Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

I sent a tweet this morning to say I was going to do a ‘#followfriday’ for the very first time. A number of people asked me what that meant, so I’ve decided to write a short post to explain.

#followfriday is a way of recommending people you follow, to other users on Twitter. The idea is that those being recommended will gain new followers.

I feel so strongly about my recommendations that I’ve decided to write why I’m recommending them as potential people for you to follow.

People I recommend and why

@Sheetalmmehta (London)

Helping companies to go global, Innovation, Social entrepreneurship, Technology, Investment…

Sheetal is one of the most inspiring people I have ever met. Sheetal is the UK Dealmaker for the UK Trade & Investment. She sits on several advisory panels including Shelter, UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women), Digital Diaspora Network for Africa, and the LSE Alumni Mentoring Committee. Her volunteer work is extensive and she is currently writing a book on Social Venture Capital. One of her most notable accomplishments is her new foundation that enables developing communities to access cutting-edge technology based on a social enterprise model.

@Mikeyfletch (London)

Technology journalist, Events, Networking

Mike is an established business & lifestyle journalist. He’s launched three magazines on behalf of UK publishing house Haymarket Media Group & specialises in marketing, media & live events. He is Contributing Editor for Visit London and also owns a part-share in digital networking company Net.works. Mike is also one of the best connected, if not the best connected person in the entire UK events industry.

@PatPhelan (Cork)

Technology with a bias towards mobile, Connector, Innovation

Pat is the founder and President of Cubic Telecom, a well known disruptor in telephony circles and one of the leading voices of Voice 2.0. Pat has developed a number of unique products for the USA, UK and Irish markets including MAXroam, and is a board member of Global Roaming, a NASDAQ listed company (OTCBB:GRDB). Pat has a genuine passion for connecting people and has been responsible for connecting me with some truely amazing people.

@JackieDanicki (San Francisco)

Marketing (true expert in the use of new tools, techniques and trends such as social and Web 2.0), Connector, Writer

Jackie is an extremely direct person who always speaks her mind. She’s an incredibly insightful marketer which is difficult to come by. Almost every marketer and PR expert think they know how to make best use of Web 2.0 tools and techniques. Jackie does - which is why she’s the Director of Marketing at Qik; one of the most innovative mobile products companies in the world. Like Pat, Jackie has a genuine passion for connecting people and has been responsible for connecting me with some truely amazing people.

@Jobsworth (London)

Technology, Social Enterprise, Innovation, Writer, OpenSource,

JP has  spent most of his life working in the space where finance meets technology, for a number of very large firms. Since 2006 he has worked for BT, as part of BT Design, where he is Head of Innovation and Strategy. He has a passion for how work is changing: the paradigms created by globalisation, disintermediation and the web; the implications of virtualisation, service orientation and commoditisation.  JP is an inspiring speaker and writer, who I admire most for his passion for how technology can be put to good use for the benefit of society.

If you decide to follow any of these great people, or you do already, please feel free to retweet my message - they all deserve to be heard by as many people as possible.

You can also leave a comment with the people you recommend on Twitter.

I’m on a TechCrunch panel tomorrow entitled ‘Balancing Tech Culture: Getting more women involved in tech startups’. I’m likely to be a little controversial, but then again, I’ve never been known to sit back and clap other panelists or speakers on the back for the sake of it. You never know, some of the panelists might agree with me - I won’t make assumptions.

It’s my opinion, which I’ll articulate tomorrow, that the books of males vs females doesn’t need to be balanced in favour of more females. Why? Well, because there are plenty of females in tech and those that aren’t, don’t want to be. Ok, so there might be a small percent who would like to be in tech, but don’t make it. But can’t the same be said for any industry?

Are we trying to balance the books to encourage more males to become nurses?

It’s panel discussions like this one that does little to help - they’re likely to do more harm than good by devaluing the females already in tech.

To sidetrack for a minute; it seems I’m being called into the female-tech world - I’m heading to Greece next week to give a talk about entrepreneurial stuff to over 100 geek women and I’ve been invited to give a talk to a group of convent girls about entering into the interactive industry. So I guess I get to speak to the before and after. More about the Greece talk next week.

