you want to start something?

Gareth at Hunky Doray writes about ‘ideas and implementation‘:

There was an article a while ago about the value of ideas. And when I say value, the article basically said that ideas are worthless. An idea has no value until it is realised. This is no Platonic ideal we’re living in. Only the concrete has value. There is no need for me to reiterate, but this is a blog, what else is it for? If you have an idea, get your head down and realise it. If you can’t do it, find someone who can. Just get the idea from you head and into a code editor window. Then get it out there. Don’t write about it. Don’t spend time thinking too much about it. Don’t ever think you’re the only person who has thought of it.

Gareth, just write your app and get it out there. If there’s already an app that does the same it proves two things.

1. There’s a market there.
2. You can do it better.

I say the first thing because if there’s no product in that space then there’s usually a reason. Granted, we’re in the early days of the App Store so there will be some first timers but if someone else has done the product it shows there’s a recognised need.

I say the latter because you have the advantage of seeing what’s wrong and what’s right with their implementation. Take the plunge.

Tags: Commentary, Do Something Now by mj
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Last night I was lucky enough to attend the NISP CONNECT 25K Awards.

The overall winner of the awards was Affyon Networks, a company which produces a chip which performs Deep Packet Inspection at wire speed in order to eliminate SPAM and Viruses at the router. End users don’t need to worry about this stuff – it’s aimed at Intel, Cisco and similar companies. I do wonder, however, how it works when email traffic is SSL encrypted. At the moment not everyone uses SSL for email but nearly all good ISPs support it (which says a lot if your ISP doesn’t support it).

Other notables included the solar-powered water purifiers from Clean Tech Global and the Disability Heroes, devised by Kyle Boyd – the latter of which was one of the “Digital Media” category entries and therefore has particular interest to me.

Infurious plans to help Kyle promote Disability Heroes by getting his content onto the iPhone using the Infurious Comic Reader application as well as getting him talking to similar organisations and help him secure funding for bringing his ideas to the next level. It’s my intention to bring this in to also cover not just physical disabilities.

Tags: DigitalCircle, Startup, infurious by mj
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The Register writes about todays announcement:

“It’s disappointing for BT Openzone customers that they will no longer be able to benefit from the convenience of our hotspots – we are disappointed that BT could not reach acceptable commercial terms, though we are certain everyone will understand that our service partners, O2, Orange, AT&T, iPass and many others are happy to do business with The Cloud.”

The thing is, selling WiFi like this was never going to be a good business model. For my money I’d rather back community focussed efforts like FON or support grassroots efforts which will pull apart the dependency on third parties selling WiFi for more than pennies an hour.

We can’t consider muni-Wifi in Northern Ireland because public-funded money should not be used to compete against private companies (except in cases where the privately owned service proposition is really bad) but that’s not to say there shouldn’t be alternatives out there.

I’ve got my hands full at the moment with Digital Circle, Infurious and the other things on my plate. I’ll have to return to UKWifi.net at a later date. There’s more shakeouts to happen as 3G dongles take a bite out of commercial WiFi, mark my words.

Tags: Wireless by mj
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So, guys, it’s out. You can buy EyeCandy #1, The Masked Marshall in “Mah Pony Must be Punished” straight from the App Store for iPhone and iPod touch.

We’ve also bagged one video review from Sakura as well as a detailed review from her Dad.

So what’s in the package. It’s an 8 page comic with a bit of humour and great style. It’s also eight pages of colouring-in book with an etch-a-sketch style erase. You can take screenshots of the Comic and print them out for later colouring with pens/crayons. You can peel away the colours and inks with a simple swipe-down so that anyone interested in learning to draw can quickly copy the pencils there and get a neat tutorial in how to draw. Plus there’s a “toy” in the Extras section which shows the pony with googly eyes and makes up to 4 different neighing sounds when shaken. You can see all of this demo’ed on the Infurious web site and you can take it from me, it involves kids like no other game. It’s educational and, best of all, fun!

All this for 59p (or $0.99). We’d really like to hear what people think, what they’d prefer and whether they’d like to see something specific on the store.

And there’s more. It’s going to be monthly at first and we’ve got some top notch artists and writers who are producing content for the platform already so keep your eyes peeled!

Tags: Commentary, Made me laugh, infurious by mj
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Through a flurry of tweets today, @dressjunkie has organised a Tweetsupper for 10 people for this Saturday night. We have the two of us (@cimota, @dressjunkie) and @theronster, @karenquinn, @goblin and his wife, @goodonpaper and a friend and @pauljholden and his wife.

This is especially relevant considering that an ex-colleague of mine described Twitter as a place for sad geeks to hide behind iApps. Yeah, he’s right. But so fucking what?

Looking forward to seeing everyone on Saturday night.

Tags: Social by mj
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