New Tech Post - Ireland

Limerick and the Doughnut Effect: Need to Learn Lessons from US Cities [VIDEO]

Tom McEnery — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 12:54:04 +0000

ITLG's Tom McEnery talks about Limerick City's decline due to the suburban doughnut effect, and how Ireland should learn from similar stories in US cities like San Jose, Los Angeles and Atlanta.

Savvy Bears: Secure Online Gaming for Children

Conor Harrington — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 07:34:37 +0000

Savvy Bear is a virtual world for children between the ages of five and twelve years old to play, interact, and learn, in a safe environment. The Dunboyne, Co. Meath-based company was founded in 2010 by father of three John Joyce, who saw a gap in the market for a virtual world that was both educational, and crucially, safe for children to play in.

“I was watching what they were doing on the likes of Disney’s Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters and I said, “I think I could actually develop a product like this.”

John, who is a graduate of computer science from Trinity College, Dublin had seventeen years’ experience in the technology sector before looking at the virtual world space and deciding, “right, I’ll give it a go."

“I set the company up last July/August and that’s kind of how it started, just from a concept in my head to saying, “OK let’s give this thing a go”, and that’s what happened.”

John is aware that Savvy Bear are not alone in this space, but feels that his product’s educational value, and its safety, set it apart from the rest.

“The unique selling point is that we have an educational part to our product, so there is a school in the game if the child wants to go into the virtual world school, and learn Irish, English, maths, geography, history and science.”

The Irish, maths, and English educational modules on Savvy Bear are all free, as well as optional; if a child wants to simply play or interact, they may do so. The virtual world’s chat function contains only pre-selected words and phrases that a child may choose from, such as “hello”, “thank you”, or "you are funny!”, which ensure that the chat remains innocent and cannot be hijacked by Internet prowlers.

“Our product is 100% safe, continues John. The other games like Moshi Monsters, Club Penguin and Panfu, they have an open chat policy where you can potentially chat to the child. We don’t, we just have pre-selected words in the game, so we’re 100% safe, which is crucial for a parent. We’ve a little bit of education in it, but it’s great fun, and it’s ad-free.”

The educational aspect of the game is pitched very much as an option and part of the fun, rather than the sole focus of the game, so from the child’s perspective he or she is playing at school rather than attending it or doing homework. Also, any phrases which are chosen in English are translated on the dashboard in Irish as an added educational aid.

John readily acknowledges that it is remarkable to think that he has created a virtual world for children from as young as five years old.

“I’m 39 years of age, this stuff didn’t exist when I was growing up. If you look at a twelve year old child or a ten year old child with a phone and they’re twittering and they’re maybe doing something on Facebook. You can’t turn it off, it’s just there, it’s 24/7.”

With digital devices and worlds so commonplace, it is hardly surprising that the uptake of Savvy Bear amongst children has been high so far. The game has taken on a certain momentum; an appearance on the Irish Dragon’s Den secured some valuable publicity; but Savvy Bear’s growth until now has been achieved without any marketing budget.

“We’ve been going since January and we’ve just over 30,000 people on it (15,000 of which are regular, active users), and it’s been played in 102 countries. It’s just taken off, which is fantastic, you know?”

In anticipation of this growth, Savvy Bear have updated their software to cope with increased demand; behind the cuddly teddy bears, there is a back-end which has to cope with potentially thousands of visitors at any one time.

“What the user sees at the front-end is probably the easiest part, the art and animation. The hardest process in that was listening to a child describe it, or they might sketch out a hair salon and say, “this is what we’d like in a hair salon."

“At the moment we’re using five or six pieces of software, so we have Flash, php, Gimp, Ubuntu, and we’ve a piece of software that we’ve invested in recently called Smartbox, which Facebook use and allows us to handle thousands of people per second, which is a big issue for any virtual world.”

John laments the fact that he had to locate Savvy Bear’s servers outside Ireland due to what he sees as a “sad” lack of broadband infrastructure.

“The reason we have the servers over in London is because the broadband is a lot better and you get 100% up time, whereas unfortunately, in Ireland you can only guarantee 99% up time, and with a virtual world the last thing you want is to be down.

“When you’re using things like Google Analytics and you’re looking at my market which is the whole world, and you look at the size of Ireland, it’s a little dot. And you think, “why can’t people access the game in Roscommon?” It’s because there’s no broadband there.”

John hopes that the initial growth he has seen will continue and is confident the market is there for Savvy Bear to achieve this.

“I’ve had lots of people say that there’s loads of people in the gaming space, and I say, “that’s correct”. Gaming is massive, but there’s no-one in Ireland or England at the moment developing a virtual world forchildren between five and twelve. We’re it.”

Naoise Nunn talks about Mindfield

Tom Murphy — Mon, 02 May 2011 10:25:59 +0000

Mindfield is an international festival of ideas organised by Naoise Nunn who is originally from Kilkenny but now lives in Oranmore, Galway. The most recent event took place in Merrion Square, Dublin and had more than 5,000 visitors over the May Bank Holiday weekend.

Mindfield has four main themes or areas; culture, technology, politics and inspiration. As Naoise explains, “It is about having the big public conversation about where we are at and where we are going and so on. The common thread is that the people are expressing ideas, coming up with ideas, trying to innovate, trying to get us out of the bind that we are in.”

The genesis of Mindfield began with a political cabaret that Naiose runs called Leviathan and is modeled on the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts in Hay-on-Wye, Wales and the TED talk series.

He set Leviathan up in 2003 as a very informal, interactive debate combined with entertainment. in the form of satire, film and comedy. Three years later he was invited to go down to the Electric Picnic and do Leviathan at the festival in a tent.

“Obviously, Leviathan is just one show and we ended up programming the tent for the weekend. The next year we had two tents. The year after that it was eight. Mindfield developed into being a festival within a festival — a spoken word forum for ideas and so on.”

Naoise had been thinking for some time about spinning Mindfield out on its own and make it an urban festival in a park. He says that he could not have picked a better location.

“Here we are in Merrion Square, right in the centre of the City. At one end you have the parliament, you’ve got the Arts Council, you’ve got the Goethe institute, you’ve got the Institute of Architects. There’s also Oscar Wilde’s house and the American College. It is the cultural hub of Dublin and of the country so it is the ideal location for it.”

Based on the success of this event, Naoise says, there will definitely be a Mindfield international festival of ideas taking place next year.

