West Cork Development Partnership are doing a series of web workshops. I like the idea of the Responsive Design one.

Love this. All the Twitter accounts for the London Underground routes.

Make things people want rather than make people want your things.

Breaking bread. Nixon McInnes go over the social aspect of business, today and historically.

Guy hides away inside AOL building his startup. Totally ticks the box of every person that wants to build a startup on a shoestring. The truth is somewhere else I would think but that would be boring, right? I expect this story to be reused by some entreprenurial social startup hacker in Ireland in about 5, 4, 3 …

You may have heard of Jonny Ive, the guy that designs all the pretty Apple items. This guy is probably his strongest influence. Dieter Rams. You will know his work.

Social TV. James Whatley has some ideas. I agree. Not enough innovation even when the tech is brand spanking new. Not just about tech, is it.

Via Jim OTR

It’s in Darc Space in North Great George’s Street. Facebook invite is here. My “art” of #mulleybucks will be there along with genuine pieces of art too.

Can I get tax relief now?

Full submitted piece:

If you want to be crass, lazy and think only of the short term for your organisation, I have a suggestion for you. If you want to extract money quickly from people and let a private organisation get handsome fees from you, I have a suggestion for you. If this were the Simpsons I’d start singing about a Monorail about now.

Chugging is the fracking of the charity world. It does get you back something of worth but it is controversial, it angers many people and there can be a poisonous fallout over it. If you want to see how the general public feels about chuggers, do a search on Twitter for the phrase or look at the Twitter account @chuggerwatch (I have no affiliation with them, it’s obvious as they are nice to charities)

When I met an organisation that employed chuggers a few years ago they told me if I can find an easier way to get money as quickly, they’ll do it. Shortcuts have gotten this country and our society into trouble in the long term and the quick buck means chuggers blocking you, making you shake their hand, asking for high-fives or hugging you. It will make you first disliked and in time despised by the general public. Don’t forget the massive data protection issues too as these strangers gather banking details in your name.

The organisation I met told myself and other active Twitter users that they would never employ the tactics of asking for handshakes to stop people. Now they do. As people become immune to the usual chugging tactics, stronger more intrusive tactics are needed. Fracking came from the oil industries that drained mother earth dry. What next for chuggers?

The fallout of an industry ignoring more aggressive chugging is that all organisations may be mistrusted and all forms of on-street collections could end up being banned. Politicians in this country will always use a sledgehammer to crack a nut, it is their nature to over-react. If you want to be the BP of the charity sector, I have a suggestion for you…

===

If it can be measured, measure it, but use it well. Restaurants copping on to big data. And medium data.

Twitter gives away Obama’s location! Hand wringing about security. Think terrorists in Afghanistan rely on Twitter to give them local info?

Another day, another Apple post but it also shows the depth to the company. More insights for any business about how to inch into a market before taking over a lot of it.

Trust in advertising, thanks Pat.

Zynga making ther money back quickly with Draw Something, even if usage is plummeting.

Via New Aesthetic (RIP) is the Descriptive Camera. You take a picture and it is turned into a textual description thanks to Amazon Turk.

I really like the idea of F.ounders, bringing a buzz to Ireland and hopefully getting some of those tech boys setting up shop. It’s a juggernaut of tech meetings. It’s a private affair though. Dublin Web Summit then commercialises this very well by introducing the F.ounders types to the public. Is it value for money? F.ounders, I think is. Getting some of the most brilliant people in tech together in Dublin for any event is worth a lot. What happens though when these leads are generated and delivered? Who converts them?

So what did EI and IDA give to the F.ounders and Dublin Web Summit events over the past while?

F.ounders 2010
IDA gave €30,000
Enterprise Ireland gave €10,000

F.ounders 2011
In 2011 a consortium of Irish state agencies gave €170,000 to F.ounders/Dublin Web Summit
Enterprise Ireland gave €50,000
IDA gave €60,000
Other agencies contributed the rest.

EI’s Cloud sub-event
However they also gave money towards Enterprise Ireland’s “Beyond the Cloud” event as part of Dublin Web Summit 2011.

€54,450 was paid to Dublin Web Summit Ltd. by the state agencies
IDA gave €10,000
Science Foundation Ireland gave €10,000
Enterprise Ireland gave €34.450

London Web Summit 2012
Enterprise Ireland gave £10,000 to the event (Press Room Sponsorship)

Here are the original emails from EI and IDA on this (names removed)

IDA:

Damien

Further to your recent query, in 2010 IDA sponsored the F.Ounders part of the event to the amount of €30,000 following an approach by Paddy Cosgrave.

