Weekly Digest
Weekly Digest Issue No. 507
18-03-2010
by Emmet Cole
When Irish apps are smiling | iPad off to a solid start
Do you know the way to San Jose?
The 2010 ITLG/Irish Times Innovation Award ceremony was held at Stanford University, in the US this week. Cable solutions provider RedMere scooped the Innovation Award at the ceremony, which was hosted by Irish Technology Leadership Group (ITLG) Chairman Craig Barrett (the former CEO and Chairman of Intel Corporation) and attended by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. RedMere's chip technology removes up to 80 percent of the copper and PVC content used in hi-definition video/data cables by placing a self-powered chip in cables – -- enabling for ultra-slim cable designs.
Presented annually by the ITLG -- a group of Irish and Irish-American Silicon Valley technology leaders committed to helping Irish start-up companies -- the ITLG Innovation award was launched in 2007 to encourage innovation amongst Irish technology companies. In all, seven firms were shortlisted for the award: RedMere, Dial2Do, and Kainos, B-Secur, SiSaf and the Digital Hub-based pair Sentry Wireless and DecaWave.
Meanwhile, Taoiseach Brain Cowen was doing his bit for Irish IT Stateside this week, officially launching the Irish Innovation Center (IIC) late Sunday night (Irish time) in San Jose, California and leading an Enterprise Ireland-supported trade and investment mission to the US. The IIC is designed to assist Irish technology starts-ups in the US. The trade mission saw Irish social media start-up Weedle secure USD4 million in funding. Weedle has developed an online platform designed to facilitate employers-employee match-ups.
In a busy week, on Tuesday, Cowen travelled to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of the Ireland America Economic Advisory Board and chaired the first US meeting of the Global Irish Network, which was formed as a follow-up to the Global Irish Forum held in Farmleigh last year.
When Irish apps are smiling
The Irish public will get a chance to vote online for their favourite mobile phone application concepts, thanks to a competition launched by Nokia this week. The competition, which is being run through Nokia's Facebook page, will run for eight weeks from 13 March to 7 May. Nokia is seeking three categories of mobile phone application ideas -- sports, lifestyle (covering fashion, music, and culture) and a general app category, (covering everything else). Each week, the app with the most public votes in each category will win a Nokia 5230 mobile phone and a place in the final of the competition. The winning applications will be developed by mobile app developers Mobanode and made available on Nokia's Ovi Store.
Meanwhile, children with autism might one day find it easier to communicate thanks to 'Grace' an iPhone app developed by prolific software developer Steve Troughton-Smith and Lisa Domican, a Wicklow-based mother of two children with autism. Grace, which has already been trialled successfully in Saplings School in Rathfarnham, Dublin, is designed to be used in a similar way to the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS). PECS helps children with autism increase their vocabulary by allowing them to build sentences using a book that consists of laminated pictures attached to a board by Velcro. As new words are learnt, they are added to the book. Grace enables parents and teachers to benefit from PECS, but in the more portable form offered by the iPhone. O2 supplied iPhones for the creation and testing of the app and funded the development of the app's final artwork. Grace is available in the official iPhone App Store, retailing at EUR29.99 for up to five users.
Finally, Wicklow-based energy services company Crowley Carbon, is set to launch an iPhone app designed to help its clients reduce their energy consumption. The "Danu" app (named after the Celtic Goddess of wisdom), provides energy saving insights drawn from 150 global expert sources. The app -- which will be provided free to Crowley Carbon customers -- is expected be launched next week at the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland's Energy Show in the RDS, Dublin.
iPad off to a solid start
On 12 March some 120,000 eager consumers signed up to pre-order their Apple iPad, according to estimates. The majority of the sales were of the Wi-Fi-only version, according to reports which revealed that the 3G versions of the device are so far proving less popular with consumers. Following this positive start, analysts are now predicting that Apple will sell five 5 million iPads in the first year.
The company initially announced a "late March" date for the iPad's US release, but have pushed that back to 3 April. The device will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK by late April, Apple says, with other countries likely to get the device later in the year.
Meanwhile, Apple has released details of its a USD99 battery replacement scheme for the iPad. If the battery needs replacing, Apple will send you a refurbished iPad, not a new battery. And not your original iPad either, which means that you will have to back all your data before sending it to Apple.
We can expect to see a lot of refurbished iPads doing the rounds then, since the device's 10-inch LCD display requires a battery that's more than five times the capacity and size of the iPhone's 3GS battery. Apple runs a similar whole-device replacement scheme for its iPhone and iPod Touch devices.
Trouble on the way for online news?
A significant 71 percent of US internet users (53 percent of all American adults), get their news online, but only 19 percent are prepared to pay for online news content, according to a major new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. The number of American adults getting their news online has held relatively steady in recent years. Worryingly for media organisations hoping to sell advertising alongside their content in order to boost revenue, 8 out of 10 of those surveyed revealed that they ignore online advertisements.
Interestingly, only 35 percent of those surveyed have a favourite site, but 65 percent of that number are loyal, visiting that site at least once a day. However, if their favourite site started charging for content, that loyalty would quickly drop away, with 82 percent saying that they would find somewhere else to get their news. Given the hypothetical choice between having to pay for a subscription or a pay-as-you-go micro-payment systems, 54 percent said they would choose a subscription model, 24 percent said they would opt for micro-payments and the rest said they would reject both models.
Long-term, the report concludes, media companies are going to have to seek out new ways to monetise their content if they want to profit from their online content. In the short-term at least, consumers remain highly resistant to paid-for content models.
The survey was conducted in the US between December 28, 2009 and January 19, 2010, with a sample of 2,259 adults aged 18 and older.
SXSW conference is eventful
Twitter CEO Evan Williams took the opportunity presented by the annual SXSW (South by Southwest) Interactive conference in Austin, Texas to launch a new feature called @anywhere. The feature allows users to look for relevant tweets, follow people and post their own status updates site from certain third-party websites. Twitter's initial partners on the service include Amazon.com, Advertising Age, Bing, IAC/InterActiveCorp's Citysearch, eBay, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, Yahoo and YouTube. In its blog, Twitter said the service will be available "soon".
Also at the conference, Daniel Ek, the Swedish founder of popular online music service Spotify, announced plans to launch the service in the US later this year. Though initial reports suggested the Spotify model for the US would differ from that in Europe, Ek has since been quoted as saying that the "free element" would be "pretty much" the same as in Europe. Spotify offers a range of different account types, including free accounts supported with advertising. Users can also purchase an ad-free premium subscription. Premium subscribers are able to access the service from mobile accounts.
Location-services social networking site Foursquare experienced a growth of 100,000 users in 10 days during the SXSW Interactive event. The company is estimated to have some 600,000 users. Foursquare players compete to become the "mayor" of real locations, like hotels and restaurants, by using Foursquare to "check in" at a location more often than anyone else.
But it was Foursquare's arch-rival Gowalla that won the award in the festival's Best Mobile App category. The location-sharing service, which also has a strong game-play element to it, allows you to share your location with your friends via other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 