This week I watched a funeral online.It wasn’t my first and I suppose it wont be my last
The corpse was paraded around a theme park which wasn’t surprising given the amount of clowns attending and it was pitiful to watch, relative’s and friends no matter how distant were flown in from foreign parts to give amazing eulogies and to wax lyrical about how good the great was.
In the middle of the service it was announced that the great man’s brain had been frozen and that they had put him in a new body and would bring him back to life. All the faithful were joyous at this (of course they were paid to attend so they should) even though the new body couldn’t be really seen.
Simple people made announcements that they would help the corpse to get lines in newspapers
Upon the announcement the hysteria spread (think of water to wine at this stage) and many were converted, much celebrations were had, many newspapers were written and everyone rejoiced.
Welcome to Blackberry’s world.

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I wrote about Viddy and its extraordinary valuations recently
In the last 48hrs I am being inundated about Viddy’s explosive growth, its incredible A-List backers and hell even Zuck’s on it now.
I believe that video will eventually be huge on mobile and with Socialcam as a competitor hopefully the space can mature and grow but there’s something wrong with Viddy’s claims.
As you can see from the image above 4283 of my contacts are not on Viddy, 19 are, surely with almost 5000 contacts with a large percentage coming from social media the number should be different to that.
The exact same with twitter, 13 of my friends are on Viddy from a total of around 8000 and on Facebook its 9, don’t know how many FB friends I have but a serious percentage of my Facebook and Twitter friends are from social media and many are from The Valley and LA.
Something just doesn’t make sense on the numbers I am seeing here.
I think the explosive growth will now come since Mark Zuckerberg signed up but did you ever get that funny feeling that you are being gamed?

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I parked illegally today in Cork for a few minutes.
When we got back to the car it was gone, it had happened to me once before years ago so a taxi to Blackpool to the Cork City pound.
Got there and its closed down
I was getting seriously worried thinking the car was stolen and called the Garda, they gave me a number to call Cork City council parking,021-492-4555 it was unmanned of course.
Off over to the Garda station and got told the most bizarre story of all times.
If a car is causing an obstruction (it wasn’t) now Cork City Council tow it to the next available parking space which could be anywhere.
How do you get your car back? you go looking for it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Anyways we found it eventually, it had a parking fine on it and had been towed to a parking space and parked illegally as it hadn’t got a parking disc on it now.
What muppets make up these rules?

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Many of you probably don’t even remember the last internet bubble I know I barely can but on visits to San Francisco its whispered about in hushed tones.
These are probably the best synopsis of it on Wikipedia and The Economist.
Lately we are seeing similar circumstances with very high IPO value’s for companies who haven’t really figured out business models, I wont talk about the Instagram purchase for a combined value of stock and cash of $1 billion as I think history will tell us that that was an incredible deal by Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
There are a couple of worrying signs though

I was zipping though my feeds last night and saw this
Viddy Is Raising $30M At A $370M Valuation
I was blown away because I have experience in the field, many years ago I was the (I think) first European user of an service called QIK (on my Nokia N95) I developed a great relationship with the guys behind it Ramu Sunkara, Bhaskar Roy and the whole team including my buddy Jackie Danicki.It all ended great with Skype acquiring Qik, I have no idea for how much but I am assuming for nowhere near the stratospheric valuation that Viddy is putting on itself above but I think it’s nowhere near that. (I hope it was though )

Then I wake up this morning to see that a Y Combinator company Sendhub has raised $2 million for SMS broadcasting, now this isn’t a dig at Sendhub but I was doing this ten years ago for Domino Pizza’s as a favor to a friend, there are 100′s possibly 1000′s of way to do this with this search telling you how easy it is to get started in this field with zero investment or you could just build your own on the amazing Twilio on which Sendhub is built.

A bubble? I’m getting concerned, you?

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I absolutely love Kickstarter
“The filmmakers, musicians, artists, and designers you see on Kickstarter have complete control and responsibility over their own projects. They spend weeks building their own project pages, shooting their own videos, and brainstorming what to offer as rewards.Rewards are things like a copy of what’s being made, a limited edition, or a custom experience related to the project. This isn’t Best Buy – rewards aren’t shrink-wrapped and ready to ship. Once the project is funded, the journey to bring them to life begins”

Over the last few months there has been amazing success stories, especially in the design section which is where I generally hang out, you probably have all seen the incredible success story of Pebble, the founders had hoped to raise $100,000 and are currently at $6,514,212 with 23 days to go, go take a look.

Anyway a new one arrived today on Kickstarter, Brydge for iPad and I love it, why not go take a look and maybe invest a few bucks, its helping someone’s dream and trust me makes you feel great. I put their video up below, its well worth a watch.

