Electronic Voting Machines

/2 Comments/in , /by

So  Minister Gormley has finally pressed the shutdown button on the e-voting machines.

Since the day he took office – he knew that this day would eventually come. Given the current financial situation however, I think the announcement was actually the easy part.

The difficult part will be the job of the inter-departmental task force and their efforts to disengage from the storage contracts and offloading the machines themselves – while at the same time trying to “recoup as much as possible of their cost” – the last bit are not my words. Read more

The Internet in your sitting room?

/0 Comments/in , /by

It’s exciting to hear about the new Samsung LED TV and how internet services that we’ve become so familiar with – YouTube, Flickr & Yahoo! – will soon be much more accessible in the average sitting room.

Yes, the ways and means to do this is already out there; Apple TV, Mac Mini, the browser on Wii – but still requires that early adopter mentality which frankly is not of interest to most people.

For this particular early adopter – the path to these types of fool proof technologies has been a long one.

Read more

Customer Service Lesson

/0 Comments/in /by

Maybe the title of the post should have actually read “think carefully about how you react to a customers suggestion near the end of a working day”.

Yesterday was just one of those days, and at the end of it I had one of those customer conversations that you are probably warned about in any customer service 101’s. I got quiet ratty on the phone.

Bottom line – you just cannot do that without a very, very good reason.

Read more

Twitter for Emergencies

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

Twitter is receiving an awful lot of attention at the moment in both print and broadcast media. The terrorist attacks on Mumbai in November was covered widely, as was the online campaign backing up the Israeli attack on Gaza; even well known technology advocate (ha..) Ryan Tubridy decided to dedicate a few minutes on his early morning radio show – which caused blog and twitter debate.

Individual firsts have also been recorded – first twitterers to be report from an air crash, escape from a burning house – and of course DM fails are always just a few keystrokes away.

Read more

Arts Council New Media Conference

/0 Comments/in , /by

It’s embarassing from a blog output point of view that the last two entries here now refer to conferences I have attended or watched. Thankfully, New Year resolutions are close to hand.

What motivated me to catch a 5.45am train from Sligo and attend the arts council conference? Of course the main one was to see how the creative community in Ireland is dealing with the online world, and the other was just to have an interesting day with non-geeks; everyone needs to get perspective.

Read more

Irish Political Blogging Conference on Ustream.TV

/0 Comments/in /by

I was unable to attend the blogging conference in Dublin on saturday, organised by the European Commission. With a lot of foresight, Philippe and Cian ensured that people like myself could view proceedings by streaming most of the event with Ustream.TV;

Well done guys – the presentations I saw were good; I thought the workshop with Harry, Damien, Richard and Joe was excellent – it’s a shame that it was so short.

Read more