Two years after LouderVoice launched with the aim to make reviews more useful via Microformats, Google announced support, followed quickly by several of our competitors. What took ye so long?
The SBP has an excellent supplement about Cork in today’s edition. Hopefully it’ll make it onto their web-site at some stage. Caroline Allen dedicated the entire back page to start-ups and include quotes from CorkBIC, Rubicon Centre, it@cork and Argolon/LouderVoice. The full piece is well worth a read, particularly considering the same message was coming loud and clear from us all. Hopefully someone in Government will read it and get that message!
Here’s a rough scan of my thoughts as a start-up founder, Genesis alumni, organiser of Cork OpenCoffee and editor of Web2Ireland.org.
One quote which didn’t make it into the SBP but which is critical to my thinking:
A bottom-up approach has to be taken, contended O’Neill. We need to give the maximum number of people a chance to succeed, rather than cherry picking.
They are running 3 one-day Idea Generation Workshops over the coming weeks. The workshops are for people who are thinking about starting their own business but don’t have a business idea in mind yet and also people who have a business idea but want to study the idea further.
They will help people decide whether self-employment is the right route for them. Topics covered during the workshop will include: What does it mean to be an entrepreneur? How are new business ideas generated; How to select and develop a business idea and what steps should be taken when you have decided on your business idea. Delivered in a practical manner, case studies will be used and future worldwide trends will be discussed.
The new Nokia Ovi Store is in the process of going live around the world with Ireland, for a change, being one of the first to get it.
This is their response to the iPhone App Store and Android Market. You install it by opening the Download! App on your phone (for N-series anyway). Takes ages to install and phone must be rebooted.
My initial feeling is that it doesn’t feel wildly different to that Download! app on my N95-8GB and there is too much Star Trek.
Much more importantly, if you search for something like Shozu, they want €5! Eh, isn’t it free on the Shozu site? A rip-off like that means I’m unlikely to ever use the store again.
How much is Nokia charging companies to put their apps on the store? Is that the reason for the €5? Google charged us nothing to put the “LouderVoice Reviews” for Android app up on the Market.
UPDATE: Based on the newsletter I got from Shozu last night, it’s them charging the €5 not Nokia. Therefore, I was wrong, Nokia are not the rip-off merchants. It looks like some previously free apps are now pay-for because they have a better route-to-market. Nokia should have spotted this PR mess before it happened and “encouraged” Shozu to offer a freeium option. The fact that they are charging the €5 in Ireland but are not even on the UK Ovi Store makes this story even more odd.
The first Facebook Garage Ireland was a massive success with 150+ people in attendance and a bunch of great talks and demos.
We’re planning the next one for June and have put the call out for speakers/demoers.
If you are doing anything with FB Apps or Connect and want to let people know, then grab the opportunity. Remember, we had RTE at the last one and made the news!
Got a great business idea? Think you can put together a 5-page business plan in the next 5 days? The IQPrize is €10k for the best biz plan, with absolutely no strings attached.
The judges (including yours truly) are as follows:
Aodhan Cullen, founder & CEO, StatCounter
Colm Long, Head of Online Operations (EMEA), Facebook
Conor O’Neill, co-founder & CEO, LouderVoice
Eamonn Fallon, co-founder & CEO, Daft.ie
Gail Power, Senior Manager, Google
Martha Rotter, Internet Evangelist, Microsoft
And there may be one more joining that list shortly!
We went live on Puddleducks.ie a few weeks back and the response has been fantastic.
Today we went live with Bubble Brothers wine in Cork. They are the first users of our new SME customer reviews solution. This is a widget which can be dropped on a product page with one line of code and review-enables the entire site. No development is needed by the client and our simple job is to add the correct styling elements so that the widget blends with your site.
All our contact details are over on business.loudervoice.com. We can have you up and running in a shockingly short period of time.
