I have just read the press release on the ChangingWorlds website that announces that it will be acquired by Amdocs for $60 million in cash! That is very nice, and the current owners must be delighted! Congratulations are in order!
As far as I recall, ChangingWorlds started as a UCD campus company, and they received substantial support from Enterprise Ireland.
It really is great to see that it is not all doom and gloom in the current economic downturn!
Tags: Amdocs, Campus Company, ChangingWorlds, Enterprise Ireland, UCD
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Entrepreneurship is something that I have always been interested in, and it is something that is now part of my everyday work! So it is certainly something that I intend writing about here!
I think that Ireland has improved significantly in relation to entrepreneurship, but there is still a huge way to go! We are currently experiencing an economic downturn (as is most of the world), and this is likely to increase the number of start-up companies. Unfortunately, it also makes it more difficult for these start-up companies to receive the necessary initial investment :(
I read an interesting article on TechCrunch today titled Teen Bloggerpreneur Jessica Mah’s $500 Startup: InternshipIN. The article describes how to start a company for $500! Yes – just $500! It seems impossibly small! The start-up company is based on a website called InternshipIN, which is designed to provide a single portal for university students looking for internships. I think the most interesting aspect of this is the spirit in which it is being created, and it certainly will be interesting to see if it succeeds! Jessica Mah’s blog provides more details (and it is a good read).
Closer to home, I read that Pat Phelan (overall winner at this years IIA Net Visionary Awards 2008) is on a panel at a Digital Media Island event. Therefore, he asks the question “How can we foster start-ups and innovation in Ireland today?“, and some of the answers are very interesting!
Tags: Digital Media Island, IIA, InternshipIN, Jessica Mah, Net Visionary Awards, Pat Phelan, TechCrunch
I read three articles on TechCrunch today regarding Internet traffic on election day of the US election.
I do not expect that websites outside of the US experienced significant increases, because there is less interest in the US election, and the time differences made it a bit impractical!
Finally, Twitter also had an extremely busy night, as described in OMG, That Was A Big Day. It is a pity that this post does not give some more general statistics. For example, are any of these statistics new records?
I think that it is very impressive that all of the major websites that experienced heavy traffic were able to cope with it. I particularly like Twitter’s approach:
Our technical approach over the last several months has been to find the weakest point of the system, fix it so it’s no longer the weakest, move to the next weakest point, and so on.
I also notice that the new president is a Twitter user! It will be great if he can continue to find time to maintain his online presence!
Tags: TechCrunch, Twitter, US Election 2008, Viral, Yahoo, YouTube
I have stayed up very late to watch the US election, and it is now clear who the winner is! However, I do not want to get into politics in this blog!
From a technology point-of-view, I am amazed how much attention the mainstream media has given to the online election campaigns. In particular, I am sure that every viewer must now be aware of Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. Also, the winner thanked his supporters by email before making his first public appearance!
It will be very interesting to see some statistics from the main news web sites over the next few days regarding how busy their web servers were. I would expect some records!
Tags: Email, Facebook, MySpace, US Election 2008, YouTube
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RTE are reporting that Bank of Ireland has lost a memory stick that contains personal details of almost 900 customers. The full article is Bank of Ireland customer details lost.
This is just the latest incident of Bank of Ireland losing customer details! However, in this case the bank is claiming that the storage of customer details without encryption on a memory stick is a breach of its policies and procedures.
Perhaps Bank of Ireland needs to examine why employees are able to copy sensitive customer details to any memory sticks!
Tags: Bank of Ireland, Encryption, Memory Stick, RTE
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ComScore released a press release today covering the UK Web Rankings for September 2008. Several news sites are commenting on the fact that Facebook has overtaken the BBC to occupy the fifth spot. Indeed, this was the most significant change in the list. I guess that this is not surprising, given the universal appeal that Facebook currently has!
I find this especially interesting, because I read an article on TechCrunch over the weekend claiming that Facebook may be trying to raise more capital in order to cover their soaring costs. To put this in context, Facebook have raised almost $500 million in 2007 and 2008 already. So what are they doing with all of this cash? Some of the more interesting costs cited are:
- $2 million per week for additional storage
- $1 million per month on electricity
- $500,000 per month on bandwidth
- $10 million per month on payroll
So where are Facebook trying to raise this extra capital from in this time of economic cautiousness? Dubai!
It will be very interesting to see if they succeed in raising more capital, and at what price! I am certainly not dying to get a piece of that action!
Tags: BBC, ComScore, Dubai, Facebook, TechCrunch
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The winners of the IIA Net Visionary Awards were announced last night at a black tie event in Dublin. Some of the nominations, and indeed the eventual winners, are very interesting. Congratulations to all involved, and in particular to Blacknight for picking up two awards!
The first winner that caught my attention was Pixie. I heard of them before, but I never actually visited their website. It seems to be very user friendly, and I happily browsed through random photos for a while. I think that they are in a very competitive market, especially if they want to have a global audience rather than an Irish audience.
The other winner that caught my attention was lichens.ie. Yes, this really is an entire website about lichen! The website is well designed, and it is interesting to look at, even if you are not a biologist! I really like the magnifying glass cursor that appears over the photos on the top of each page.
Of course, I am not saying that the other sites are not worthy of a look either!
There are several other similar types of awards during the year in Ireland, such as the Irish Web Awards and the Irish Blog Awards. I think that both of these are the brain children of Damien Mulley. I am not familiar enough with them to know the differences!
Tags: Blacknight, Damien Mulley, IIA, Irish Blog Awards, Irish Web Awards, lichens.ie, Net Visionary Awards, Pixie
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I have just noticed that one of my WordPress “Link Categories” has simultaneously become a post “Category”. So if I edit it on one of these two pages the change immediately appears on the other!
Strange! I do not understand why this is occuring!
Tags: WordPress
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There is currently an explosion of websites appearing online with information and details about blue jumpers in Irish (“geansai gorm”). Some examples include:
If you would like me to add your website to the above list then let me know. However, I do not think that Google has indexed Teknovis yet :o
So what is the cause of this sudden explosion? It is a SEO competition that was launched by Damien Mulley last Tuesday. The full details are described in his blog post titled “Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the greatest SEO of them all?“.
Good luck to all who enter!
Tags: Damien Mulley, Google, SEO
After many years of surfing the Internet, I finally reached the end of it today!
You can too, simply by visiting www.ro.ro.
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