To summarise, I think females are as likely to go into tech as males are to enter into the nursing profession. What do you think?

Fire Eagle, a location enabler for social networks is now available to the public. (Don’t mistaken it, for a social network.)

As an end user, Fire Eagle is a site that stores information about your location. With your permission, it allows other services and devices to update that information or access it. It allows the use of your location to power friend-finders, games, local information services and stuff like that…

As a social network/friend-finder, Fire Eagle enables you to make use of, users’ location - assuming you, or another social network, can capture it on your/their site and store it on Fire Eagle’s. Confused? Just think OpenID and you’ll get it.

For Fire Eagle to be a success, Yahoo! must encourage application developers to adopt it and for developers to make doption for end users seamless. The latter I fear, will not be easy. Like OpenID, a social network must send end users to the Fire Eagle Web site in order to store their location preferences. This is likely to disorientate users as they get shipped off to another brand which has nothing to do with their task in hand. This is the reason OpenID is a great solution for early adopters thus far. Great technical solution. Crap user experience.

I could be wrong of course as I’ve never used it. I’ve only seen a demonstration from Yahoo! It’s the ’shipping off to another brand’s site’ that I dislike, not the technical implementation.

It looks like the team at new search engine, Cuil, is either very dumb, or very intelligent. I’m assuming the latter. I noticed a tweet by Michele about how search results contain the wrong images. So, I did a search for Paul Walsh, only to find a guy far more handsome than me. Do a search and check out the handsome devil on the bottom right corner of the search result.

I don’t think they could be dumb enough to get something so simple, so wrong. I reckon they’re doing this for the free PR that people like me and others will give. Don’t give in - don’t tell anyone.

I was unable to attend a dotMobi presentation entitled “Avoiding the Top 10 Mistakes in Mobile Web Marketing” at the Hospital recently. So, I was delighted to receive an email from the Director of PR and Communications to acknowledge my absence with the presentation slides attached. Great communications and follow-up to an event.

I very much enjoyed reading the presentation and it referenced some good statistics along with useful tips.

Useful statistics referenced in the presentation

Among smartphone users in the US, mobile browsing has increased 89% year over year, and page views have increased 127%.

The world market for mobile marketing and advertising is expected to grow to an expected $24 billion by 2013 (vs. $2B billion in 2007) Among 5,398 North American consumers queried by Forrester in 4Q07, 48% said they wish they could look up things online when they’re on the go, but 58% said the mobile Web fails to meeting their needs - moreover, 60% said their mobile device screens are too small for activities outside of making calls and sending text messages.

I was surprised by their hard-sell approach on slide 17, entitled “MISTAKE 4: using a .com name for a .mobi experience”.

Without going into the technicalities of Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of ‘One Web’, as I could almost write a book on my interpretation and I don’t want to subject you to such an epic, their statement is completely wrong, technically speaking.

Is it wrong to use a .com (or any other) domain for a site which works on a desktop computer and mobile phone, or any other device? No, of course it isn’t. Nor is it wrong to use a .com for a site which has been created specifically for mobile phones. In fact, it is desirable in my opinion, to only use one domain as to not confuse users with multiple domains for multiple devices.

It is desirable for your Web site to automatically detect the device being used to access the site and then render the content according to the capabilities of that device. So, when a visitor uses a desktop computer they get a desktop experience and when they use an N95 they get a site which is user friendly on that particular phone. If you’re really good, your site will take into consideration, the additional capabilities that a phone has over a computer, such as GPS, SMS, MMS, voice…

Technically speaking, it is not necessary to differentiate using different domains. dotMobi is a marketing vehicle for its investors (namely Nokia, Samsung, Vodafone and others) and they’re in the business of selling domains - that’s why they say it’s wrong to use .com. But in my opinion, that’s unprofessional. You shouldn’t slag off the competition. Moreover, dotMobi is confusing people. dotMobi is not a standards body. It is a non-profit organisation in the business of selling domains.