We’ll be making a lot more announcements like this in the coming weeks. Our small business solution is going live on multiple sites shortly. Contact us on business AT loudervoice DOT com if you’d like to arrange a trial. It can literally be implemented in minutes on many sites.
Adam Maguire kindly invited several of us to give our top IT money-saving tips for 2009 in a recent issue of Business & Finance. That piece is now up on his blog. I naturally focused on Cloud Computing and SaaS. Thanks Adam.
This first generation Google Android phone is an interesting mish-mash of brilliant software and so-so hardware. The touch screen is fantastic and the UI is almost perfect. Whilst it can’t compete with the N95-8GB on multimedia capabilities, for our business it kicks its ass.
The G1 is not available in Ireland and may never be. So far it has been released in the USA and the UK. Calls to CPW in Enniskillen drew a blank as they had no idea what I was talking about. So I bit the bullet and paid full whack for an unlocked phone on eBay. The vendor in San Francisco shipped it the day before Thanksgiving and it arrived on the Monday. I was very impressed (and relieved). I immediately replaced the 1GB microSD card with a 4GB one.
First impressions of the hardware are not great. The screen looks good, the buttons cheap, the kink at the bottom weird, the full qwerty keyboard better than expected, the scroll-ball surprisingly usable , the lack of a standard audio jack bizarre, the wobble between the upper and lower halves of the phone terribly annoying and the camera crap.
The phone can’t be used until it is activated with Google. This took me a while as the Irish mobile network APNs are obviously not known to the phone and it won’t activate over wifi. A bit of Googling got me the settings I needed (see last post). Then a big sigh of relief as I realised it fully supports Google Apps for Your Domain so I could register with my loudervoice.com address.
Then you see the UI and the software and the touch screen in action. You forget about the crappy build quality and the squeaking back cover because that UI totally rocks. Many compare it to the iPhone but I actually think it looks better. The single iPhone feature which I prefer is the “Back” as a button on the screen rather than a real button. The main thing about the Android UI if you are coming (like me) from a Symbian Series 60 phone, is speed. It screams along. The browser is amazingly fast, GMail is scorching, GCal is great, GMaps is instant. Compare this to the “wait wait wait” of an N95-8GB and you wonder how you put up with it for so long.
You may have noticed a theme above. Yes you have to live in the Google world for Android to make sense for you. In my case it’s a no-brainer. Apart from Zoho CRM, Netvibes and some technical online tools like Unfuddle, I spend most of my day on a variety of Google Apps. Between GMail, Google Reader, GTalk and Google Docs, that accounts for many many hours.
The phone doesn’t come with a huge number of other applications. All the basic things you expect are there. The Google Marketplace is their equivalent to the iPhone App Store. There are a few big differences. The first is that Google doesn’t try to compete with its own developers by blocking “competing” apps. As long as the app doesn’t kill the phone, it’ll probably be approved on the Marketplace. The downside of this is plenty of silly pointless apps so you need to use user ratings/reviews to guide you.
The second difference with Android is that you are not limited to the Marketplace. Sergey Brin doesn’t decide for you what apps you are allowed to run on your phone. You can install whatever you like. This is even more open than Nokia who have dropped the ball completely in 2008 with the app-signing fiasco.
Whilst it is early days for the Marketplace and pay-for apps won’t arrive for another month or two, there are a ton of fantastic ones built already. These are the apps (alphabetically) I have installed:
Accuweather – Great weather app
AK Notepad – For taking simple notes
To-Do – Works with RememberTheMilk (Google please do a to-do!)
aLastFM Player – Scrobbler
Amazed – Simple accelerometer based game
AndFTP – Simple FTP client. Doesn’t do SFTP.
AndNav2! – Dog-ugly voice guided navigation using Google Maps
apkInstaller – Install apps from your SD card
BarCode Scanner – Simple scanner
Compare Everywhere – Awesome app. Scans barcodes, looks up the product, shows you where you can buy it locally and at what price. Obviously comes into its own in urban US areas but could work well here too eventually
ConnectBot – SSH client
Cooking Taster – Fantastic cookery application. Watch video, shop and then make yourself.