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Have you seen Voxer?
I remember the early days of travelling to the USA and seeing guys using Nextel mobile service as a walkie talkie and thinking this is the coolest thing ever.
Well Voxer does the same on iPhone and Android but it also does a lot more
Text, Voice, photo’s, location but most important to me is group chats, with Cubic Telecom now having office’s in three countries I can just start an instant chat with the guys in the USA with no dialing, texting or any of that, just click talk and we are good to go.
With Voxer’s recent $30 million funding by Institutional Venture Partners, Intel Capital and numerous angels including SV Angel, CrunchFund, Chris Dixon and Roger McNamee this has the ability to go all they way, I personally dont think so though, I think these guys will be snapped up quite quickly, there is a very smart platform play here and its only a matter of time before these guys are absorbed into something much bigger.Kudos at Mike and MG for getting in here with Crunchfund.
Techcrunch has a good back story here

The company also has an unusual backstory. It’s founded by veteran entrepreneur Tom Katis, a decorated soldier who previously cofounded a major security contractor, Triple Canopy (here’s a good New York Times profile on the company from 2005). The idea for Voxer originated during an ambush in Afghanistan, he tells me, when he was trying to coordinate reinforcements and the medical team in the middle of a firefight — he needed a way to talk to everyone all at once, and the government-issue walkie talkies weren’t doing the trick

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This is a space I have been watching for a long time that’s now growing rapidly globally.
Whats really bought this to the forefront of my mind was a discussion last week around what Irish food’s you miss when you are away from home but more about that later.
The fantastic dollar shave club sends razor’s to your home for a dollar a month (video below is a much watch) but there are a number of company’s in this area
Birchbox sends you grooming staples direct to your door for $20.
Manpacks is Socks, Jocks, razors and condoms to your door for a monthly fee.
The UK based Glossybox send you a really nice box of 7 luxury grooming products for only £15.
Finally the UK based Get Brandid which does a similar model to the rest with men’s clothes.
Thinking about these well funded companies with huge target markets started an idea. With a huge Irish diaspora wouldn’t it be a great idea to create a subscription model for Irish goods?
Something for World Irish to think about?
Who doesn’t miss their Barry’s Tea, their Kerry Gold butter and who doesnt miss Tayto?
what would you put into the your “Paddy Tuck Box”?

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I wrote this post “Twitter, are you a numbers jockey?” way back in 2009 and it still rings true today.
There still appears to be a consensus that more is more on twitter and the more followers you have the better your opinion will be.
I am watching a “respected” twitter user artificially increase their twitter followers at present and smiling inside. So you really want to do this? here’s how

Get 500 twitter follower’s for $5
25,000 followers for $277.
500 followers for $39.97
Become a twitter rockstar
How to get more twitter followers

All this wont make people respect you more though, that’s the real issue, you will just have a loudspeaker to idiot’s like you.
Twitter is an incredible ecosystem full of the most incredible people I have met, people who have welcomed me into their homes, their offices and their families, I have friends from the most unusual places, Hawaii, Japan, Moscow, places I have never been but I know these people intimately and know if I am ever there I can call on these people.
I just checked my twitter followers for the first time in months, maybe a year and I have 8200, a shock to me after almost 6 years on there.This just blows me away, 8200 friends whom I can call on at anytime or DM if I need a chat/favour.
Some of these are the biggest blogger’s in the world, some of them are the friends that go way back and some of them I have never met but I know they can be relied upon.
Can you say the same about the 7000 followers you just purchased?

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Finally an Android device that breaks my Cupertino addiction.

There are an incredible number of reviews floating around at present with most of them being overwhelmingly positive.

“People will take great photo’s with the One x” Engadget
“HTC has thrown down the gauntlet with its new flagship” Android Community
“There’s a lot to love in the HTC One X” Phone Arena

I got mine on Weds (disclosure, this is a loaner device from HTC)
First things first is the screen, it uses LCD 2 which to me is a better resolution than anything out there at present, I honestly thought that the phone had come with a store sticker on the screen its that good.
I take lots of pictures as anyone who follows me on twitter knows and this camera is off the wall good with a couple of very nice features, burst allows me to take multiple pictures in seconds but the one feature which I haven’t seen elsewhere is the ability to take pictures whilst also taking video, this will come in very handy.
Battery life is at least on par with anything else I have used and substantially better than most I have tried over the last few months.
As many of you know will know I am not an Android fan despite being a purchaser of the first G1 phone many moons ago, I feel that Google have allowed the ecosystem to be “bastardized” by a number of the manufacturers.Thankfully,this is not the case in the One x, its Android Ice Cream with none of the silly additions/interfaces that have ruined it for me with a number of devices I have tested lately.
The One x comes with “Beats audio” so music is at the top end of the scale and calls are perfectly crisp no matter what the weather/background noise.
Whilst I know HTC haven’t been away I do feel with the heavy release schedule they attempted over the last few years that this is a comeback/flagship product and as so it definitely ticks all the boxes.

Now for a few gripes.

1.It doesnt work with HTC Sync, a crazy mistake, I get “coming soon” when I try to connect.
2.This isnt HTC’s fault but the camera isnt supported yet by Instagram “1 million downloads on Android in a day”
3. Again not HTC’S fault but no Flipboard.

Would I buy it, absolutely yes, its the highest powered smartphone on release with an incredible camera and does everything it says on the box.

Oh yeah, its free on 3 Ireland with a 24 month contract.

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Garry of mi-zone demoed one of his early devices to me months ago and I was blown away by the concept. mi-zone is a two-way Bluetooth security alarm which works with a mobile phone to protect both the phone and other valuables such as a handbag, keys or a laptop to which the tag is attached.

I can see hundreds of uses for it everyday, the smart thing here is the app, if someone moves your laptop bag or your child away from you. The apps alerts with an ear splitting tone but the really cool thing is that the tag does also.
They go on sale tomorrow at O2 stores,Expert, Click, Harvey Norman and Compub for €45
Garry and the guys at mi-zone have given me one of the new tags to give away so leave a comment here to be entered into the draw.

Congrats to the winner Tommy Collison @tommycollison

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