You can also view a video report which highlights the participation of the hackerspaces of Ireland at the Mindfield event and has an interview with Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh, the inventor of Sugru.

Loc8 Code: Navigating Ireland with Greater Accuracy

Tom Murphy — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 06:54:55 +0000

After four years of development Loc8 Code was launched in Ireland in July, 2010. The product was developed as PON Code (position orientated navigation code) by Gary Delaney of GPS Ireland. For two of those four years Garmin provided devices for field testing the technology and later they went on to licence the product from Loc8 Code.

In 2006 Garmin released their first SatNavs in this country with detailed mapping. Up until 2006 there were satnavs for Ireland but they only had main roads on them. Navtech, which is owned by Nokia, had spent five years driving around Ireland making the sort of detailed maps that take advantage of satellite navigation (satnav) capabilities.

At that point in time Ordinance Survey maps didn’t capture road attribute data such as; how many lanes the road has, what surface the road has, what speed limit the road has, whether two roads that cross on a map are actually intersecting, i.e., you can get from one to the other and so on.

A satnav not only looks at a road but all the information associated with a road to make a decision about routing

GPS Ireland specializes in the professional use of GPS products for surveyors and other people in need of accurate mapping tools. Utility companies which made up some of its customer base appreciated the advantages of the satnav systems but were confounded by the addressing system used in Ireland. 40% of the addresses in Ireland are non-unique. None of these addresses can be regarded as a precise location.

Gary explains further, “That prompted us to start investigating how to come up with a solution that was usable. When we started off with this we had no intention of replacing a post code because as a piece of modern technology a post code is a bit of a dead duck.

“A post code identifies a cluster of houses so you can group bits of mail in a bundle with an elastic band, give it to a postman and let the postman find the actual door itself. That was a technology that was invented in the sixties.

“Mail as a business is a diminishing industry. If you are going to invent something you don’t want to do it for diminishing industry. Our aim was to develop technology for couriers, which is the logistics industry, emergency services and utility companies.”

At the outset of the development of the digital address code Gary had to establish clear criteria to ensure the effectiveness of the system.

“It was very important for us that if a scanner was passed across a parcel Loc8code would be picked out from all the other noise that is on there.”

Self-checking: The code is self-checking. It started off with seven characters but then an eighth character was added that acts as a check for the other seven.
Adjacency: It was decided that it was very important that, for example, W8L is next to W9L. This allows for human interpretation of the code instead of the code being only related to a database. To that end the code starts at the top left of the country with the letter A. The first character is for broad areas. N is for Dublin and W is for Crosshaven and so on.
Concatenated Code: This allows for secure social networking. If someone didn’t want to give away their exact location the could by truncating the code reveal only their general area. The first three characters cover a zone of 3.5km. The use of six characters reduces that to around 120m and of course the whole code is pin point accurate.

The code is language and place name independent and does not matter if the community would prefer Irish or English.

An additional advantage for commercial operators is that considerable savings can be had in fuel costs from not having to drive around hunting down unfamiliar addresses. Gary estimates that the savings could be as great as 20% for operators serving rural communities.

The idea of Loc8 Code is that it should be an addition to the present addressing system instead of being a replacement. Gary explains, “ At this moment in time it is elective. People use it because they find it valuable. If it were to become a national system we wouldn’t require people to come to the site and create a code for themselves. We would actually deliver it to them. But that would be a huge cost to us so we are going to hold off on that.”

Loc8 Code can also be used as an app on an iPhone. Point 8 developed under licence by One Touch Solutions can be downloaded from itunes. It can create dynamic codes that you can send to others to enable them to navigate to you which once used can then be disposed of.

Should you ever wish to stop by for a chat or a coffee or send us something nice in the post then the Loc8 Code for New Tech Post is LTD-99-BZ9

The Silicon Valley 50

Tom Murphy — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:53:28 +0000

The 4th Annual ITLG Technology Awards will take place at Stanford University on April 5th and is being sponsored by the Irish Times and the Silicon Valley Bank.

The event will be hosted by Emily Chang, Bloomberg West Anchor and the keynote speaker will be Craig Barrett, ITLG Chairman and Retired CEO/Chairman of the Board, Intel Corporation.

Of especial interest this year will be the compilation of the Silicon Valley 50 – a list that gives recognition to the top 50 Irish American technology executives doing business in Silicon Valley.

A random sample of names from this list gives an idea of the extent of influence and depth of involvement that Irish Americans have had in shaping Silicon Valley into what it is to today – the gathering of the most creative minds in technology, marketing and management.

Chris Boody - Director, AT&T
Caroline Donahoe - Senior Vice President, Sales and Channel Marketing, Intuit
Fergus Hurley - CEO, Clixtr Inc.
Rory McInerney - Vice President, Digital Enterprise Group, Intel Corporation (MPG)
Patrick O’Malley - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Seagate

Many will have been aware of the massive changes that the economy of Ireland has undergone in recent years, from the heights of the Celtic Tiger to the depths of recession. These have been serious changes that have had and will continue to have an effect on economic growth for a little while more.

But all the gloomy news has hidden from sight one of the great success stories of the modern era - the incredible and remarkable story of the Irish tech sector.

According to ICT Ireland, (the voice of the Information and Communications Technology sector in Ireland), over 75,000 people are employed in the ICT area which is responsible for approximately 25% of Ireland’s total turnover and represents one third of Ireland’s exports by value.

Employment alone has grown by 6% in this area in 2010 and there is still the promise of more to come.

Any economy, anywhere in the world would crave for these sort of figures.

And the future looks better.

Three of the world’s leading research institutes are based in Ireland:

Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) based at NUI Galway.
Specializing in the development of Linked Data. Building the Web as it will work in the future.
Centre for Next Generation Location (CNGL), DCU/UL/Trinity College.
Adapting digital content to culture, locale and linguistic environments.
Telecommunications Software and Systems Group (TSSG), Waterford IT.
Building the platform that will join our social networks to the sensors in our environment allowing us to operate in new and as yet unknown ways.

In a recent interview Barry O’Sullivan, Vice-President of Cisco’s global voice technology group, stated,

“Technology, by definition, is about the future - to the extent that you are in high tech then you are always in the next big thing.”

If one looks at what Ireland has been able to achieve in the harshest of economic climates then one can only begin to wonder at what can be achieved when the wind is set fair in the sails.

A major next step for many Irish companies is to take advantage of the world-renowned technological, marketing and management experience that resides in Silicon Valley.

