Unenterprising Ireland (correction!)

17Oct07

There’s something about my personal makeup that results in me feeling very stupid when I get something wrong. And it turns out that I did just that with yesterday’s posting about EI and Auctomatic.

Both Damien Mulley and Patrick Collison were good enough to comment on my post and correct me. You can read the comments but this is what Patrick had to say:

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Unenterprising Ireland

16Oct07

Niall Larkin blogged the other day about Paul Graham (he of Viaweb and Y Combinator fame) and his somewhat contentious remarks that if you’re serious about your startup you should move to Silicon Valley. You can read Paul Graham’s original post here and his follow-up here but essentially his point was that investors on the west coast of the U.S. are much more aggressive and less risk-averse than their east-coast counterparts. You’re more likely to get funded early if you go west young (wo)man!

There were some interesting comments on Niall’s post¹ not least of which was one about the barrier to entry for startups being a lot lower these days, especially if you’re in a web business, thereby reducing the need for early stage funding. Despite this being true, you will still eventually need an injection of cash at some stage if you really want to grow the business. My comment stated that in my limited experience it is really hard to get any kind of serious funding here unless you are independently wealthy yourself, know someone who is or don’t need the money in the first place².

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Hell Hath No Fury… (follow-up)

15Oct07

Picture by jamestee Some rights reserved.

I didn’t get a chance to follow up on my previous posting about the kerfuffle caused by the Monster spamming incident a few weeks ago. Monster came back with an apology that defused the situation quite quickly. Apparently they were the actions of a “new hire” who didn’t understand Monster’s policies.

Of course, the whole thing would never had happened had their immediate reaction been an apology rather than adopting a confrontational attitude¹. Companies and organisations need to learn that consumers and individuals who feel they have been wronged have access to an outlet that can reach a much wider audience than the letters page of the local newspaper and is cheaper than their solicitor. It’s called the Internet and with the way people are interacting across it these days all it takes is a small bit of interest for a story to get out of control.

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Hell Hath No Fury…

03Oct07

Picture by adarshr Some rights reserved.

The Irish blogosphere¹ has been abuzz for the last couple of days with the latest example of how potentially powerful bloggers have become in Ireland, how careful – and informed – companies have to be to avoid running into serious PR trouble and how they should really learn to react in a positive way when they get into trouble.

It all pretty much kicked off with this post by Michele Neylon about the response he got from Monster when he complained about being spammed by them. Things got worse when some character called “Pedro” started slinging muck about on the comments to the post only to be found out as coming in from a Monster.com IP address. Not as bizarrely funny as the whole Sky Handling Partners incident but on the same track.

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Happenings

25Sep07

Picture by bondidwhat Some rights reserved.

I’ve finally caught the Twitter meme¹ (you can follow me here). I was skeptical about it for a long time but I suddenly realised that my problem with it had always been with the way that the guys at Twitter were trying to pitch it – as a great tool for stalkers to keep tabs on you. The reality is that like most new technologies people will find uses for it that were unintended or unexpected². The people I follow, and who follow me, are mostly just doing what I do; throwing out short braindumps and observations and commenting on each other in turn.

My initial enthusiasm though has given way over the last few days to disappointment at just how flakey Twitter actually is. It’s regularly up and down and tweets³ seem to go missing all the time. They’re probably a victim of their own popularity but there are question marks over Twitter’s ability to support such a large userbase⁴. There now seems to be a bit of herding in the direction of Jaiku and I’ve set myself up on that one although I’m not using it yet.

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