Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Job Title: Mobile Application Developer
Company: Wubud
Location: Soho Office, London
Position Type: Contact (with view to permanent role)
Pay Rate: Please state expected rate in cover letter
Skills: J2ME/Java
Start: ASAP

Read the job description on the Wubud blog.

In case you missed my recent live video interview with the Lucky Startup crew, here it is. Visitors to the site were able to ask me questions from the chat room. Very cool format.

Source

Alongside Wubud, there will also be presentations, with a ‘Location Based Services’ twist from…

Locle - Ronan Higgins & Pieter Oonk
http://locle.com
We kick off with two of Dublin’s own mobile & location based social networking experts. They’ll be discussing LBS in general, and their own implementation, ”as featured in the Sunday Times”.

JustRoutes - Dave Rooney
http://justroutes.com
Dave will discuss the company’s online & mobile travel planner for Dublin. Definitely born out of too many traffic jams.

RateMyArea - Mike Brennan
http://ratemyarea.com
Describing and demonstrating a cool new service that lets you review, share and discuss local businesses whilst mobile.

Wubud - Ewan Spence
http://wubud.com
Our grand finale from Paul Walsh’s still-stealth mobile social networking startup - not to mention the inimitable Mr Spence.

Starting at 7pm tonight (17th November) at The Odeon on Harcourt Street, Dublin.

I’m now sharing an office with Alex Tew (milliondollarhomepage.com) and Paul Birch (Bebo, Birthday Alarms and Cominded). Given that we’re all currently working on social network-related projects, you can only imagine the creative juices that flow around the office.

Now that I’m in the happening place they call Soho (Greek Street to be precise), I’ll be more accessible for inpromptu meetups and business meetings. Loving it here!

It’s always a blast to hook up with Loren Feldman. Love the guy. In case you didn’t notice, we had a late night before this interview was shot - hence the delayed reactions.

I’ll post a comprehensive post about my entire trip to San Francisco soon.

I’m delighted to announce that Paul Birch has just invested £150k (approx. $280k) in Wubud.

Paul is Co-founder, Bebo - sold to AOL for $850M. Founder, Cominded and Co-founder, Birthday Alarms; a social network with 50 million subscribers. So, he knows a thing or two about social networks.

Read more on the Wubud blog.

TechCrunch covered the story here.

Check it out. http://blog.wubud.com/

Hello - Paul Carr here, live in Terminal 5 of London’s trendy Heathrow Airport with a special guest post to thank Wubud for kindly agreeing to be drinks sponsor for Smack My Pitch Up.

What?

Smack My Pitch Up - the only tech pitch event happening in San Francisco this Tuesday. The idea is simple… you have 50 seconds to pitch your very worst tech business idea. The word ideas, best presented win exciting (crappy) prizes. A grand prize of $50 is on offer to the very worst best.

More details can be found at The Long Fail.

See you on Tuesday. And, remember, as long as Wubud are paying, drink early, drink often.

My recent trip to Hong Kong was a great success. It’s amazing how everyone asks me how it was, including people I’ve met for the first time over the past few days. All thanks to Twitter and Facebook status updates.

Here are some photos to sum up my trip as I don’t have time to write about it.

TechCrunch has published a good post about the difficulties of taking a social network from one country to another without thinking about their cultural differences. I agree with their position. Too many companies assume that their software (in this case, social networks) will work in other countries in the same way it does back home. However, they fail to realise the cultural and religious differences that borders impose.

Social networks have become integrative elements of modern American youth culture over the last years, shaping social patterns and changing the ways that people communicate. When taken abroad, these services have to deal with a large number of cross-cultural peculiarities by their very nature.

Societal and cultural gaps are particularly evident in the case of Japan. Market entry in this country with a “What works in the US must also work over there”-attitude is going awry for both Facebook and MySpace. It’s not a stereotype that communication tends to be nonverbal in Japan. The society generally puts more emphasis on the community rather than on the individual. Also, security plays a major role in many aspects of Japanese life.

I’d like to emphasise that it’s not just about translation. It’s about internationalistaion and localisation (I’m now hooked on Wikipedia thanks to Orit). Luckily, this is something I learned early on at AOL during the launch of numerous territories in the mid 90’s. AOL, for all it’s silly mistakes in recent years, did after all, encourage mass adoption of the Web across many countries including the US, UK, Germany, France and Australia. It took a while, but the US did manage to see the light, thanks to the strong teams/personalisties in the UK and Germany in particular.

This topic isn’t restricted to social networks by the way, it applies to any product or service. My advice is to partner with companies already in a similar space. If that isn’t possible, the recruitment of local staff to manage and controle the launch is imperative.

Read TechCrunch’s post for more insight.

This is one of the reasons Wubud is being developed in Hong Kong.