DoggCatcher – Good podcasting application. There should be a built-in one
fBook – Good mobile Facebook viewer
FBReader – eBook Reader
My Maps Editor – Edit custom Google Maps
PicSay – Annotate pictures with speech bubbles etc. Fun.
PixelPipe – Upload media to many different sites. Like Shozu.
PostBot – Wordpress blog editor
RemoteDroid – Control your PC with the phone. Good for presentations etc.
Skype – Rubbish. IM only. Voice via normal mobile network.
Twidroid – Weak Twitter client but best of a bad lot. C’mon people!
Video Player – Another app that should be built-in. Use Handbrake on PC to convert movies for it using similar settings to iPhone.
Wikitude – Amazing Augmented Reality application. View your surroundings via the camera on your G1 screen. It adds information about things in your field of vision that it finds online. Imagine pointing it at a restaurant and seeing the reviews appear beside it. Or pointing at a landmark and finding out its history.
ZXAndroid – ZX Spectrum emulator. Sadly development stopped.
As you can see, lots of stuff after only a couple of months on the market. The quality can vary a lot and I still think there should be much stronger multimedia apps built-in. It’s one area that Nokia are getting better and better at.
What are the big ones we are missing? VOIP is number one. There is no proper VOIP app yet and no rumblings that one is coming. So no proper Skype, no Truphone, no Fring. Is this due to the Java-based development platform not providing the necessary API access to the network stack?
There are no video streaming apps yet either. I’m a huge fan of Qik and would love to see it on Android.
Lots of people mention the lack of multi-touch on the screen. It appears that basic hardware support is there but no software support yet. Looks like a neat idea but apart from zooming crappy pics on the iPhone, how else is that feature used?
The SMS handling also needs improving. It gives up too easily and doesn’t re-queue the messages like a Nokia.
Having lived with an N95-8GB for a year, how does the G1 compare?
Pros:
Fabulous touch screen
Great keyboard
Blazingly fast
Fantastic browser
Lovely intuitive UI
All my Google stuff just works
Uses cell-tower ID to give you instant rough location lock whilst waiting for GPS
Cons:
Rubbish camera
Disasterous battery life
Poor multimedia built-in
Basic phone features a bit clunky
Google Maps needs internet access making it useless when abroad compared to Nokia Maps
No VOIP stack built-in
Idiotic HTC extUSB connector. Had to buy adapator for headphones.
I originally thought I’d drop the N95-8GB for the G1. Having used Palm IIIx, Tungsten-T and Nokia N770, I now consider a touch-screen mandatory on my main device. However, the superior multimedia and camera on the N95-8GB means I now carry both. The device to lose out is actually my laptop. Unless I know I need to edit Word documents or something else heavy duty, then I generally leave it behind. Of course, I did have to buy 2 spare batteries for the G1 to get me through the day!
Google doesn’t actually have to do a huge amount to get Android almost perfect. Add some more built-in apps particularly on the multimedia side, add VOIP, improve the “phoning” experience and enable Gears for all apps (particularly Maps). The better phones will come from the partners. The Lenovo oPhone looks amazing and addresses every hardware criticism I made above.
I said in my 2009 predictions that Android will be huge. I’m totally convinced of that. The profile of person moving to GMail has changed from early-adopters to people like my Dad. I’m pretty sure when people like him go for their next phone upgrade, the “with Google” and built-in GMail will be enough to move them from Nokia. I can’t be the only person who saw the N97 and thought “it looks amazing, pity it’s Symbian and therefore probably dog slow”.
Should you buy a G1? If you are based in the UK/USA and it is on a good deal, maybe. But most should wait for the G2 or the wide range of other manufacturers’ phones that will have Android in Q2-Q4. HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Lenovo and others will all have phones in the coming months.