The Irish Technology Leadership Group (ITLG) was founded in 2007 by John Hartnett. He is a recent recipient of the prestigious Spirit of Ireland Award from the San Jose-Dublin Sister City program.

He says there are three overwhelming reasons why Irish companies should establish a presence in Silicon Valley:

“One, you have access to the greatest collection of technology companies in the world. These companies are all over the world doing things with sales and operations. But you want to come to the heart of where they’re at, and that’s their headquarters.

“Number two, if you’re going to get investment, a smart investment from someone who is going to change your organization and make you a true winner, these VCs, these angel groups are sitting here, not in Ireland.

“The third piece is access to talent. You have the world’s talent sitting here - guys that invented Google, guys that are running companies like Facebook or Twitter - if you want to build your organization and build some key leadership where you might be weak.”

The ITLG have set up an innovation center right in the heart of Silicon Valley as a launch pad for Irish companies to set themselves up, and to make it easy for them to do the necessary networking and have the essential face-to-face meetings.

The ITLG is determined to create the most powerful Irish network in the world. The Irish Diaspora is estimated to consist of over 40 million people. If this huge and powerful potential resource could be harnessed, organized and focused, then the door opens for all sorts of great and marvelous possibilities to occur.

To help facilitate this the ITLG can draw upon its network of 1,500 Silicon Valley executives and industry leaders who are either Irish or of Irish descent. Many of these people have had great success in their professional lives and view their contributions to the ITLG as a means of payback for their own good fortune.

These contributions vary in nature but can consist of:

Mentoring new Irish businesses coming to Silicon Valley.
Providing vital contacts for business development through their personal networks that would be very difficult to obtain by any other means.
Providing facilities such as the Irish Innovation Center to provide Irish businesses with a solid base from which to work from.

The rapidly growing Irish tech sector can only continue to succeed if it can take its place in the global marketplace as quickly as possible. The center of the global market place for high tech is Silicon Valley and the ITLG is ideally placed to facilitate and further the growth of Irish technology businesses.

The Silicon Valley 50 will be recognized at the 4th Annual ITLG Technology Leaders Awards at Stanford University on April 5th. You can register here for tickets.

Tunepresto: Using Algorithms to Create Music for Videos

Tom Murphy — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:07:11 +0000

It has never been easier to make your own videos. A decent camera can be picked up for a fraction of the cost of a fully loaded professional camera. Editing can be done for very little additional cost on your desktop with software such as iMovie for the mac or Microsoft’s Windows Live Movie Maker 2011. As minimally functional as they are, they pack enough features to get started and turn out a something worthwhile in a relatively short time..

But when it comes to adding a music soundtrack to your video it can be become a real challenge to find a suitable piece of music. The options for those that are not so musically inclined or are unwilling or unable to pay royalties for material under copyright options can suddenly become very limited.

Even if the payment of a royalty fee is waived seeking permissions and searching through audio libraries can feel like an extreme process to undergo when all you want is a soundtrack for a video that you are going to share with some friends on YouTube or Facebook.

For those with a talent for music there is always the option of creating your own soundtrack but such ability seems not to be distributed equally or fairly amongst the population at large leaving the not so gifted with little hope in the realms of self-composition. So what to do?

Tunepresto is a web-based music maker. It generates original copyright free music to match your video or your slideshow presentation. How it works is really simple from the user’s perspective.

You upload your video or enter your YouTube URL and the Tunepresto software analyses the video.
The user then selects a style of music from the range of styles that are available on the system.
The software then generates a piece of music that exactly fits your video.

If you like it you can then download it and get the combined video and music file.

The idea for Tunepresto came when Siún Ní Raghallaigh, a television producer and her co-founder Justin McCarthy, a video editor, were chatting about what a pain it is to deal with copyright music and wouldn’t it be great to just press a button and have a music track composed for you.

As Siún says, “We were coming from a professional background and we were targeting a professional market. But whilst everybody thought it was a great idea the take up was a slow. So we decided to do some more market research.

“We learned a hard lesson. Our idea was not for the professional market. Our target should really be the consumer market. We refocused and changed the whole way we were approaching Tunepresto, the way we were marketing it and how we were targeting it.

“Part of what we discovered from the market research we did with our existing customers was that while we packed the desktop product with loads of great features all they wanted to do was press the compose button.

“We had put in a timeline, we had put in markers, you could change instruments and loads of different things but the majority of customers would just press compose. So we said, let’s do some of the decision making in the background as to what it produces but still use the same basic composition engine.

“We now have a one click solution, so to speak and we will be market led as to what we make available after that. If we add more features we want it to be what the user wants not what we think they want.”

Tunepresto have developed an algorithm that when presented with a video containing certain elements that it has detected in the video it can then generate a musical composition appropriate to the information presented to it.

Siún explains, “This is not pre-recorded music. This is not music loops. This system is actually making original music. It is generating the music based on the information that it is extracting from the video and the selection the user makes in terms of style of music. It is making new music to suit that particular video.”

MUZU.TV: Official Video Music from the Original Artists

Lisa Jackson — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 09:22:44 +0000

Launched in July 2008, MUZU.TV has one of the largest music video hosting sites on the web. It allows users access to videos, interviews, exclusive footage, music news and more. All the videos on the site are the legal and officially approved versions as MUZU.TV works directly with record companies and artist's representatives to ensure the authenticity of the material made available. With the strength of YouTube and the proliferation of other music websites, what makes Irish-based MUZU.TV different?

Ciaran Bollard, CEO and co-founder of MUZU.TV believes, “There are lots of music sites out there and a lot of them are focused on audio. Then there is YouTube which would be our biggest competitor. YouTube has a mixture of user content and content from the music labels. Our service is dedicated to music fans so all the features and functions of the site are tailored to music fans so it offers a very different and unique experience.”

“Just by looking at the service you can see that immediately. It’s only focused on music content. It hasn’t got user-generated content. Clearly fans like that because we’re growing by 20% month on month.”

The MUZU team works with individual record labels and artists to promote the site. Ciaran explains, “you’ll see on most of the major artists’ pages, like Cheryl Cole who has millions of fans, you’ll see posts about MUZU on her page. All the major artists’ pages will post about MUZU because we have this initiative called the ‘Video Fight Club’ where we put an artist up against another artist and they have this competition over who has the best video.”

The site also maintains its competitive edge by launching new initiatives like the ‘Video Fight Club’ on a regular basis. The most recent is ‘MUZU Live and Loud’.

