Maz Nadjm from Ogilvy spoke about social commerce and niche markets. Social is not new, social transcends technology. Likes the site Fashim.com

Mark Nolan and Deirdre Waldon from Cawley Nea were up next. They said social was not new. They also did a contrast between Arab spring and the London riots showing how people in one wore Adidas and in the other wore Nike. Called the London riots the ‘Nike Swoosh riots’.

Mark also gave his 3 rules:
Be engagement led
Increase sense of identity
Let it breathe ie. release it into the wild and see what comes of it.

Mark and Deirdre then highlighted Bjorks app album, Biophilia, and rounded up their talk with a couple of videos:
Video of Electric Ireland tweet hunt campaign.

Showed a video of HSE anti smoking campaign. Quit.ie

Adam Levene, from Grapple, the leading mobile app development agency in Europe and north America spoke about the importance of the Mobile phone.

They asked the question ‘How would you live for 24 hrs without mobile?’
One of the responsese was “I was itching like a crackhead without my phone”

There were 840m apps downloaded in uk in 2010 and £4.4bn forecasted global revenues in app purchases.

“When brands get it right returns can be huge” Deloitte

He then showed the Fable 3 Kingmaker mobile app example, and an example of an app from the Premier Inn. This app brrought in £3,000,000 in additional revenue.

Adam then gave 5 tips for anyone developing an app:
Know objectives
Know your audience
Add value to your customers
Know the context
Shout about it

Ciaran Norris from Mindshare, the biggest buyer of google ads globally.
He started with the Wiliam Gibson quote: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed”

Ciaran then outlined some emerging trends:
Living in a post pc world
6% of Irish population own iPad
51% use social, gaming gamblimg apps
Platform neutral HTMl5 apps
iPad is not mobile: Mark Zuckerberg

Need to educate when using cutting edge tech.

David Sneden Google
Nice google wallet video
Use google insights for market research

Carla Buzasi Huffington Post
Launched in uk the night before hack gate.
Make it as easy as possible to comment.
They have 24000 bloggers in the us.
People are eager to blog.
Politicians love blogging.
Ordinary peoples voices are the most interesting.
If you wouldn’t read it why would anyone else.

Why people blog, people just like talking.
What makes blogs stand out: passion.

Joe Fernandez Klout
Web moving from site centric to people centric.
Klout sends influence score to hotels, call centre to see what perks you deserve or how long you are on hold.
Klout works with companies to put their products in the hands of influencers.
Number of followers not important, it’s all about engagement.

Alan Coleman onlineadvertising.ie
Creating a campaign on facebook LinkedIn allows you to target people by many different variables enabling you to target a ver specific demographic.

David Shing, AoL
It’s all about conversation.
Attention is the new economy.
Engagement
Participation is very important.
Cause marketing: 90% of people interested in it.
Fiesta movement
What’s next?
Conversations not campaigns or chatter.
Second screen companion, for example a phone synched with tv to provide more information
Curation culture.
Mobile merits, frequent flier points for mobile, like the rewards you get from being the mayor of a place in Foursquare
Focus on explorers, look after VIPs
Post digital=physical time online to enrich offline life.

How to succeed:
Encourage remix culture
Find the right people
Harness the power of pre-existing products
Make it look good
Be ambitious
Producer and consumer should work together

Tony Wang Twitter
Was asked why there are no dev jobs in Ireland and mostly qa support type jobs
Replied that it was early days for twitter in Ireland
Also said one of the reasons they came to Ireland was the friendliness

Cindy Gallop makelovenotporn .com
Peoples idea of what ‘love-making’ is formed from what they see in porn.
Porn more easily accesible than sex education.
No open dialog.
Launched at ted 2009.
Ifwerantheworld.com

Nick Bilton, NY Times
The hyper personalisation of everything
Spole about the Nycresistor hacker space
Showed how information spreads
Nice data visualisation of the day that Michael Jackson died died

Ben Parr, Mashable
Gave 7 reasons why entrepreneurs fail.

So that was the day 1 of the 2 day event. The main take aways I got from it were that social and mobile are extremely important, and engagement is more important than number of followers. The web is increasingly becoming about personalities and less about sites.

In a short and entertaining slot, Mary outlined their view of the future of the web. You can see the talk here and download the full deck here

Starting with the theme of “globality”, kpcb outlined the top 25 websites in the world (based on market value). Mostly, these sites are US based, but there is a growing trend in Chinese and Russian sites, for example the Chinese site Baidu is 5th largest site in the world. One interesting statistic was that the vast majority of the users of the largest websites are from outside the US, 81% in fact.

The number of new users in the last 3 years also threw up a few surprises. The top five countries are China, India, Nigeria, Russia and Iran. It would be interesting to see if any Irish businesses are targeting any of these countries.

Social networking seems to really capture peoples time especially in Israel, Argentina, Turkey and Chile spending more than 10hours a month on social networking sites.