According to it’s very first press release (which I can no longer find), it was setup to encourage developers to build mobile-friendly Web sites for the provision of encouraging consumers to buy more high-end devices to access said mobile Web - thereby also increasing the amount of data consumed - which obviously generates more revenue. In other words, set up a non-profit organisation under the guise of helping industry when in fact, it’s setup to generate more revenue for their profit making companies. It’s a bit like Google Android, which comes with Google applications pre-installed each time. Oh, a bit like Microsoft’s OS pre-installed on computers, but without the ‘non-profit, community-loving cloak’.

Sorry, back to dotMobi - that was the plan before they probably realised how flawed it was with companies such as MAXroam demonstrating to operators, what they should have done years ago; offer customers value for money instead of ripping them off with ridiculously high roaming charges. The iPhone is almost forcing operators to provide unlimited data tariffs and handset vendors are being encouraged to stop providing 3 features per model - just put it all in one device! Google Android should encourage operators and vendors to actually collaborate like real stake holders in the same industry. Crap. I’ve gone off-topic again.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think it was wrong to setup dotMobi, we all need to ensure our shareholders are happy. What’s wrong, is the confusion that has been caused and the fact that dotMobi does little to help the situation.

It’s not wrong to use a .mobi domain for sites which are specifically created for mobile phones either, irrespective of how much I dislike the idea. Although some would argue it is.

Some people may wish to use a .mobi domain for mobile friendly Web sites. That’s their choice. It is no more, or less appropriate than say, .org for non-profit associations. Take the BIMA Web site for example - it makes sense to use http://bima.org but unfortunately it has been taken by another organisation. That’s why it uses http://bima.co.uk. Is that wrong? Of course not. However, it is wrong according to the dotMobi presentation. That’s what is wrong in my opinion - it’s sending out the wrong message to the industry behind closed doors, as I’m almost certain dotMobi wouldn’t dare to make such a bold statement on a W3C Mobile Web Initiative mailing list.

Going off-topic slightly, something I never do, the presentation stated that dotMobi generates $10m annually. I suggest they revise that statement because being given a $10M annual budget (as of Year 1) for marketing, is not the same as generating revenue.

My advice to Web site owners and the agencies building their sites: stick with .com or whatever domain you already have. Then, when it comes to adjusting the site to work better on mobile phones, follow best practice design guidelines.

Check out the W3C Mobile Web Initiative Best Practices to find best practice design guidelines for mobile Web development. This is particularly useful if you haven’t designed for small screens before. It’s not particularly useful if you’re a WAP developer, as you’re more inclined to stick to WML based sites.

Disclaimer: Segala is one of the original Founding Sponsors of the MWI.

GeoHot, the creator of first iPhone hack has recently launched a Web site. It’s unknown whether he’ll release a hack for the new 2.0 firmware though. The iPhone-dev team responded to the launch of the site with venom. Not sure why as it’s a compliment that others want to copy their work - especially because they’re all hackers. It doesn’t make sense for a hacker to complain about another hacker hacking their work. Does it?

Here’s the dev teams response

Rush, rush, rush….
Over the last year we’ve discovered some interesting things about the software used in the iPhone. These “hacks” , “exploits” and “techniques”, or whatever you want to call them, are valuable - not only from a financial perspective (so scummy people can sell unlocking software) but also from a strategic point of view. Think of it like a game of poker, showing your hand too early would certainly make you lose “the game”.

The majority of iPhone users are not technical - they want an easy, one-stop, simple application that will allow them to quickly and painlessly unlock their phone. If we were to release a crummy command-line based tool that does the immediate job that everyone is screaming for, we’d only end up in the following situation:

1) The technique is released to the world and people use this technique to quickly create GUI apps that they charge cash-money for, or re-release something hacky and horrible that bricks lots of devices, or for example disables the Wi-Fi that then causes more stress that ultimately comes back to us

2) The technique is exposed to the vendor, allowing them to locate and repair the security hole. Sometimes these security holes span product versions, for example: between the first generation and second generation iPhone. In such a case releasing the knowledge in the middle of the product development cycle is pointless and risks the “usefulness” of the technique - especially if there are existing hacks/techniques that work just fine.