Ciaran explains, as in the first week for instance, “There’s going to be two major artists Jessie J and Ellie Goulding. We’ve two exclusive live sessions and these will be up against each other and Jessie J and Ellie Goulding’s fans will vote as to who’s the best.”

Other recent initiatives include:

A ‘best of live’ catalogue.
‘Gig In Your Gaff’ competition where an artist will play live in your living room. It recently featured The Wanted.
Live streaming in-studio, recently featuring Rodrigo y Gabriela.

According to Ciaran, the MUZU catalogue currently has approximately 80,000 music related videos. It streams 10 million videos a month, mostly from UK and Ireland viewers. MUZU’ers have the ability to post comments below artists’ videos. With so much content, MUZU.TV is conscious of filtering.

Ciaran says, “We’re filtering comments as much as we can. It’s very difficult to react very quickly to all the comments that happen but the main thing is that the content on the site is not inappropriate content. The actual video content is all appropriate and we also use age filters as well.

"On our site we only focus on professional music-based content. Users cannot upload to the site, apart from uploading to, let’s say The Scripts’ channel. They can upload to the fan TV section and become a fan TV contributor but the band actually approves that content.”

The site generates income from advertising served in and around the music videos. In addition, MUZU.TV has created a partnership with Group M, a leading vendor of online advertising worldwide.

Ciaran explains that, “We’re very careful that we only serve a pre-roll ad (an advert that runs before an online video) for every one-in-three videos. There’s a balance. You’ve got to be able to support the business from a revenue perspective but, at the same time, the user experience is crucial.

"It’s all about offering the best consumer experience that we possibly can. We try to make the advertising very targeted to the age and genre that somebody is watching so it’s relevant advertising.”

MUZU is currently based in Dublin, Waterford and London. It had its beginnings in the DIT Hothouse, an innovation and technology centre located at the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Ciaran remains a huge supporter of the programme. He feels it “is a fantastic way of supporting somebody who is in a current corporate job and wants to get out of that but still has a mortgage to pay and bills to pay.”

He says that, “What’s good about Hothouse is:”

You can network with other entrepreneurs in the same position.
You can get a grant which helps support your income for the first year of starting up your business.
It gives mentoring around your business plan.

With MUZU.TV recently expanding into France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Benelux this specialist music website conceived by Irish entrepreneurship and built with Irish technology has carved a niche that seems to be ever-expanding.

TSSG: Building The Future

Tom Murphy — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 21:51:31 +0000

The Telecommunications Software and Systems Group (TSSG) was formed in 1996 by Dr. Willie Donnelly and is based on the West Campus of the Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland. It is a public research organisation and the focus of its work is in the area of telecoms and internet technologies. TSSG engages in research and works with industry as well.

A unique aspect of the setup is that the TSSG competes for every cent that it brings in, and its funding is mainly dependent on the winning of tenders that are a part of the European funding framework and collaborating and partnering with other organisations.

Barry Downes, Executive Director - Innovation and Commercialisation, describes TSSG in this way, “We see ourselves very much as a European organisation. We see ourselves competing for collaborative tenders and working with the leading companies across Europe.”

Very often organisations end up collaborating with the very people they were competing against for given projects. But the benefit of being able to switch from competitor to collaborator is that, apart from requiring a flexible attitude and the ability to switch focus with some agility, it creates a sense of connectivity between different organisations and their similar or not-so-similar interests.

Apart from the financial benefits, the opportunity is there to grow an extensive knowledge base across a given number of areas that a lone operator would not be able to accrue very easily, if at all.

“Everybody’s got to compete to win these tenders, but they also have to collaborate with top-class organisations across Europe.” Over the years, the TSSG has worked with every major telecomms company in Europe, every major operator and all the major equipment providers.

But it is not just about Europe: through its commercial arm, 3CS - the Centre for Converged Services, the TSSG also runs programs such as “Innovation Partnerships.” As Barry explains, “It is a program where we will work on direct, collaborative R&D programs with a company where Enterprise Ireland will part fund that work and we will put our staff in at cost.

“What we are doing is leveraging knowledge and technologies that we have to directly work for an Irish company that can improve their product line or enhance their competitiveness in different ways.

“We do research, we do development and then we give the technology to the company. If you are a startup, your preference is going to be assignment obviously. I think this is reflecting the needs of startups. If you’re a company and you engage with us, you want to own the tech at the end. You don’t want to licence it. So we spent quite a bit of time working through our Technology Transfer Office developing standardised agreements so the tech can just be assigned out.

But the specialised knowledge and experience that the TSSG has is not only for established companies. In conjunction with Enterprise Ireland, they participate in the “Innovation Vouchers” scheme aimed at the smaller, newer companies and startups.

“The vouchers program is a way of getting Irish SMEs, small and medium-sized enterprises, to engage with public research organisations.

“If you run a startup, you can go to Enterprise Ireland and get a voucher for €5k or get a matched voucher for €10k and you come to us and say, ‘you’re in my area, I like to give you this voucher, I have a small project that I’d like you to do for me.’

"It’s a great program as it creates the opportunity for a small company to be able to work with a research organisation where we can deliver quickly and where they can see immediate value.

“We try and work like a consulting organisation for Irish industry. We want the companies to get the value of working with us, to leverage our expertise and get the IP at the end of it.

But there are major benefits for the TSSG as well. In the knowledge economy, the acquisition of knowledge is key:

Through the vouchers program, TSSG is able to engage and learn what startups and small companies are looking for and need.
Through the Investment Partners program, the same learning opportunities are available with the added element of short-to-medium term planning that does not always exist with smaller companies.
Through its collaboration with its European partners and their need to supply large scale solutions and innovations, the TSSG can learn as much as anyone what the future really holds.

This ability to directly observe and engage via partnership and collaboraton in a vertical plane from the very small companies to the very large, combined with being able to take a longitudinal look into the future at whatever development timeline that is most useful to the need at hand, allows the TSSG to have a unique and encompassing view of the telecoms and internet industry that very few organistions of any sort have.

“If we want to look at what the future of services is in four or five years time, we need to track a couple of key trends that are happening in the market that are having an influence both on our work and the industry as well:”

What’s happening with phones, operating systems, development tools and mobile apps.
The move from circuit switch calls to everything being IP.
IMS technologies.
Pervasive services: services that use location, context or sensors.

