Kirstie and Aphrodite from Beaut.ie will be in Cork tomorrow to sign copies of their new book, the Beaut.ie Guide to Gorgeous at Easons tomorrow at 1pm. The Beaut.ie girls always write with verve and joy, so any chance to meet them in person is a treat. More details on the Beaut.ie blog.

Disclaimer: I have to ban myself from their blog at times, such is my addiction to buying cosmetics.

(Logo shamelessy robbed!)

To celebrate this birthday, the Morning Ireland team have a special show in store for us tomorrow morning stuffed chocka with loads of guests including Hanley.

The show also posted some pictures of the team way back when.

David Davin Power before Night of the Living Fianna Fáil Ard-Fheis with the august David Hanley.

The Starsky and Hutch photo. (Really, that’s what they call it!)

Do say Happy Birthday to them on Twitter or just shout it at the radio!

A brief history of artificial life.

[Next Step] Visualisation on contoured maps?

Toronto is a city of datasets. Open data, we likez.

Joe Coleman of Dublin? Via Twenty.

Urban Informatics Speech Title Generator.

8′20″ – The Ebb & Flow of Paris Traffic. Recorded from the top of the Arc De Triomphe on traffic below. More info.

Eolai is currently collecting photos of graffiti garage doors around Dublin. Lovely.

Martha lists upcoming tech events. Busy calendar!

Follow Me tattoo socks.

Angry people in local newspapers.

Phases of owning a computer.

Where the Dirty Hipsters Are

Interesting exhibition ‘Bits ‘n Pieces’ in the NYC, exploring where digital meets analogue in a post-Digital world.

Contrasting the UI of Android and iPhone for developers in terms of app customisation.

The Cookie Card! Via Nathalie.

Daily Drop Cap.

That Vodafone Symphonia spot. 1000 phones. 1812 Overtureness. Making Of Part 1 and Part 2.

[All in the shadow of last night's Leviathan egg-drubbing of Frank Fahey and Dan Boyle. The one that got away!]

Going live on TV from tomorrow. For further details in how to support Barnardos, check out their campaign site.

The Realex Payments Irish Web Awards 2009 winners list. So many talented peeps nominated. Another year of working in an amazing team. Grateful. Am sure I annoyed the heck of out patient Stephen. Video is my nemesis. * bows *

Further info on Microsoft Ireland’s coop and graduate positions here.

Trends are trending.

Prescient urban advertising.

UXing print newspapers.

iPhone app for predicting flight delays (US only at the min).

Believe in God. Instantly.

Of Disney and Menstruation

Cast of Terminus discuss the play. Opens at the Peacock stage in the Abbey on November 11th – running until early December. And the show is touring to Cork, Belfast, Longford and Galway.

Scarf – Lucinda Creighton

Hello – Brendan Halligan, Joe and Emer Costello

Tricolour

Yes Balloons

Wave of Mutilation

Monkey Gone to Heaven

Via Charles. Nyom. From Kamaal The Abstract.

Blas na hÉireann Awards 2009 shortlists are out!  Via Ice Cream Ireland.

Via Victoria, the late William Safire’s rules for writing.

Automating the gaydar.

Hitwise has interesting stats on photo searches.

Via the Guardian, BBC Four’s season on how tech has changed our lives – Electric Revolution.

Creep Festival posters. Simplicity.

Vegemite iWhat 2.0 tekzzspk?

Working hard is overrated.

Augmented Reality bandwagon needs a shake.

FlashForward has massive buzz, but is it really coming from these digital initiatives?

Twenty French movies to see before you die.

Dante sneakers.

If anything, iStockPhoto really should expand by connecting designers working on different price structures with site builders. iStockPhoto could become a design cupid.

iStockPhoto could let designers tag and categorise their work and then show them in a contextual view beside stock images. Say designers could show a portfolio and show samples at fixed prices, couldn’t iStockPhoto just get a cut of the transaction?

Charles reviews District 9. I thought it was a steaming pile.

On Terminal 5.

Nuanced behaviours of cities.

India – the fastest growing market for LinkedIn.

You are..

Mobile office.

Açaí Juice 100% fruit – Wafer Keyboard advert loveliness

Read the interpretations of treaty by the Referendum Commission and make up your own mind. The Referendum Commission is an independent voice charged with explaining referenda to the public.

Judge Frank  Clarke of the Referendum Commission has been answering queries on the treaty on Morning Ireland over the past couple of weeks. If you’d rather listen than read, do check out the segments.

Via NextWeb

Unarocks ‘Love is Equal’ animation on the Playhouse installation at Liberty Hall last night. Oh and ‘fish’ by tim.

Inside, the ReFunct exhibition was wrapping up. ReFunct is a show on hardware hacking and repurposing held as part of the ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art). A little peeved now that I didn’t go to one of the workshops organised. ReFunct closes on Monday.

A mutant NES!

Fridge globe

Physical impact of a hit. The other side of that video.

Where to avoid McDonald’s in the USA.

Too honest?

Flickr blog captures the red dust over Sydney. Wowzers!

And only since it’s en vogue. The most frugal cities in America. What would Ireland’s be?

