Inside View

Notes from a Failed Entrepreneur

FROM 1999 THROUGH 2004, I was part of three different start-ups. One dealt with Y2K software. Another involved an animation and post-production studio. Another had a very clever intelligent digital signage concept. All three were vetted for their export potential. One earned High Potential Start-up status. All collapsed for different reasons.

   On the heels of Tech Crunch 50 and Bizcamp Dublin last week, I'm thinking about those past ventures because the experiences I learned in them were part of talks I gave in several Irish meet-ups like the one at the left. Additionally, my painful experiences become interwoven into the third level creative multimedia programme where I teach.

   Currently, I'm surprised by the clear lines of disconnect that continue to exist between the people in charge of energising Ireland and those on the ground who are working hard to bring clever ideas to market.  I think it's inevitable that civil servants think in a top-down manner. They set up procedures that they hope will vet applicants but those administrative procedures reduce creatives to paper-pushers. That's what happened to me during many days working to bring products to market at those three start-ups. I often realised I should have been trying to generate real business by using my contact managment software instead of filling in the blanks for yet another grant application.

   After reading a few related items today, I'm left with a few conclusions, gleaned from my professional experience.

Learned on the FOI Trail

BEFORE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION (FOI) made its first footprints in Ireland, I worked inside the Beltway for agencies that specialised in circumventing FOI coverage. Several decades later, I see the similar tactics at work in Irish government that Pentagon and White House officials used to good effect in the States. For the record, I'll write a few things on my blog that I don't expect anyone in Ireland to notice because I sit on a rather quiet part of the Irish internet, far from the chattering classes that drive conversations to a fever pitch on Twitter. Below the break (that's on my weblog to you lads reading this short summary through aggregators), I'll share some vignettes about post-it notes (sample at left) containing snide comments about requestors, tissue paper co-ordination copies, and Shadowberries. For every patriot who believes transparency is an essential virtue, there's another patriot who knows imperial governance is better for the unwashed masses. This blog post will self-destruct in 19 seconds.

Sunday Times in Ireland

IT'S MY FINAL Qik clip for this month, covering my 13-minute Qik take on the Sunday newspapers in Ireland. I'm deploying to a two-day birthday party deep in County Cork next week and I expect my phone to remain in the flight mode then. Today's review of the Sunday Times and Sunday Business Post suggests more green shoots of recovery than the brown slurry of the National Assets Management Agency. I really like the coverage of Apps.ie in the Sunday Business Post and the descriptions of several Android phones in the Sunday Times. And to keep the right and left sides of the brain entertained, the Times goes with an A3-format for its Style section, carrying on a splurge theme that the Financial Times and Fortune magazine started. More than anything else, when pampering gets the front page, you know recovery has to be close at hand.

Sunday News in Ireland 20 Sep 09

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Direct link to Qik clip: http://qik.com/video/2952196

And to MP3: http://www.insideview.ie/files/sunday_news_in_ireland_090920.mp3

Bonus Link: September 2009 across Irish blogs.

Sunday Observer via Qik

FRANK DEASY GETS front page coverage in the Sunday Observer and follow-on mention inside the paper for his moving article and radio interview about organ donors. [1] Frank died in hospital on Thursday, just days after appearing on RTE Radio One. He never got his liver transplant. There are some other interesting items in the Sunday Observer today. I enjoyed every page of The Guardian & Observer Guide to Painting [2] and opened with Fiona Rae's work in my Qik clip. I'm intrigued by the Discover Ireland advertisement that doesn't show Dublin as a subtitled destination. The Observer Sport Monthly shows athletes sporting fashion with an accompanying article about how most athletes can't handle numbers well. The magazine goes well with Fortune's cover of "Luxury Fights Back" this week. [3] Moctezuma is photogenic [4], the labels are nostalgic [5], both Google and Yahoo have figured out display advertising while Mark Zuckenberg is breaking even [6], and the comment section explains that American women want to walk more than make love while French women rank making love first. [7]