NB: We will be covering all these subject areas in greater depth over the next few weeks.

The European programs are the backbone of the TSSG, and along with the pure research funding partners such as Science Foundation Ireland, a central part of the organisation’s heritage forms a significant part of the work taking place there. But there is a strong and clear focus on serving the greater Irish business community as well.

“The goal is to leverage all of the knowledge we have in the TSSG, all the work we do in the TSSG, to work with Irish industry through those programs: vouchers, partners, contract research and consulting services for example. There are all these projects that Irish industry can interact with us on.

“We have a practical group that can engage with industry and solve real problems - implementing those solutions and also pushing the boundaries a bit.

“One of the key things we are focused on is trying to support and help Irish industry. We try and help them leverage knowledge that we have brought in from Europe or through international experts from SFI and do practical work for them.”

We would like to thank the TSSG for hosting our stay in Waterford and allowing our correspondent to have such comprehensive access to the people and projects that were made available to him.

Wavebob: Generating Power from the Movement of Waves

Tom Murphy — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 08:12:49 +0000

Wavebob is a device that floats in the sea and converts the movement of waves into electricity. The average electrical output of an individual unit is around 500 Kilowatts. That is enough energy to provide power for three to four hundred houses every day. A small city such as Galway, with just over 25,000 households, would only require a wave farm of between eighty and a hundred Wavebobs to provide it with sufficient electricity for its domestic needs.

According to SETIS, the European Commission's information system for strategic energy technology, wave generated energy could supply Europe with roughly 1% of its power requirements by 2020.

Wavebob was founded Irish physicist William Dick in 1999. By 2007 it became apparent that the company needed to scale to be able to bring the product to a commercial reality. It was at this point that Andrew Parish, an environmental chemist who had worked in the public and private sectors and who at the time was running his own management consultancy joined Wavebob to help create and lead the management team.

How did things look in 2007?

“I joined at a time when we had just had our first sea trials in Galway Bay. We had started to attract some international attention by virtue of the fact that we had a sea-going demonstrator and a track record of R&D prior to that.

“My task was to formalize the company. We opened an office in Maynooth which was convenient for Dublin and for accessing the highway to Galway where we were doing the sea trials.

“We have an office in the United States and our operation over there has recently started to bear fruit for us. We have just recently got a $2.4 million grant from the Department of Energy for the work we are doing there. That builds on grants that we have secured here in Ireland of €2.2 million and a European Commission Framework grant of €5.1 million.

"We have been quite successful at maximizing financing from the public sector over the last couple of years. This is very important as it has been a time when the global economic conditions have been such that investment in new pre-revenue technology has been challenging. Trying to find the right investors with the right kind of appetite for this has been challenging.

“Having the endorsement of significant public sector funding partners has been important in bringing in new investment. But we also have been very successful in attracting large corporate companies to work with us.

“We have brought together a world-class team of engineering expertise into the company. We realise we can’t develop a commercial product on our own. So, instead of growing 50, 60, 70 people internally we have built a small, very talented, expert team and we collaborate with third parties in areas where they would have greater expertise.”

The green-tech energy sector is growing in importance and is clearly vital for all our futures. But good ideas and technology are not always enough for success. How do you manage the non-technical development for Wavebob?

“The opportunity for us has been trying to collaborate with end-users at an early point. Identify who would be our ideal customers and get them working with us now. So, we are developing our product absolutely in line with their expectations.

“We identified key market segments that we wanted to serve:

”Utility scale electricity. A wave farm where you might have one or two hundred megawatts of wave energy devices bringing electricity to shore into the national grid and contributing to renewable energy targets, etc.
“To that end we have strategic relationships with Vattenfall one of the largest electrical utilities in Europe. We have established a joint venture company with them in Ireland called Tonn Energy which is focused on developing commercial scale wave farms consisting of Wavebob technology off the west coast of Ireland.
“We are also engaged with Bord Gáis. They invested with us before Christmas. We also have a technical service agreement with ESB international so we have good, strong relationships with the key utilities.
“The other market sector we are pursuing is the off-shore oil and gas sector. Wavebob technology is designed to operate deep water so we can get out to those platforms that are operating in that environment and work effectively. There are a number of oil and gas companies that see the opportunity in reducing their costs by using the renewable energy that surrounds their platforms.”

When are we likely to see these wave farms in operation?

“The industry is still three years away from being commercial. There is a lead-time for putting down the infrastructure for these wave farms; the permit process, the planning, the environmental impact assessments and all the regulatory issues that are involved and which have to be considered.

“Then we have to allow for the fact that the amount of time to procure the cable that brings the electricity back to shore is about eighteen months to two years. The cables are made to order as there are specific requirements for fibre optic cables for communications and so on. Also, at present, there is a global shortage of copper.”

Despite the challenges involved, generating electricity from the movement of waves contains a number of advantages that justify all the effort and costs involved. Designing a device that is expected to function consistently while out in the open sea and be able to survive in that environment for twenty-five years is a work of extreme engineering by any standards.

Apart from issues of sustainability and fulfilling the need for a low environmental impact, wave generated electricity offers a consistency of power generation not found with wind powered devices. There are always waves coming in along the west coast of Ireland. It is this combination of sustainability and consistency that makes the generation of electricity by means of wave power such a vital contributor to our future energy needs.

Soundscape of Ireland - Audioboo, a Social Media Tool

Bernard Goldbach — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:25:58 +0000

Audioboo is a web and mobile application that enables you to record and publish audio segments directly to the web and straight into other social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook if you have enabled the connections.

In this debrief one our correspondents, Bernard Goldbach, shares his enthusiasm and his experiences with the application as an educational and Social Media tool.

You may want to listen to this compilation that he and Peter Donegan put together to get an idea of the breadth and depth of what is possible with the audiboo format. It is also a rather lovely soundscape of Ireland in 2010.

click image for "Irish Boosters"
(background via Google Earth)

So how did you get started?

I followed the lead of Neville Hobson, a presenter of For Immediate Release, a weekly podcast for social media in a public relations context. He was doing a few of these. I could subscribe to them and they would just drop into my ipod. In my day job teaching third level students at the Tipperary Institute it’s important to challenge student’s observational skills. While it’s very difficult to get the newer students to write five to eight hundred words about a particular subject it is not difficult at all to get them to sit down and talk about it. Particularly if they described what they saw as if they were telling a friend. We knew right away audioboos could have a direct application to our work and they do.