Neon Skater Tetris. Via It’s Nice That.

The IDA Campaign - Innovation Ireland

First, a little background. The IDA organised the meeting to showcase their new advertising spots for ‘Innovation Ireland’, their new communications campaign. The spots were simple. A chalk on chalkboard animation that squiggles and moves with script to end on chalk squiggle Ireland. Simple. The idea being that Ireland is a place where the brain can storm.

The brief, they said, was to catch the tech/biotech exec in a hotel room just out of the shower and get him to turn around. The spots will run on international business news channels that jetsetting execs watch – like CNBC.

The online campaign is also peppered with videos from execs like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Microsoft’s Paul Rellis advocating why Ireland is a great place to do business in – the competitive advantages in basing operations here.

Thoughts

As part of the briefing, we had the opportunity to ask questions on the campaign and generally on the IDA. The Q&A session was excellent. Passion was easy to see on both sides.

Back to the campaign. I really liked its simplicity.  It beat the oh so common set of talking heads style of adverts promoting innovation and HiTek stuffz.

The selection of media outlets seemed interesting.  Running with CNBC, CNN and WSJ spoke volumes about where the campaign saw its audience. Businessmen do watch those channels and occasionally read that paper. I’m kind of interested where blogs like Techcrunch, GigaOm or other younger publishing ports of call in the tech world sit. CEOs, CFOs of tech companies large and small read those blogs too. As do tech professionals. The sorts that build small startups – where 1% or less become tomorrow’s Facebook or Microsoft.

It’s not necessarily a criticism, but if we are trying to push the innovation button to market Ireland on the bleeding edge as a place for international investment, why are we trying to market using the same media points as every other other country hungry for capital?

So, Innovation Ireland sits beside Beautiful Bosnia and Amazing Asia?

Adverts on CNBC and CNN marketing countries usually equate to day-glo holiday catalogues in moving pictures. A smiling workforce, sharply-dressed execs and lasers – you get the idea.

GIEF, Pat Phelan and the Wider Picture

So with the launch of the IDA campaign by the Tanaiste done and in the pocket, eyes of the National media fell on the Global Irish Economic Forum meeting last weekend at Farmleigh. Like a post-modern, monied League of Nations, the rich and powerful Diaspora descended unto our  National house to discuss how to jumpstart the Irish economy and build international connections.

The Department of Foreign Affairs plans to produce a report on the findings of the conference. What will be interesting about this report is not only its contents, but also how much of it is implemented.

Indeed, the idea that the Government needs to convene a conference at all, seems a little preposterous. Look to Israel. Does their Diaspora need a kickstart to engage with enterpreneurs or researchers at home? No. The incentive to see opportunity, build links and drive innovation comes from entrepreneurship.

Reviewing Pat’s excellent post on TC50 and fostering innovation takes me back to GIEF and even, back to the IDA’s campaign with – You Reap What You Sow – in my ears. Pat’s piece is not new. It isn’t shining a light on something that we’ve just stumbled upon.

As a nation we navel-gazed our way through the Nineties. When our costs reached a plateau relative to countries with the same economic, regulatory and educational levels, we priced ourselves outside of our own market. What Pat, Damien and countless other commenters on the piece are saying is that we have to bear responsibility for not getting off our arses and building those business links, for not innovating in our ways, for not selling our own wares, for not opening new avenues when our older ways of doing business withers. Innovate or die.

I don’t have a clue whether the Government’s actions following GIEF will pump momentum into the Irish economy more than those who met at it and decided to take matters into their own hands do build business links organically. State-sanctioned anything in place of organic innovation needs soft step treading.

From Us and No-one Else

Innovation comes from us. Introductions come from us. Defending our ideas and showcasing our implementations come from us. Business comes from us.

Want another example? The Tuesday Push. It’s currently on holidays, but it used to happen once a fortnight. It used to select one company every fortnight and coordinate blog posts from bloggers on their offering.

While it ran fairly successfully for a while, it became clear after a bit, many of the companies that wanted the community spotlight of blog posts highlighting them just didn’t want to commit to paying that back to companies showcased before them or after them in blog posts for other Tuesday Pushes. So, on the heads of a few committed bloggers fell the responsibility of pushing week in and week out. That isn’t sustainable for a community. That’s not sustainable for business either.

Community isn’t a one-way thing. Business relationships are exactly the same. The Tuesday Push, just like the Irish technology scene needs people to give as much as they take. Successive Tuesday Pushes became ineffective as people could not be arsed in being part of a community.

If anything, the single biggest problem that the IDA, GIEF, the Government and Irish technologists have to face is building community. A community where giving and taking are interchangeable. We can sit and dirt and point fingers all we like, nothing is going to change until we pull together.

]]> http://golez.net/2009/09/23/when-innovation-means-sharing/feed/ 4 http://golez.net/2009/09/23/when-innovation-means-sharing/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/alexiablogs/TBag/~3/x7JSKe4mpWc/ http://golez.net/2009/09/23/too-fake-hockey/#comments Wed, 23 Sep 2009 06:05:38 +0000 Alexia http://golez.net/?p=3990

Live at The Academy last night

nyom