. In three other card readers, several minutes would elapse before I could locate the appropriate file in order to transfer it to the laptop for editing. I experienced no delay with the MotionFlash device--quite remarkable since more than 300 different reside on my digital dictaphone's memory stick. I like the small labels next to the various openings on the MotionFlash reader because clear labels are about the only way I can differentiate between micro SD and M2 card slots. I even get those little cards confused in my phones. The MotionFlash card reader is handy in another way. I can store the smallest memory cards in the device, thus minimising the potential for them getting lost. My MotionFlash Card Reader cost me 21 in the Sony Centre in Drogheda, County Louth, Ireland. Like I told my work colleagues, It was well worth the price.

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Rated 5/5 on May 06 2008.
Vote on Bernard Goldbach's Reviews at LouderVoice.

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Handling Change

FROM PODCASTS TO industry press releases with The Economist Intelligence Unit and Harvard Business Review thrown in between, it is very obvious that today’s globally integrated economy demands more from CEOs than they have been trained to handle. According to IBM’s 2008 Global CEO Study of 1,130 CEOs, one involving face-to-face interviews in 40 countries and available through Text100, CEOs are battling to keep up with the pace of change. The helpful study reveals that the number of organisations who have limited or no success at managing change is increasing faster than those organisations that are successful at it. This is surprising since more CEOs--83 percent of them--expect substantial change in the future, and are optimistic they can successfully manage change.

Six Weeks without laptop underarm

I CARRIED MY LAPTOP into Limerick OpenCoffee last Thursday and that was the first time in six weeks that I unparked the Dell Latitude from its perch point in my sitting room. I needed the laptop for a webcam connection to five Online Meeting Rooms where I connected to Waterford, Dublin, Galway, Cork and Clonmel. After Ina left her seat from Galway, Chuck connected from New York and he streamed the session out via Mogulus.

After 15 minutes inside this virtual meeting space, I was thankful that we were recording the session for editing into a shorter version. I also learned that we need to be more structured when inside a shared space because it is really difficult to talk through noise when courtesy prevents you from muting a seat.

Within a fortnight, we will share some lessons learned directly onto the Opencoffee.ie website. In the meantime, I am dedicating the summer months to developing a process whereby I keep my laptop hibernating in my sitting room for even longer.

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Online OpenCoffee

WE SOFTLY ATTEMPT to connect three groups meeting for OpenCoffee by using technology from Online Meeting Rooms shown above. Using Maryrose Lyons' laptop, Dublin's group appears on screen in a cable connection from The Morrison Hotel. In Waterford's Arclabs, Tom Corcoran has wired a DV camera in a meeting room in Carrignore. Limerick OpenCoffee uses a Creative webcam over the Absolute Hotel's free and open wifi.