I expect to see some really enthusiastic students leading the charge about six months from now with boos of their cooking group and friends of the Medieval Society and things like that.

The ability to tap and talk is the way it is. You launch the app, you touch the screen, you are recording, start talking, tap the screen to stop, tap again to put a title or add a picture and tap again to send it up. It’s so simple. A conversation with podcasters just a year ago would have revolved around mixer boards, cables, bit rates. production values, hosting requirements, monetizing - all that. Now the conversation is about the creative process, what to say, how to script, how to theme a series of audio boos.

Audioboos have removed the entire technical challenge of posting audio remotely.

It’s simple to do, you publish right to the server and you share right away. An entire community is starting to unfold organically.

Who is it for?

Audioboo is for people who like to converse. Twitter is for people who like to confine themselves to a short-form of communication where things are frequently superficial.

The key thing is that it is self organizing which is always the best thing. You have professionals who use it, hobbyists, people who speak Irish as a native language, school leavers, college students, about 20 or 30 people in all who regularly provide one snippet a week from Ireland.

There’s a real Irish conversation involved. You can actually map it out; there’s Peter feeding his hens at 7am, his mum talking about the washing at nine o’clock and someone from the bus at ten and someone else is working in their office and talking about their conference call that happened at noon.

Some people are just doing pure audio. One guy went to a supermarket and just stood by the cash till and recorded the ambient noise

People want to know that they are listening to a real person. When you say something you are bringing someone into your circle. It feels like you personally talking to them as opposed to writing it on a piece of paper and you know that ten thousand people have read that same column.

There’s a more personal twist to it. You have to take an active step as well to give time to listen to conversation. People have shoveled out parts of their life to listen to what you’re saying. This investment leads to more engagement than just words on a paper.

What happens next?

In September Audioboo.fm will have it’s own digital radio channel. That means you will be able to listen to an assemblage of boos in your home or care wherever you have a DAB, radio. The internet is going mainstream.

Who's "Most Tweeted" In The Irish Twitterverse?

John Breslin — Wed, 05 May 2010 09:23:55 +0000

The Irish Twitter users who received the most replies from other Irish users during the study.

A research project by John Conroy, a Masters student supervised by Josephine Griffith at NUI Galway, has gathered some interesting statistics on Twitter usage and the most tweeted users in Ireland (during February / March 2010).

The study acquired 307,168 tweets from a group of Irish Twitter users. These tweets yielded 93,022 resolvable replies (@someuser), and another 7,298 retweets. Therefore, a third of the tweets investigated contained either a reply to another user or a retweet. Of the 93,022 resolvable replies, the vast majority were directed at users external to the Irish group. 15,364 replies (16.5%) were directed at an Irish user, and 77,658 (83.5%) at a user outside of Ireland. (Just over 2,000 investigated tokens were spoiled, often due to typos or e-mail addresses being detected as replies.)

The most replied-to Irish account was @planetjedward (pop stars), followed by @thescript (a band), @Dublins98Dave (a radio presenter), @darraghdoyle (community manager at boards.ie), @rayfoleyshow (another radio presenter), and @damienmulley (an online PR consultant).

Of the total set of users that the Irish replied to, @addthis, a link sharing service, topped the list, followed by pop stars @MrPeterAndre and @mileycyrus, and the unclassifiable @stephenfry.

Who the Irish replied to most (including international Twitter users).

Retweets accounted for a much smaller portion: about 2.5% of the total set of tweets, or about 7.5% of tweets that referenced other users. The most retweeted Irish user was @marklittlenews (a journalist and former RTE presenter). @tweetmeme, a link tracking service for Twitter, was the most retweeted user by the Irish usergroup.

Who the Irish retweeted most (including international Twitter users).

(You can follow both John Conroy and Josephine Griffith on Twitter as well. I've saved some of the top user lists using Many Eyes.)

The Best: Referencing John Herlihy From Google; Third-Level Education In Ireland; Doing What You Love

Tom Murphy — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:43:40 +0000

At the Digital Landscapes conference in Dublin last week, John Herlihy gave the audience a round-up of the corporate culture and attitudes at the company where he works, Google. In amidst the description of personnel and management reviews and how to handle dud projects, he pointed out that in a world with a population of 6.4 billion, good enough isn't really any good at all. In the video of his remarks, he says in connection with the standards of performance required by individuals in the new economy at 3:07: "It's not the best by your standards, it's the best in the world standards. Don't play League of Ireland football, play Champions League."

He says it in a matter-of-fact way, but if that isn’t fighting talk then I am not quite sure what is. When it comes to brain power and knowledge capability, Ireland is a gold mine. A gold mine people seem, almost willfully, to ignore. Ireland has many great things going for it and an educated population has to be one of the greatest attributes on what would be a very long list. It has well over 800,000 people who have completed third-level education of some kind. (We'll leave out the half a million that are coming through the system for the while.)

These are figures from the Central Statistics Office. Adding the third-level graduates together we get a figure of 829,201. Now to compare this to UK statistics. Wolfram/Alpha compares the populations thus.

So in the UK, with a population of just over 14 times the size, one would expect a matching proportion (fourteen or so million) of people having completed third-level education. Not so. From a PDF download at the site of the Department of Children, Schools and Families, 30.9 per cent of all adults aged 19-59F/19-64M have a qualification at level 4 or higher. This equates to 9.1 million people. So by taking these government figures we can make a useful comparison.

UK: 9.1/60 million = 15% of the population with third-level education
Ireland: 829,201/4.3 million = 19.2% of the population with third-level education.

With proportional adjustment, this means that for every 4 Irish persons with a substantial education history there are three UK citizens. Or if Ireland were the same size as the UK there would be 12 million Irish with third-level education to the UK’s 9 million. There is a greater depth of education in the Irish population by a truly enormous 33%. By any standards that is a phenomenal difference that reflects very well on the potential of the Irish population to make great progress in the future.

But still, being the best seems both a daunting idea and a daunting challenge: being the best means being better than all the folks that are coming out of those fine American universities. Being better than the multitudes graduating from technical academies of India and China. In short, being better than everyone else. So, how do we be the best? The answer, I believe, is in our hearts.

In a recent interview for Social Bits, economist David McWilliams summed it up perfectly. The quote comes at 3:20 in this video: "Do what you love, as only doing what you love, you do what you're good at." It's not what others think you should be doing or what you think you ought to be doing. The way to truly excel is to do what you really love to be doing.

