At first I thought it was all straight forward. I called them up and was told that in 5 working days I would have broadband. Cool, it’s only “up to 8MB”, but whatever, it’s got a contention ratio of 1 i.e. I’m not sharing my connection.

So on the the 30th of September I call eircom to set up my direct debit. While on the call, I asked where my ADSL modem was. I was then told that broadband hadn’t even been ordered for my account. At this stage I was a little bit miffed. So I said ok, make sure that 8MB broadband has been ordered and it gets sent out to me.

In the middle of this call the sales guy tried for (what seemed like) a long time to sell me emobile.

Fine, I’ll have 8MB broadband (sorry, up to 8 MB) in 5 days time. Or so I thought.

Five (working) days later, I received the ADSL modem. I set up the ADSL modem with anticipation of my blazing fast (up to) 8MB. Hmm, it doesn’t seem all that fast. Right, off to speedtest.net, what’s this 0.8MB?

Call number 3: Tech support at 8am in the morning. According to tech support, I only had a 1MB connection. The tech support guy told me I needed to talk to sales to get it increased to 8MB. He then told me he would transfer me to the sales department. The only problem was; there was no one in the sales department. Now I’m annoyed. How is it possible that the guys in tech support don’t know what time the sales department opens? Really frustrating.

I then waited until 9am for phone call number 4. I got through to one of the sales staff. At this stage I didn’t really trust what the front line sales staff were telling me so I asked to speak to a supervisor. After being put on hold 4 times I eventually got to talk to a supervisor. I wanted someone to send me an email confirming my order. I was then told it was against company policy to send external emails.

After speaking to someone in customer care, I was told that my case would be escalated.

Yesterday, I got a call from eircom. I tried to explain to him that it’s not the people that are the problem, it’s the process.

It took me 4 phone calls to get what I ordered and at no stage in the process did I get a confirmation that anybody understood what I ordered.

So how could eircom drastically improve the experience? Well here’s a few things they could try:

• Implement an automatic email system that emails people confirming what has been requested
• Tell the tech staff what time the sales center opens
• If I call to set up direct debit, don’t try sell me crappy emobile
• Frontline staff should be ok with letting people talk to their supervisor
• Educate frontline sales staff on what they are selling, e.g. if it can take up to 3 weeks to install broadband, tell me and explain why.

One thing eircom have done right is their twitter account. I found the guys doing it to be polite, helpful and responsive.

Anyway, rant over.

I have to say I think Apple’s behavior in this has been appalling. The only reason that Apple are doing this is for money. If they allowed the flash player on these devices, developers could make applications available to users without the need to provide them through the app-store and thus deny apple their cut.

According to Steve Jobs, Adobe Flash is a closed proprietary, whereas Apple is all about the open-source with Webkit. That’s great, but Webkit has nothing to do with this debate.

The Adobe Flash platform is a lot more open than Apple’s mobile platform. Let’s compare them.

To develop an iPhone application I can use xcode, Apple’s development environment, that’s it nothing else. To create a swf file that runs in the flash player I can use haxe, flash develop or fdt. There are loads more and none of these come from Adobe.

Once you have created my application, it doesn’t get any better. To make an iphone application available to the public, a developer has to pay a fee of $99. This fee allows developers to submit their application for the appstore. First, however, it has to be reviewed by Apple. This review process has resulted in a lot of denials and not just apps made by small independent developers. Google have had at least 2 apps denied, Google Voice and Google Latitude when they submitted them to the app store. On the other hand, once you have created an application on the flash platform you can share it however you wish.

Steve Jobs states performance as one of the reasons why xcode is the only dev environment allowed. This makes the assumption that if developers use something other than xcode, the apps will not perform as well. In that case, why not let these apps be developed on different platforms and add performance to the review process. That way, apps that are badly written on xcode are caught as well.

From a technology point of view, it doesn’t really make any sense. There are loads of developers out there who create great apps. Why is Apple forcing them to use their tools?

But lets look at it from Apple’s point of view. Why should they let the Flash on their products? There is absolutely no reason why they should. It just means that users will have less choice. They can only install apps from the app store. They are creating a closed system and history has shown that when a closed system challenges a open system, the open system always wins.

I love Apple’s products, I’m using a MacBook to write this post, but at the moment if someone offered me the choice between an iPhone or a Google Nexus One Android phone, I’d have to go with the Nexus One.

Have a look at the comments to get an idea of the calibre of facebook user.

Maybe teaching facebook in schools is not too far-fetched.

Imagine though, if you didn’t have to leave your house. Imagine if all your work was available to you where ever you have an internet connection. That is the power of cloud computing. You can access your data anywhere. Not only that, you can also work on it.

There are loads of applications that are solely based on-line. In fact, you can do pretty much anything in web based applications. The only limitations seem to be video/imaging editing although even that is changing.

For business applications salesforce.com is definitely worth a look. If you are involved in sales, marketing or services having a salesforce account at the moment could be a life-saver.  The ability to log on from anywhere, even from an iphone or blackberry, offers a huge advantage over on premise software solutions, especially in the weather conditions we have at the moment.

Not to mention the fact that the TCO is lower for cloud based solutions. No need for expensive hardware or the staff to maintain it.

So if the climate (economic or meteorological) is bad, maybe you should be working in the cloud.

The reasons for using these technologies are many-fold. I really want to learn Django and today I found app-engine-patch which allows better integration between Django and Google App Engine.

Anyway, back to my project. I think that the way people consume news is going to change in the future. I think that people like @marklittlenews have recognized this. I don’t think for a second that 6 0ne or newspapers are going away any time soon.

I do however think that the way we, the public, view the news is changing. The crash-landing on the Hudson in 2009 is a good example. It was all over twitter before it was on the news. Photos included. With a video camera included in nearly every phone. For example, my phone (the HTC Hero) has a video camera built in. I can even post videos directly to youtube. I can even stream videos live using a service like Qik. Photos are the same. Soon any news event will be broadcast on the web as soon as it happens.

Features will also be online. The excellent site Pictory is an example of the direction that I think features will go in.

So what does this mean for Journalists? Even with news events being captured as they happen, the background information, the meat of the story, will still be important. Usually, this comes from a built up network of contacts that comes from years covering stories.

And  so, the project I am planning to build is a platform that brings the on the spot user generated news together with the experience and skill of journalists.

It’s an ambitious project, but what is the point of aiming low? There is a good chance that nothing will come of this, but hopefully I will learn something along the way.

This is Apple’s traditional time for big announcements. The big Apple convention MacWorld used to be on at this time of year.

Apparently, back in 2007, Apple registered the domain iSlate.com. That, with the rumors coming from Chinese screen manufacturers seem to point to a 10 inch tablet.

It will be interesting to see if Apple can do for tablet computing, what it did for the mobile.

Personally, I don’t see a future or tablet computers. I think a touch-screen would be really difficult to type on long term. I think tablets are more suited to graphical type applications. I don’t think there will ever be a novel written on a touchscreen.

Who knows though? Apple have surprised us in the past.

A new Irish satirical blog worth checking out is The Daily Blogicle.

Basically, what it does is keeps your calendars and contacts the same over your devices. There are other apps that do the same thing, like Apples mobile me and Microsoft Exchange.

The main advantage of the Google app is that it is free. Of course, it’s also in Beta. Read all about it.