IDA sponsored the F.Ounders event again in 2011 as part of the Ireland team overall sponsorship package. IDA invested €60,000 in the event in 2011. In addition, IDA contributed €10,000 towards the running of the Beyond the Cloud event at the Dublin Web Summit in 2011, in conjunction with EI and SFI.

IDA Ireland can confirm that at no time was it asked by the Department of An Taoiseach or any other Government Department to support these events.

EI:

Dear Damien,
In response to your recent FOI request, I have gathered the following information.

Enterprise Ireland provided €10,000 in sponsorship for the Founders event in 2010 following an approach by Paddy Cosgrave.

Enterprise Ireland decided to sponsor the event as it represented an unprecedented opportunity for positive global publicity for Ireland as a top business location.

On foot of the success of the 2010 event, and a sponsorship request by Paddy Cosgrave, Enterprise Ireland in partnership with other relevant stage agencies negotiated a joint inter-agency sponsorship package for Founders and Dublin Web Summit in 2011. The agencies jointly provided a package of €170,000 in sponsorship of which Enterprise Ireland provided €50,000.

In addition, Enterprise Ireland ran the “Beyond the Cloud” event as part of Dublin Web Summit. This event cost approximately €74,500 of which €54,450 was paid to Dublin Web Summit Ltd. IDA and SFI each contributed €10,000 towards the total cost of this event. The rest was covered by Enterprise Ireland.

In 2012, Enterprise Ireland, through its London office, provided £10,000 (Sterling) of sponsorship for the London Web Summit.

Enterprise Ireland can confirm that at no time was it asked by the Department of an Taoiseach or any other Government Department to support these events.

I trust this covers your information requirements,

Kamori Studios have a blog. It can be read. For free. By humans. Free humans.

Doing some PR Workshops in Cork and Dublin. Sign up if interested.

Mr. Brand Ireland links to an agency called Huge. We’re motherfucking hipster creative motherfucks. Pivot! Creative! Dogs! Passionate! DanishDesignerEyewear!

Ouch. So Google did know they were scanning WiFi networks and intercepting data on those networks. They only got fined $25k for this.

Future of retail? Apple Stores perform 17 times better than the average retail store. Ask them.

If this, then that. Make your web tasks more efficient. Automate things.

Low – Lullaby

Pushing the Kickstarter idea can be good for a few reasons: It shows that they can pitch their product, shows they have a network and can use it and also shows that they have some kind of business acumen. It doesn’t need to be a 6 figure kickstarter or even a high 5 figure sum but something that gets the public interested in a project but also not small enough that you get money just from savings and family.

Fund It in Ireland is great for the arts. Small and large projects are on it and there’s a great deal of learning after they’re run. A clone for startup funding could even be created for the Irish market with Government funds. The argument would be this service makes invested money have a higher chance of used well. Naturally scams would be attempted like they are everywhere else but let the crowd find the holes in it.

This was playing as I wrote the post. So there you go.

The mp3s of the talks from Measurement.ie are now online.

Netflix has a script that acts like a rampaging primate in their systems to train/prepare them for unexpected failures. Great idea especially if you like chaos.

Via Suzy. How hotels now making supremely sure that your first 15 minutes in the hotel are excellent. Damn that social media!

More on Steve Jobs, this time the “wilderness” years which we can see built the man that changed the world.

Mindfulness in Education.

Pinterest list of PR Stunts.

When in doubt, buy out the research company.

Amazing. Using mobile phone usage data to learn about society and relationships.

Until people pointed out they were “spam” followers. AKA they were bought. Seán of course claimed no idea of how that happened. He said at first he thought it was a hacker:

Then later he said at first he thought it was a celeb mentioning him:

Seán’s employee Bill Liao who claims to have co-founded Xing…

Tweet above from the founder of Xing.

… had the same issue with these “spammers” going from 30k followers to 110k in a very short space of time. He too doesn’t know where they came from:

If I saw myself go from 30k to 50k to 100k followers and noted they were all spam accounts I’d be worried about my account security and would report it to Twitter.

Bill instead will Tweet about you for cash to his 25k (when the ads were starting they were this) and now 100k followers. This is what he is saying on his Fiverr profile. Oddly, this is also the site where you can buy “spam” followers!

There’s been a lot of chatter on Twitter about faking follower numbers recently and also over on Pat’s blog. Experienced people can spot fakery but tell media people you are now followed by 80k people and they might not fully check, repeat it and one fake number makes you seem way more powerful than you are.

A conspiracy theorist though might suggest this was timed like that to do damage to the Open Ireland initiative. Or it might have been an intern going rogue. That happens a lot. Still, not the best start to this new intiative.

BTW, with past experience of blog posts of this nature I’m betting I’ll be classed as a bully, made people cry, I’m anti-Ireland, anti-jobs and more. I do admit to all of those and being anti-bullshit too.

* that’s a new one to me