Observing the News (20 Sep 09)

iTunes 9 Makes Me Shop More

A FEW DAYS AFTER installing iTunes 9, my credit card told me I have purchased more in those days from Apple than I had in the past month. In my case, it's down to the fact that Apple's iTunes 9 makes it easier to share information about purchases. I get poked on Facebook by friends buying tracks (you can tweet or text your buying habits to others while inside the iTunes Store). This small touch of social networking may be the first time that Apple has waded into social media. Too bad iTunes doesn't let you hook into playlists (or scrobble) Last.fm because the impulsive buying effect would be a lot stronger. And even though I don't like the handing over control of my audio library to Steve Jobs (I had major issues with iTunes eating my stuff three years ago), I have to admit that iTunes 9 has improved a much-used program on my laptop and it has prodded extended members of my family to entrust their portable media management to Apple.

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x_ref125mw #technology

Logging into Facebook as Topgold

HOW CONVENIENT! I can log into Facebook by using my user name instead of my email address. But what remains is regaining my old dot com address to ensure the topgold name actually points to something relevant.

x_ref125pr

Excess Killed the Celtic Tiger

MORE THAN ANY OTHER thing I've seen about the demise of the Celtic Tiger, the film 8.5 Hours exposes a series of probing thoughts about how excessive consumerism killed off the hard-working demeanour that I saw when I first walked among the information technology work force in Ireland. In late 1994, I watched people coding web pages in coffee shops and in self-service laundries with washing machines spinning in the background. Ten years later, it seemed that some of that code-loving drive had moved east and was replaced with a fun-loving energy focused on loving life. All my impressions are my own, formed by places where I associated in the centre of Dublin or out at Citywest Business Campus. In both of those locations, I passed by people who wore the same kinds of clothing as the actors in the film 8.5 Hours and I listened to the same snippets of conversation in the film. Times have changed since those heady days. The Celtic Tiger was stabbed by the sword of consumerism and fatally slashed by easy credit that boosted people into unsustainable lifestyles.

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x_ref125mw #create

Start at Feedly and Get More Done.

A FEW MONTHS AGO, I installed Feedly as a plug-in to Firefox and watched my trawl of online reading material dramatically increase. Feedly gives me very useful views of information and because of how I've culled my sources, I can see trends, topics and breaking news items emerge faster with Feedly than Scoble can see on Twitter. That's because I've inserted the trusted tweets into Feedly. If an item is moving around as a discussion topic on Facebook, FriendFeed or Twitter, my Feedly "latest" link normally shows it.

Ireland Now Least Expensive Hotel Beds

IRELAND'S NIGHTLY RATE of EUR 80 makes the country the least expensive country in western Europe for an overnight hotel stay. The €80 is a real price paid in a live survey of 78,000 hotels in 13,000 worldwide locations done by Hotels.com. To get cheaper than an Irish hotel bed, you have to go to Poland (€73), Hungary or the Czech Republic. (€71). The downward movement in rates is the most dramatic in five years. When you consider trans-Atlantic airfares are discounted 30% from the summer rates, now is a great time to visit Ireland for the birthday of the pint. You would spend €110 for a room in Galway, €79 in Cork (shot from inside our fav Cork hotel where we've spent eight nights on six separate occasions), €76 in Dublin, or $65 a night in Limerick.

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Alison Healy -- "Hotel room prices down 26% in first half of 2009," in the Home News section of The Irish Times, 15 Sep 09.
Sent mail2blog from my Nokia E90 using O2-Typepad EDGE service in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, Ireland.

x_ref125mw #travel

Safe Saucy Sexting

YOU REALLY CANNOT strike a sultry pose on Bebo or Facebook and hope that it's just a throwaway moment. That's because anything titillating is going to be scraped and passed around by dozens of people. I've seen some of the watchlists used by lurkers to scope out interesting (often puerile) content so they can add it to their personal stash. If you don't want your image to appear in the modern day equivalent of alt.binaries, you should consider some sage advice from Conor Ryan. The Irish Examiner gives him a page to discuss how mobile phones became a menace (and became a matter of concern for Childline in Ireland), how most parents steer away from looking at what's on their teenagers' pones, and why hyper-active texters normally fall outside the reach of European rules for data protection because of they qualify for a "household exemption". I think it's important to pass along some simple guidelines for safe usage of a mobile phone.