The iPhone DevTeam is comprised of a group of people who work together over IRC from various parts of the world. This distributed method of working happens 24 hours a day with people performing tasks in the time that best suits their time-zones. It is a completely self-managing, self-regulating and member-funded organization. Most of us have never met face-to-face and we rarely know real names - in fact, we would more than likely not recognize each other if we walk past one another on the street. Despite this we follow a strict “hacker code”: ground rules by which we all abide.

Perhaps the foremost of these rules is management of knowledge. We keep certain information private, restricted to members of the team only (to help with points 1 and 2 above), and members are entrusted to make sure this secrecy is consistently enforced. This makes the team. Only when there is a majority vote from the team do we make any announcement or release.

So now we come onto Geohot, the self appointed media frontman for last year’s iPhone hacks. Geohot actually worked with us a month or so before the media-circus that he led. Geohot is certainly a bright guy, but he couldn’t abide by rules that I described in the last paragraph and because of this he was asked to leave the team. Of course like any hacker Geohot continued on for his goal.

Using some of our techniques and tools (and some of his) and using his own brain power (and that of an unnamed Russian) he was able to release his hardware hack and demonstrate the first unlocked iPhone to the world, he has also demonstrated other things during the last year and some of those releases have helped us with our work.

We thought that Geohot would have matured somewhat in the last year, but this clearly isn’t the case, as sadly one of the team members has leaked a copy of our exploit to Geohot and he is now using this to try and provoke us into making an early release

So finally, just in case some of you were wondering, we’re not sitting on this tool because we’re full of ourselves or stuck up our own asses. We’re not sitting on it cause we like to see you writhe. We are testing it to make sure it’s as glitch-free as we can make it. We want to avoid releasing something that turns expensive phones into pretty looking paperweights. Don’t you agree it’s worth the wait?

If others want to feel like they’re in control by posting all-knowing entries on their blogs, we can’t stop that, but the new PwnageTool will be released when it’s ready, and not a moment later.

Zibri, the maker of ZiPhone decided to add to these curious happenings:

Talks, lies, haters, fans.
I’m sick of this!
This is not a war and not even a game.
I originally developed ZiPhone for my own use.
Then people asked me to release it and I did.
I bought my first iPhone in September 2007.
I released ZiPhone in February 2008.
I know you people are crazy about the iPhone
but believe me, I am not.
I think the 3g iPhone is not worth even buying
for people who already have the
first generation iPhone.
GPS ? I have a TomTom Go device.
3G data ? I have a 7.2 Mb/s card
in my laptop.
Apps ?
I have my iPhone.
Everything else ?
I have my life !

IF and WHEN there will be a new
ZiPhone you will be informed.
Stop asking, hating, begging.
By the way,
Maybe you don’t know the difference,
But ZiPhone was a real hack.
Software upgrades or custom firmwares
are a totally different thing.
A nice proof of concept, a nice work, but
that’s not hacking..
But if that will ever be released
and that suits your needs,
use it. You’ll be (hopefully) happy.

Another note:
I’m being reported of many people
faking me on many blogs and sites.
Check the profile (if there’s one).
And don’t take as gold any word from me that
you don’t read here !

To any hacker out there:
FACTS speaks louder than words.

Peace out,
Zibri

Read the original post here.

Original source: Florian Seroussi via Twitter.

So, no expected time of arrival for the hack. Are you having problems with the 2.0 firmware? I’m going to do a vblog review of the new 3G iPhone including the 2.0 software so I’ll save my thoughts for that.

You’ve probably read this already but here goes anyway…

This story is a fine example of why I subscribe to the TechCrunch UK blog by email. Fantastic reporting by ‘Butcher Boy’ Mike (feel free to call him that from now on).

Looks like Google is mapping the streets of the UK prior to getting the green light from the Information Commissioner. As if Google would do such a thing <g>

According to TechCrunch

Privacy International, a UK rights group, which believes the technology breaks data protection laws, is stirring up a lot of press on the matter, as they are concerned that Google needs a person’s consent if they end up on StreetView. Google says it is trialling a face blurring technology.