It very probably is that simple.

Chris Horn Talks About Innovation And Ireland: "How Can We Create A Desirable Environment For Entrepreneurs?"

John Breslin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:15:00 +0000

Dr. Chris Horn, co-founder of Iona, president of Engineers Ireland, and member of the Irish Innovation Taskforce, gave a keynote at the Dublin Web Summit a few weeks ago.

He began by giving us some history. 30 years ago, he was a PhD student in TCD's computer science department. In 1981, he had his first visit to Silicon Valley because at that time TCD computer science had some links with Stanford computer science. When he went to the computer science department he met two young guys working on graphics hardware, Andy Bechtolsheim and Bill Joy, who later went on to co-found Sun Microsystems. Chris thought "we're as good as these guys, why can't we set up a company like this from Dublin, Ireland". He talked to other people at home doing interest things with software and hardware ("geeks like me") and they decided that they were going to start a company.

In 1991, Sean Baker, Annrai O'Toole and Chris set up Iona in Pearse Street. They had one metal desk, one phone and no chair. Each put in 1000 punts (Irish pounds) into the company, and they set out to build a global software company. They realized that there was an opportunity in the worldwide software industry to tie applications together. Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and HP were all playing in this space. They decided to see who would give them some money: they tried the BES (business expansion scheme), didn't get anywhere, and tried the banks. However, at this time, Guinness Peat Aviation's IPO had just been pulled, and Memorex Ireland had just collapsed, so they didn't get far. They talked to VCs in the UK and folks in US, but got nowhere. Everyone said they just couldn't invest in them.

For a while, they did anything legitimate: running training courses for the Met Office in Glasnevin, carrying out backups for banks, writing device drivers, doing programming courses for the Department of Excise in Southampton. Chris was an electronic engineer: he never did an MBA, but his strategy was that he had to have at least three months of cash in the bank, and they always tried to have that money available as a throttle.

They started their first product in 1992 with John Moreau and Bridget Walsh, but they couldn't sell their product in Ireland or Europe and realized that they had to do it in the US. Iona went to a trade show in the summer of 1993, and Chris recalls getting that first cheque from their first customer (SAIC, a systems integrator) as being the most thrilling moment of his life. He wishes he still had that cheque or even a photocopy of it. Their application integrated the new version of Windows with Sun's latest OS, and was demonstrated on their stand. The Sun guys got very excited, and were delighted to see what they had, so they wanted to check them out in Ireland.

At this stage, Iona was just 11 people in a small Pearse Street office so they tried to keep them out of the office and arranged to meet in a conference room in the O'Reilly Building in Trinity. They signed a deal in December 1993, and sold 25% of the company for $600k. Iona was profitable, and being in profit every month meant that people would give them money. Sun endorsed them, and they met Scott McNealy a few times. At that time, Motorola was building a global cellular network, and they wanted to use Iona technology for the management of the constellation. There was no way that they could bet a multi-million product on the 11 guys in Dublin, but Sun backed the endorsement story, and they got the Motorola deal and other deals on the back of it. It was the glue that got them into Boeing, and led to their IPO in 1997 on the NASDAQ. The IPO got $60 million, the fifth largest at the time. Iona grew from there, becoming one of the top 10 software-only companies worldwide, growing to employ 1200 people at one stage. It ended with the sale of Iona two years ago, not on the same high note, but luckily on a positive one: Lehman Brothers were the bankers, and the Iona sale deal was completed two days before Lehman went bust.

Chris went on to talk about the Innovation Taskforce. He was approached last June with 27 other people to join the Innovation Taskforce, including the head of the IDA, SFI, Enterprise Ireland, and the Enterprise, Trade and Employment secretary general. The goal of the group is to examine how we can make an innovation economy. Chris has been blogging regularly about each of the meetings, talking about what would it take to make Ireland an innovation centre for the planet, how we can enable successful growth and create jobs. We have a number of things going for us: natural resources, green technologies, wind power. But we also have huge potential due to our electromagnetic spectrum and the free capacity on the radio waves. This means that companies can do experimentation of new transmission technologies and algorithms here in Ireland. Chris says that ComReg are doing fantastic stuff around trial licensing in this area.

We also have had recent successes in digital animation and nominations for the Oscars, demonstrating our great creativity. We have a huge diaspora; he cited David Williams as being highly influential in the Farmleigh diaspora forum. Chris says that there are more Irish worldwide than Indian and Israelis combined. It's an incredible resource and there is so much good will towards Ireland. We have had our problems with the death of the Celtic Tiger, but we can create a framework in which these guys in our international diaspora can help us. There are various angel investors coming through aiding with the formation of startups, but the big thing that Ireland has that Singapore does not have, which Israel doesn't have, and even Silicon Valley, is the presence of not just ICT multinationals but huge biomedical companies as well (others would kill for that).

What's great with many of the companies who are here is that they are not the headquarters, so they can do things here that the mothership would not consider. This can create an opportunity for a multinational like Google to sit down with the pharmaceuticals, to enable cross-disciplinary discussions between traditionally-stovepiped industries, enabling collaboration that can't happen with the motherships. Worldwide head of Bell Labs, Jeong Kim, was in Ireland recently looking for more that Bell Labs can do using Ireland as their hub. Bell Labs has a lot of dormant IP that could be licensed to an Irish startup. IBM and Microsoft have already done that. These multinationals are an additional resource that other jurisdictions don't have.

On the negative side, broadband in Ireland is a big issue. One of the biggest, stupidest issues in Ireland is the legislation around bankruptcy. It takes twelve years to clear your name, and you have to go the high court. Only one person in Ireland did that last year. There were 13000 registered bankruptcies in the UK, but over there you can clear your name in just one year. We have to clean up our bankruptcy laws. Another point that Chris made is that an entrepreneur in an Irish context isn't always perceived in a positive way. (They are seen more as "chancers".) We need to change public attitude towards risk, failing, learning from failure, and trying again. The second or fourth time around, you'll get it right. Another issue is in relation to intellectual property, particularly through state funding from the likes of SFI. How can research work get out and become commercialized? How can IP be managed since they are state assets? There should be a fair return to the taxpayer, encouraging spinouts and startups. The taskforce is struggling with this, because inconsistency is an issue: you don't get the same answer from each University. There are different rules, but they need to be made entrepreneur friendly.