In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for more stuff on Android right here.
I got an unlocked HTC G1 from the US recently for a project we are working on. This is the first Google Android phone and I’ll be doing a full review soon. The first thing you have to do is activate the phone with Google and I immediately ran into problems. It turns out you need to add the Irish mobile network Access Points to the phone so it knows how to connect to the internet.
For the purposed of activation I used an O2 broadband dongle SIM but I also use my normal Vodafone phone SIM since I moved to the 1GB ISP data package they now offer for the same €10 price as the old 512MB Live! WAP package.
You should definitely switch if you are on Live. I just discovered that GPS is so slow to lock on the N95-8GB with Live because the A-GPS port is blocked. It now locks in a minute or so compared to 10 minutes before.
Back to the HTC G1:
Follow the simple instructions in this forum post to get to the APN-adding screen.
For O2 Ireland the settings seem to be:
APN Name: O2 IE Internet
APN: internet
MCC: 272
MNC: 02
For Vodafone Ireland they are:
APN Name: Vodafone ISP
APN: hs.vodafone.ie
Username: vodafone
Password: vodafone
MCC: 272
MNC: 01
SMS works fine but I’ve had no joy with MMS. This is no big deal since I receive maybe 1 MMS a month and never send any.
I know a lot of webapp businesses are bought by Google and die through lack of attention. In our innocence, many of us thought Jaiku would be different. We thought there was a masterplan. We thought Jaiku would be the heart of the Android Address Book. The ultimate mobile social network with millions of users instantly.
We were completely and utterly wrong. Jaiku was bought to get some amazing minds, like Jyri. There is no masterplan. Google still doesn’t get Social Networks. Will it ever?
And anyone who thinks that OpenSourcing the Jaiku code will achieve anything is sadly living in lala-land. The software is irrelevant in a Social Network, the people are what matters.
But pleaseeeeeeee Twitter, give us channels, pleeeeeeeease. I’ve avoided Saturday sport on TV for decades but I can’t avoid it on Twitter.
The 2008 predictions weren’t the most accurate. Let’s see how we do for 2009.
The Android platform will be absolutely huge. With Motorola, Sony Ericsson and a raft of Tier 2 manufacturers signed up, it will become the mobile platform from the mid to high end. Ignore the HTC G1, that’s just a rough first attempt by one manufacturer.
Despite Android, iPhone will remain big. There is always that 10% of the market who like paying extra for “luxury” brands
SaaS ecommerce providers will go mainstream. The idea of only selling locally will become ridiculous. Everyone who can send something by mail-order will end up online. SaaS will be utterly compelling for small biz like this.
Facebook will continue to grow with people who neither know nor care what a Social Network is but want to keep in touch with people they know
Facebook Connect will be everywhere
Investors in pre-revenue Web2 companies will start losing patience and grab the management reins. In most cases this will fail
Nice-to-have webapps that cost anything to run will disappear at an ever increasing rate
The various Irish Government “throw money at VCs” schemes will continue to fail miserably
Nothing will change in the structure of Enterprise Ireland and how it funds companies
The Incubation Centres in Ireland will continue to be a source of a large number of successful start-ups
Twitter will be sold for a lot less than expected as they fail to execute on a business model
Smart BigCorps will hoover up tons of start-ups for petty cash and start building for the economic recovery
All the Twitter clones will disappear
All the major SocNets will add Twittter-like functionality
At least one global location aware mobile SocNet will get decent traction
Garmin and TomTom will be beaten up by GPS-enabled phones
Google will make a play to own the yellow pages space using Google Maps. Everyone, including your chimney-sweep, will end up there
Wifi will start becoming the norm in mid-range point-and-shoot cameras and everyone, including your mum, will start photo-sharing
The proliferation of local review sites will end and a few big players will own the space in Europe
More APIs will become pay-for as “Free” becomes a dirty word
Sony will file for the Japanese equivalent of Chapter 11, sell off everything that is non-core, exit all JVs and continue to struggle to define itself in the 21st Century
Sony won’t create the PS4, a low-cost perfectly open platform, built around the web, media from-anywhere to-anywhere and open standards
Sony won’t create the PSPhone
BlueRay will remain a perfect solution to a problem which doesn’t exist
The Nintendo DSi will become the de-facto MP3 player for kids aged 3-15
The DSi will be the catalyst to turn kids from consumers into generators
Someone will build a GSM module for the DSi
Someone will build a VOIP app for the entire Nintendo DS range
Someone will provide solid internet access on the entire Cork-Dublin train line
The Semantic web will remain something people write and talk about only
The fastest growing webapp of 2009 hasn’t been written yet
More Irish start-up founders will move to Silicon Valley
2009 will be the hardest year for Irish start-ups since 2002
My predictions for 2008 were very hit and miss (mainly miss), here’s a quick re-cap:
Cubic Telecom will have a £100m exit
Not yet. 2008 was an amazing year for Pat and the team with deals happening at breakneck pace.