This type of technology is great for advertising and possibly mobile social networks. However, it’s potentially bad news for privacy advocates. Make sure you’re not caught doing something you shouldn’t be doing.

Read the full article on TechCrunch.

This post was inspired by a debate taking place on the Mobile Monday London forum. It has never been this easy to predict mobile. It has become increasingly easy since the first release of MMS (picture messaging) in 2002, which almost revolutised how users consumed content on mobile phones.

We have some historical data to go from when trying to predict the next few years of Mobile - in terms of connection speeds to help mass adoption of Mobile Web anyway.

Trying to predict mobile in 2015 is a little too far for my liking. I’d have to lay on a bed and dream about something so far stretched that most would probably laugh at. Some of my greatest failures include not having the balls to execute ideas because of colleagues laughing at them - such as charging hotels and restaurants for online advertising. Long story which I won’t bore you with. Instead, I’ll bore you with another story about connection speeds. For the sake of the record, I’m not bragging - it’s easy to say you had ideas, it’s another to execute them.

Some historical data which may help.

During the early days of the Web I remember writing modem strings to help get the best out of 1200bps modems. Before that I was using them to download interest rates from a bank in Paris to a bank in Dublin - all I knew was that some machine made noise and it all just happened.

We were delighted to eventually see the delivery of 33.6k modems after having 28.8k for so long. We were told by BT that it was *technically impossible* to get anything faster down a phone line. Then, one day, BT came back and said “hey, we’ve managed to squeeze 56k by reducing the line noise”.

1200bps to 56k happened between 1995 (roughly) and 1997. That’s just 2 years.

In 2002 the rollout of Broadband helped to achieve a major spike in users on the Web. I wasn’t involved in that, but some of my friends were, and still are.

So, it took about 5 years to make a huge jump in speed to help accelerate mass adoption of the Web. If we consider that the growth in mobile technology (and possibly technology in general) today is just twice that of Internet technology during the mid to late 90’s, we should see a major spike in mass adoption for mobile web in about 2 to 3 years. This argument is boosted in my opinion, by our generation’s knowledge and experience and the newer generation’s expectations.

Explaining the benefits/possibilities of the Web during the early days was much more difficult than it is to explain the benefits/possibilities of accessing the Web via a mobile today.

The future is bright, the future is not Orange or any other Operator. If this isn’t realised soon, Operators will end up like AOL - i.e. going out of business holding onto old business models

There’s a rumour going around Apple releasing the new iPhone with a built-in SIM. If this were true, it would prohibit customers from swapping with other SIMs, like MAXroam for example - to avail of cheap roaming charges. For me, it would mean the end of my live video streaming with Qik on the Nokia N95. I don’t just swap SIMs, I also swap phones to avail of different features. So, the impact would have been quite significant for a lot of people. So severe, it would have stopped me from opting for the free upgrade in July when it hits the UK market.

The good news is that the rumour is not true. I’ve taken the image, which clearly shows the SIM tray, from the official Apple Web site.

In short, I love Apple products. I hate Apple corporate attitude.

Why I love Apple products

mobileme, Apple’s rebrand of .mac is truly remarkable. It appitmises epitomizes everything about its products. They just work. They’re extremely easy to use and interoperability between each product is seamless. (mobileme is a simple way to keep your office/home computers and iPhone synchronized all of the time.)

Check out the video demo of mobileme not only for insight to the service, but for the best explanation of ‘the cloud’ I have ever seen.

Why I hate Apple corporate attitude

Steve Clayton summed it up beautifully on Twitter by saying

if I go work for Apple this would be our last convesation. only one steve allowed to talk at Apple and it’s a 1 way convo! Check out his original message on Twitter.

This is extremely uncharacteristic of Steve. Every presentation I’ve seen him deliver includes plenty of Apple and Google slides. In fact, he uses Apple iTunes as a way of explaining in plain English, what the long tail means. Have you ever witnessed employees at either Apple or Google say anything positive about Microsoft, let alone use its products in a presentation to demonstrate a point.