For the requirements of grants from most funding agencies, importance is placed on entrepreneurs filling out forms and having meetings. Rather, we need to streamline accounting, employment legislation, health and safety issues, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on business and make things easier for them. We need to look at immigration policy. For non-EU nationals, or exciting entrepreneurs from Asia, how can we make things easier for them? Chris says that it's wrong for Ireland to do a me-too policy just because other countries are. Don't copy infrastructural investments: create a new platform in Ireland that's globally unique and that can be the leg up for companies in Ireland to use that structure.

TSMC said they could break the Intel model and have manufacturing separated from the design of ICs: give us a design and we can make it for you. That led to a large number of VLSI design shops in Taiwan, disrupting the industry. There are good ideas that could change a whole industry based on insightful government investment in Ireland. The IDA has been great in attracting companies to Ireland, and SFI have been pretty good too in investing to attract international scientists to work alongside our own. But which agency focuses on bringing risk capital and overseas entrepreneurs to Ireland? Not the IDA, Enterprise Ireland or SFI. If we could get risk capital and overseas entrepreneurs interested, what would it take to get them to think "I've got to come to Ireland because…" How can we create an environment that would encourage that? It's a big challenge, but we strongly need to do this.

Chris referenced Michael Henning ideas in this space, referring to his own blog post "Transforming Irish Industry". He looked at the IDA annual reports from 2000 to 2009. He also went to the Enterprise Ireland website: they only had the last two online, so he used the Wayback Machine and pick up the older reports. Chris set up a spreadsheet, graphing money in, out, imports, exports, jobs created, etc. He wanted to draw a graph of employment figures, to see how many jobs were created by client companies of Enterprise Ireland and the IDA in the last ten years. But what he found was a flat line. You would have thought we'd have more jobs in 2009 than in 2000 created by Enterprise Ireland and the IDA. They've been working so hard in these agencies to create employment and create jobs, so what's wrong?

We have 430,000 unemployed, so how do we create jobs, and create a positive feedback loop in the economy? We can hope that existing companies will spin out others. Iona spun out something like 30 companies in their lifetime. For every tax euro we put into companies, we need to look at how we can get these companies to in turn get more excited and involved, trying new things to create more jobs and spinouts, thereby forming this positive feedback loop. We need Enterprise, Trade and Employment to go viral, leading to a multiplicative effect, not an additive effect. Chris finished his talk by telling us that there would be a report from the Innovation Taskforce going to cabinet in a few weeks and it will be published in March 2010.

XTech 2008 comes to Dublin, Ireland in May 2008

John Breslin — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:15:10 +0000

Call for Participation for XTech 2008

Proposals for presentations and tutorials are invited for XTech 2008, Europe's premier web technologies conference. The deadline for submitting proposals is January 25th, 2008.

XTech 2008 will be held from May 6-9th 2008, in Dublin, Ireland.

XTech's theme this year is “The Web on the Move”, focusing on the emerging portability of data, applications and identity on the internet. We will explore the benefits, issues, practicalities and fun of a web built on open standards, open source and commodity technology.

XTech presentations should inspire, educate and challenge. Your audience will be people like you, responsible for steering the technological direction of their organizations and the web as a whole.

Last year's schedule can be viewed on the XTech 2007 web site.

Please direct any questions to the conference chair, [email protected]?subject=XTech%202008%20CFP">Edd Dumbill.

View the calls for participation and submit a proposal

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

Social platforms
- Design patterns for social software
- Social network interoperability
- Internet application platforms (Facebook F8, OpenSocial, etc.)

Identity management
- OpenID
- Practical security
- OAuth

Ajax
- jQuery, YUI, other toolkits
- Offline applications
- Comet
- Professional Javascript
- Flex

The web of data
- Collective intelligence
- Semantic technologies
- Search
- Markup and meaning
- Freebase, Twine, Google Base
- The place of XML on the web

Data and databases
- Client-side databases
- REST-oriented databases (e.g. CouchDB)
- XML and RDF
- Messaging architectures
- XQuery

Operations and programming
- Web application frameworks
- Virtualization and appliances
- Application scaling
- Multicore and concurrency oriented programming

Mobile devices
- Commodity mobiles
- Android, iPhone
- Hardware hacking and personal prototyping
- Geolocation
- Getting the mobile mindset

WebCamp workshop on social network portability

John Breslin — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:52:52 +0000

A WebCamp "Social Network Portability" workshop has been announced to be co-located with BlogTalk on 2nd March 2008. You can view the wiki page for this event.

"Social network portability" is a term that has been used to describe the ability to reuse one's own profile and contacts across various social networking sites and social media applications. At this workshop, presentations will be combined with breakout sessions to discuss all aspects of portability for social networking sites (including accounts, friends, activities / content, and applications).

Topics of relevance include, but are not limited to, social network centralisation versus decentralisation, OpenSocial, microformats including XHTML Friends Network (XFN) and hCard, authentication and authorisation, OpenID single sign-on, Bloom filters, categorising friends and personas, FOAF, ownership of your published content, SIOC, the OpenFriend format, the Social Network Aggregation Protocol (SNAP), aggregation and privacy, permissions and context, and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).

You can register for this workshop in conjunction with BlogTalk 2008. If you are interested in speaking or otherwise participating in the workshop, please add your name under the Speakers or Participants headings on the wiki page at http://webcamp.org/SocialNetworkPortability.

Final call for social software conference "BlogTalk"

John Breslin — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:24:59 +0000

BlogTalk 2008, the 5th International Conference on Social Software, will be held in Cork, Ireland on 3rd/4th March 2008. The event is designed to allow dialogue between practitioners, developers and academics who are involved in the area of social software (blogs, wikis, forums, IM, social networks, etc.). A workshop on Social Network Portability will also be co-located with the event.

The organisers (me included) have just sent the final call for proposals to present at BlogTalk 2008. The end date for submissions is 7th December 2007, and these should be over two pages in length (no fixed template). Reviews will be completed by the end of December 2007, and the organisers will notify successful authors in early January 2008.

You can view the full call for proposals at http://2008.blogtalk.net/proposals and can submit your proposals at http://www.easychair.org/blogtalk2008

As well as peer-reviewed proposals, BlogTalk 2008 will have a number of prominent invited speakers (including Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare and Nova Spivack of Radar Networks, with others to be confirmed).

Mashable recently listed BlogTalk as one of the top 10 events for bloggers in 2008, and you can register for BlogTalk 2008 with Mashable's 10% discount code "mashtalk".