Unsurprisingly, the growth of mobile is a continuing trend with a 35% growth in global 3g subscribers. No doubt the increase in smart phones like iPhones and Android phones has something to do with this. In 2010, smartphone sales surpassed ordinary phones in Western Europe. There is still a long way to go for smart phones to go as there 835 million smartphone subscribers and 5.6 Billion mobile subscribers.

Mobile usage of sites such as Pandora, Twitter and Facebook has increased dramatically since 2008. For example Pandora mobile usage increased from 5% to 60% in that space of time. Google mobile queries quadrupled in the last year. Mobile advertising has ramped dramatically as well, up to $12Bn in 2011E.

The next part of the presentation involved the changes in the way that we interact with computers, the evolution of the user interface as it moved from text based to graphical to sensory. Touch and sound now form a large part of the user experience. This is mainly thanks to the visionary work of Steve Jobs and the iPad.

According to Mary the next big thing is audio. Sites like Spotify (unfortunately not available in Ireland yet) and SoundCloud are leading the way in this regard. Voice services, like the newly released siri on iPhone and Google voice search are another example.

E-commerce online continues to grow against offline, with online accounting for 8% of total retail sales in the US. Mobile sales continued to grow also. Another interesting fact is the way that consumers are using their mobile devices to check prices before making a purchase. 52% of smartphone users gave the reason for abandoning a purchase in-store, that they found it online for a better price. That means that these people were in the store before abandoning their purchase. 51% gave “Found it at another store for a better price” as their reason. It shows that with smartphones, people can check prices in other shops, while they are in your store.

Mobile and online can also help with real world commerce. Sites like Groupon and Foursquare are driving business to local companies. For example a friend of mine is currently the ‘Mayor’ of Brambles in Sandyford through Foursquare. He got a free mushroom soup, and made me want to knock him off his perch.

Advertising spend online still has massive growth potential. The spend on advertising compared with time spent online does not correspond. There is a potential market of $20bn in online and mobile up for grabs in the US alone. Print media is going to be the loser, with revenues dropping for the fifth year in a row.

According to kpcb, the biggest trend in the near future is the empowerment of people through mobile devices. 85% of the worlds population is covered by wireless signals. To put that into context, only 80% of the worlds population has access to electricity.

The rest of the presentation is mostly about the US economy, the highlights being; there is lots of uncertainty and the US has too much debt.

So what does all this mean for Irish businesses? For a start you should have a global focus. If you have a website, it should work on smartphones. If you don’t have a website, why not? It’s easy to set up.

Your business should also be on facebook and twitter. Social networks are your customers are, so it makes sense for your business to have a presence there no matter if you are a local petrol station/shop or a global multinational.

When we think of start-ups, especially in the technology sector, we think of young men tinkering away in their garage or dorm room (before they drop out of course). The reality is a bit different. Starting a company is really hard. If the ‘nerds’ who start up tech companies seem to have no social life, it’s probably because they don’t; starting the company is taking up all their time.

After the general election there was a lot of talk about creating jobs through the digital economy and governments don’t create jobs, they create the environment to create jobs. If the article form the New York Times is correct, the government should create the environment to create start-ups.

So what can be done to create this environment? The government essentially own the banks. Through Nama they own loads of property. We have a highly educated population and as the Global Irish Economic Forum showed us earlier in the month, we have a global business community that is willing to help.

The first thing we need to do is create a start-up culture; a hacker culture.

I’m not talking about the kind of hackers you see in Hollywood movies, I mean the kind of hacker Paul Graham had in mind in his book Hackers and Painters. This culture invariably starts in college or around colleges. It is no coincidence that silicon valley is close to Caltech and Stanford, and on the east coast of the US, a lot of start-ups are created in the vicinity of MIT and Harvard.

What drives the start-up culture in the US is a determination to give things a go. The fear of failure doesn’t really come into it. It’s better to take a risk and fail 100 times because you only need to succeed once. In Ireland, we have a problem with that way of thinking. Anyone who tries to do anything risky is seen as thinking “they’re better than everyone else”. There is a genuine fear of being laughed at by your friends down in the pub if you fail (and sometimes if you succeed).

Most successful entrepreneurs consider the experience of failure to be an important step in their eventual success. We need to teach people in Ireland that it’s ok to fail. The best way of doing this is to allow people to fail in a safe environment.

So what does this safe environment look like? I think the Government should create hacker spaces, like tóg around the major IT universities in the country.

We could use some of the buildings in Nama’s portfolio for example. Attached to each hacker space should be a business development unit to help start-ups with the legal and tax implications of starting a company. Thereby allowing start-ups to get on with doing what they do best, creating new innovative products. The government should also encourage the banks to provide funding for potentially successful companies. It would also be a place where the current leaders in the business community could lend their expertise in a mentoring role.

If the New York Times is right, we need to lower the barrier to creating a start-up before we can rely on the digital economy creating jobs.

Is feidir linn.

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.

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.

Google Goggles, for example. Why can I not find that in Market? It is available in Ireland, but seemingly only if you work for Google.

Come on Google, it’s Christmas, where is the love?

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

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.