Facebook Places.. BOO..

I’m sure I’ll be turning it off soon, but Boooo… hurry up!

August 19th, 2010 at 11:26 am • Add Comment • Filed in Geekery


iTunes in the cloud is more ambitious than we think

There is lots of chatter about on the new data centre that Apple is building – a data centre to end all data centres. A data centre with 500,000 square feet. At that footage, you’re talking almost seven times the size of a soccer pitch.

Besides the sheer size of the facility, the next thing that’s been whispered is that Apple will use it to put iTunes in the cloud. It has to be Spotify-like service though, because I can’t see telcos wanting that kind of data clogging up their backbone.

And what about Spotify? They can’t be happy. It’s not inconceivable that iTunes will go with the subscription model in the medium term especially if your tracks are merely up in the air? They could do a mixed-mode model, say you can buy X songs for 5 bucks a month or have Jay-Z hand-pick a playlist of tracks.  Whatever happen, a cloud-based client that serves up music has to hurt Spotify.

Also, it’ll be interesting to see what value-add products Apple can bring online to compliment the music offerings it currently sells. Imagine buying your 8 year-old daughter a Hannah Montana pass on iTunes. They can download the music, get a season pass to episode of the show, see exclusive Miley concerts, ringtones, karaoke backing tracks, dance how-to videos. I could go on and on. Suddenly Apple isn’t in the music business, but it’s a content delivery platform player and media tollmaster. Whatever device, they have a holistic menu you can buy like age-appropriate passes to and just gift to whomever, even kids.

The Apple cloud computing centre isn’t just a music play. It’s a CDN play where scale matters and they’re counting on that. Their single biggest asset is the bank of iTunes customer accounts they manage. Yes, security concerns has hampered iTunes in the last few weeks, but you can bet that Apple are depending on iTunes in the cloud to unlock market scale unheard of and predictable income streams, year on year.

July 21st, 2010 at 12:39 am • Add Comment • Filed in Geekery


Red Links 20/07/10

EU regulation of the Cloud. IIAE are hosting a talk on the subject with Google’s Global Chief Privacy Counsel, Peter Fleischer and Billy Hawkes, the Data Protection Commissioner on July 28th.

Fustar on the impact of kidnapped Madonna to 80s games bois.

Suzy plays it again while Michael Lynn’s hearing is adjourned ’til October.

Astronomy Ireland has a new blog.

Codgerism is still rife in the news room.

Biggest road party eva?

WANT.this.house.com

July 20th, 2010 at 12:44 am • Add Comment • Filed in Red Links


Red Links 19/07/10

Ben and Jerry shuts shop on email marketing to concentrate on social networks.

Interesting council posters.

NYT Lens’ blog features Colombia’s beauty queens.

Clare has been taking some inspiring NYC pictures. Love, love, love this one of Flat Iron Building.

Chair socks!

July 19th, 2010 at 12:22 pm • Add Comment • Filed in Red Links


The Independent Bookseller

Book Mirror

Last week, Jenny’s post about the future of bookselling popped into my feed reader and it stuck a chord with me. Independent booksellers are close to my heart. It’s all tied up with family too.

My mother is an independent bookseller. To understand why she does it, you have to understand her.

After raising a third (and surprise) baby to school-going age, she decided she had enough of staying at home with the kids. She likes say she was never a housewife, never married to the house and that her third baby made her younger.

She made choices that perhaps that I would have shook her physically had I a time machine, but c’est la vie. Despite doing well in her Inter Cert in the Sixties and was offered a scholorship to become a chef. She passed on it. Preferring to stay home and become a carer for a relative. Opportunity gone, she settled into shop work. She’s always excelled at everything she’s done. She loved her work, her customers and the little shop she worked in. Fond stories are always at her fingertips.

That’s where books come in. Being absolute book obsessives, our house was always stuffed with books of all types – Mills & Boon, Choose Your Own Adventure, classics, library books, encyclopedias, second-hand tomes, audio books, pre-reader books with magic pens that read out the words, pop-up books, Dick Francis. It was really was Pick Your Poison. The converted cottage we used to live in, had a mini-landing-come-book-graveyard where we’d stack them high.

We’d go to the same bookshops and library trips were once a week. Book people became part of our family and us, theirs. Hearing that one of the bookshops we’d frequent was looking for someone part-time, she jumped the chance. The timing was right, the shop was right.