European Founders, Howzat Media, TAG or Advent will do a deal with a web or mobile start-up here
Again not yet. I still think this will happen
More foreign VCs will invest in Irish web start-ups than Irish VCs
Well they both hover around zero. With current climate, we could be waiting a long time for this.
One of the current batch of Irish Web 2.0 start-ups will go global in a big way
PollDaddy!
EI’s €170m VC fund will continue to provide minimal benefits to Irish web start-ups
I got that one 1000% correct
Eircom’s small fund will result in two major web start-up successes
Sadly not yet but the signs are still good
Someone will launch a full Y Combinator/Seedcamp here
Sadly no. And with Government pissing away another €500m to foreign VCs this time, could they not take a €5m flutter with some smart entrepreneurs (no not VCs!) co-managing this?
Minister John McGuinness will be given responsibility for re-structuring all state bodies concerned with business
Again no. Will Government have the balls to shake everything up in 2009? €500m to foreign VCs says no.
EI will absorb Údarás na Gaeltachta
No.
EI will launch a self-contained web unit with its own budget, minimal red-tape, firewall access to Facebook and based in the Cork Gaeltacht or Kilkenny
No, big opportunity missed. The geo-centric model of EI needs to change to centres of expertise.
Damien Mulley will launch his own start-up
Mulley Communications
Six Apart will launch a free version of Typepad
No. Give it time tho.
Six Apart or Automattic will launch a full blown social network built on their blogging platforms
No. I’m very surprised how long this is taking.
Facebook Sign-to-Noise will continue to plummet as more and more people join and repeat usage plateaus (How many FB apps did I have to install this week just to read happy new year messages?)
SNR did plummet but usage didn’t. I started to find FB more useful in the latter part of 2008 as all the vampire crap subsided.
There will be a management bloodbath at a high level in the mobile operators as they see ARPU drop on traditional services and continue to sit idly-by, unable to make sense of the mobile internet
No. Bit by bit it looks like the mobile telcos are getting the hang of the internet.
Google’s Mobile strategy will continue to peek out here and there and continue scare the bejesus out of the incumbents
The strategy seems to be working well. The ones who are scared are not the telcos but Nokia and the non-Android handset makers. It looks like the mobile telcos are actually embracing Android.
The first Google Android phone will be launched by HTC and won’t be fantastic
I got this one right. I have a G1. The software is fantastic, the hardware mediocre. Review coming soon on LouderVoice.
Amazon will merge with eBay
No. They still should
Amazon will seriously impact Apple iTunes
I believe they are making a bigger and bigger dent here. Android will accelerate this.
Google will buy 3 (ok ok that’s wishlist too)
No, not even close.
RyanAir will buy 3
Ditto.
Ye know I cannot come up with one decent prediction about Microsoft. More of the same maybe?
Live Mesh impresses the socks off me.
