I spoke last week at the Irish Web Technologies Conference. My topic was “SMS, LBS and Social Networking” from the perspective of an enthusiastic punter and early adopter. I got a great response from the (albeit small) audience with particular interest shown in

• Buying music by SMS on downloadmusic.ie
• Live Video streaming from your phone on Qik
• Geo-tagging of photos and their map display on Flickr
• Vodafone offering a photo sharing site with 5MB in total available. “Photo” singular :-)

The full deck is available on Slideshare.

I met Russ Nelson, one of the other speakers, at the end of my talk and he showed me his amazing hand-built Bluetooth chording-keyboard device for his N800 internet tablet (yes I’m old enough to remember the MicroWriter). It was only the following day that I found out who Russ was and I am humbled. If you were playing around with network connectivity in the early 1990’s on PCs then you must have encountered Crynwr packet drivers. Russ was the brains behind that and is one of the tech heroes of the communications industry.

Overall, despite the small numbers, I thought it was a great conference. Next year it should probably be only two days and possibly more focussed on a specific area of the web. Support from Enterprise Ireland wouldn’t go amiss either.