The shop was a mix of old books and new. Customers were regulars, people who’d pop in for a chat as much as a book. Books were laid away for people. Facebook a social network? Your independent bookseller is ultimate social network. All walks of life come in. Everything in every shape and size.

I dare anyone to spend a day in your local independent bookseller that sells new and *old* books and not be impressed. The old part is important. Second-hand booksellers are social treasure troves. Beat the joy of helping three generations of the same family buy books and leave the shop happy and enthused.

Things have changed in some ways for my mother. The bookshop she worked in closed. She decided that she’d open her own. So with some of the stock of the old shop, she moved up the street and around the corner in a little nook of a shop. She sells second-hand books. Competing with chains is impossible if you depend on selling new books and you’re a small bookshop. The margins you make on new books are just too small. Eason 3 for 2, Amazon and the Book Depository etc make it impossible.

I like to teasingly call her bookshop a drop-in centre. She’ll berate me, I am sure. Customers pop in with coffee for her.  Thieves reselling dubious books in perfect nick. Nurses traveling from Cork in for reads for a holiday in sun.

She’s a massive crime thriller fan. When she isn’t buying books off the Book Depository or Amazon for herself (American editions are treasured as the UK/Ireland publication dates trail US ones significantly), she’s buying books for customers and selling for little more than cost or just passing her reads onto them. It’s important to her that her customers are happy. Customer loyalty is her number one priority.

It seems to me that the independent bookseller has so many lessons for so many other businesses today. The ones that are doing well, are doing well because of their customers. Loyalty goes both ways.

Bookselling has changed in the last twenty years, it’s more than a book on a shelf. It seems to me that the really great independent booksellers will continue to stay in business, because they’ll just do what comes naturally. We could learn a little from their passion.

July 19th, 2010 at 11:16 am • 4 Comments • Filed in Business, Culture


On scaling for innovation

plastic
Photo owned by Joost J. Bakker IJmuiden (cc)
A few weeks ago, Andy Groove wrote an opinion piece for Bloomberg entitled ‘How to Make an American Job Before It’s Too Late’. It’s an important piece not just for the America, but also for Ireland.

Grove, ever the engineer, takes a deep breath and a pragmatic approach to exploring why having a manufacturing base in America is important to scaling the economy and fostering innovation. Learning how to build things better comes from knowing how to build.

There’s more at stake than exported jobs. With some technologies, both scaling and innovation take place overseas. Such is the case with advanced batteries. It has taken years and many false starts, but finally we are about to witness mass- produced electric cars and trucks. They all rely on lithium-ion batteries. What microprocessors are to computing, batteries are to electric vehicles. Unlike with microprocessors, the U.S. share of lithium-ion battery production is tiny.

That’s a problem. A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer-electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to learn to supply batteries for the more demanding laptop PC market, and after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies didn’t participate in the first phase and consequently weren’t in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up.

In Ireland, we’re even further behind the US. As a net beneficiary of the off-shored manufacturing for a window up until the late Nineties and early Naughties, we learned how to build. The things we built may not have been sexy, but skills nonetheless.

We don’t have the powerful entrepreneural engine that the US has. We have lost and are continuing to lose technical jobs of all descriptions – from R&D to high-end manufacturing. Riffing off Grove’s assertions that sometimes economies need focus applied by their governments, we have a little more market infrastructure on tap to plan our economy more. But is the Irish Government applying its stimulus salve to the right place?

The Taoiseach was in New York last week launching the country’s new shiny solution to the dearth of  VC investment in Irish firms. The Innovation Fund is a halfsy match of public-private monies to the tune of half a billion Euro. The fund will be managed by a board and expression of interest can be lodged through Enterprise Ireland from the September.

It’s up to that board then to decide how to dole out the money. Is it crazy to believe that a conceit still exists around manufacturing in this country, especially when giving out grants for innovation? I’d love to hear what the board of the fund think innovation is.

July 18th, 2010 at 5:08 pm • 1 Comment • Filed in Geekery


Way behind

.. on blogging but do check out Inside The Margin, a group blog on all things popculturey I’m helping with.

July 15th, 2010 at 10:47 am • Add Comment • Filed in Culture


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