The BBC will brand the OLPC XO as the BBC Micro Model D and launch a major combined TV and internet education program around it
A little too bluesky for the BBC. Netbooks seem to have taken all the buzz here.
Google will buy Bebo
Well they were bought but not by Google.
One of the video 2.0 companies will be massive (Qik, Seesmic, Kyte, Ustream etc)
Whilst not massive, both Qik and Ustream seem to be doing very well.
A dedicated generic Irish Social Network will be launched
Both IGOpeople and Locle went live so I got that right!
Bandon and Old Chapel will get 12 Mbs broadband (that’s on the fantasy list)
We got 3 Mbs. Better than a poke in the eye I guess
Old Chapel residents will get flat-rate unencumbered 3.5G on our phones (ditto)
Well I got 1GB for €8 from Voda last month so we’re heading in the right direction
2008 will provide tougher challenges but greater rewards to Irish entrepreneurs than 2007
At Cork OpenCoffee yesterday we conned convinced Joe Scanlon to organise the Cork Blogger & Start-Up Dinner. It’s on December 15th at 5pm in Market Lane on Oliver Plunkett Street and you just have to leave a comment over on the blog to attend.
On Tuesday, I was on TodayFM’s The Last Word radio show with Professor Frank Roche talking to Matt Cooper. The topic was centered on fund raising in the current economic climate. You can hear what we had to say in this audio clip. The interview starts about 4 minutes 30 seconds in.
Don’t forget that our 2008 BES offering is open until Dec 31st. The response to-date has been very positive.
Niall Harbison from iFoods is arranging a blogger and tech-start-up Christmas lunch/party in Dublin for December 17th. If you are interested in attending, leave a comment on the blog.
We were looking into doing similar in Cork but have realised that we are flat-out with travel and meetings in the run up to Christmas. So that leaves two options – someone else grab the baton and arrange it instead of us or have a post-Christmas party in the horrible dead time around mid January.
I’ve been raving about Nokia Maps since I got my N95-8GB last December. Having voice-guided turn-by-turn directions on your phone is a killer app. It totally saved us getting back from Carnac to Roscoff this summer after printed Google Maps made a total mess of the outbound journey.
However something has gone badly wrong in Ireland and I’m not sure how long the problem has been there. I’m running the latest V30 firmware on my N95-8GB which includes the latest Nokia Maps 2.0. The big problem is that it seems to have lost the ability to find addresses.
Unless you give an utterly vague address like Rathmines, Dublin, it will fail. Most attempts at putting in street names or numbers fails. But what is driving me insane is that is has the data. The latest attempt was last week where I wanted to see where 84 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin was located. My searches were as follows:
84 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin: No results
Lower Baggot Street, Dublin: No results
Baggot Street, Dublin: A few results including “Baggot Street Lower”
Baggot, Dublin: Even more results and the type of list I’d have liked with the first search.
Come on! Is Nokia Maps really doing exact text matching including word-order on street addresses? That’s ridiculous and utterly useless. I’m particularly amazed that when there are zero results, that it doen’t expand the search using individual words.
Is this problem unique to Ireland?
Please Nokia, you have an awesome app in Nokia Maps 2.0 but if I can’t put in a destination address, then my use of it will plummet. Remember, Android is coming and this is the instant result for “84 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, Ireland” on Google Maps on my N95-8GB:
One other issue worth mentioning is foreign travel. I didn’t realise that loading a foreign country map on to the phone in advance of travelling did not include voice navigation. We ended up in McDonald’s in Vannes on free Wifi buying the France voice guide to help us get home.
I’d also like to be able to pe-load detailed routes at home to avoid the usual rip-off roaming charges. Luckily by using Vodafone Live on the SFR network we somehow managed to avoid roaming when the map detail was loaded up.
A few simple fixes could ensure that Nokia Maps continues to kick the iPhone’s hamstrung app and can compete against the Android app.
Oh and I’m still waiting for that touch-screen version of the N95…….
