you want to start something?

The Economist: Nokia tries to reinvent itself:

ASK Finns about their national character and chances are the word sisu will come up. It is an amalgam of steadfastness and diligence, but also courage, recklessness and fierce tenacity. “It takes sisu to stand at the door when the bear is on the other side,” a folk saying goes.

We have this feeling. We have it. We likely don’t have a word for it. And that’s a damn shame.

We need something to change. Northern Ireland will always have difficulties because we lack the environment we need to excel. Part of this is historical, part of it is just the way our culture is built. We have the talent, we have the brains, we just lack part of the execution. We will never have the same number of angels and funds as Silicon Valley. So we have to make better use of what we have. We will never get the massive DoD contracts that Israel secured so we’re going to need to find other ways to make our mark. We need to have the foresight to prepare for the future, the charisma to make friendships that will last and the heart to build it. Not for our own gain but for the gain of tomorrow. Well, starting from today, the first week of January 2010, we’re going to change that.

We’re going to start an incubator.
We’re going to start building a fund.
And we’re going to do it in Belfast.

So I’m looking for a word in Irish to express something. To express the passion about how I choose to spend my free time. There’s some candidates here – and the front-runner so far in bold.

Tags: Commentary, Do Something Now, Social, Startup by mj
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Workplace 2010 is an initiative within the Civil Service. I recently met with Mark Bennett, who works for the Department of Finance and Personnel (DFP) and is specifically charged with OpenDataNI along with a team of talented anarchists within the walls of the Civil Service. Mark took the time to show me around Clare House which is the home of the DFP (as well as other departments including the Strategic Investment Board).

I took a short video:

This shows some of the facilities, including the circular meeting rooms, a glimpse of some of the ’standing room’ for visitors as well as the copious amounts of hot-desking space and collaboration areas. This, a booth not dissimilar to that found in a restaurant, was my favourite:

A booth with ethernet, power and a monitor. Plenty of room to spread out or work with someone. Perfick!

Did I mention the entire place was flooded with WiFi? (BTOpenZone so not perfect but still, progress, and from somewhere you would not expect).

Tags: Bedouin, CoWorking, Commentary by mj
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A few years ago I approached Belfast City Council with the idea of my company putting a large chunk of cash into a Meraki WIFI mesh which would then provide free WiFi to Cathedral Quarter. Cathedral Quarter was and still is plagued by having historic cobbled streets which prevent the laying of new lines – but for my business it was an opportunity. If Belfast City Council would pay for two or three ADSL lines in some buildings, we would sink a heap of capital into the network hardware and handle all of the installations. What would we get out of it? A bit of advertising to the Creative Centre of Belfast. That’s all we wanted. The response we got back was that the area already had BTOpenZone, which, if you investigate is notable for it’s absence in the area.

Undeterred I believe that Belfast needs a free-to-access Municipal Wi-Fi network.

There are providers around but the cost and subscription burden of many providers (and lack of basic interoperability, never mind poor user interfaces for mobile travellers) makes the current WiFi subscription set up to be a very unsatisfactory experience for the average traveller.

Belfast allegedly attracted 800,000 people for the Tall Ships event recently.

“Around 800,000 people crowded to the city’s docks for the biggest event ever staged on the island of Ireland. This included 100,000 holiday-makers who visited the city especially for the event – and 250,000 people believed to have watched the magnificent Parade of Sail out of Belfast Lough.”

(Doing the maths: This means there were 200,000 per day. Which means 10,000 per hour or so during the four days the Tall Ships were here. I call bullshit but hey).

Either way – there were thousands of people present and over 1000 crew from those ships. Would a free WiFi service have been useful to them? Of course. Last time I travelled to the US, I had to pay nearly £1000 in data and voice roaming charges and my next trip will likely be as bad if not worse. It is essential to the Tourism economy in Northern Ireland that we have a tourist-friendly environment. Rather than the tourist not using voice or data services (or worse, spending hundreds of pounds on roaming data paid to their home carrier), we should be providing that service free of charge and permitting them to use Skype or other voice services to call home. We need to build Northern Ireland as a progressive traveller-friendly destination.

Recently in the news, San Francisco is pioneering with Solar-Powered WiFi bus stops.

By 2013, San Francisco is planning to construct 360 new Muni bus stops that’ll further the causes of both solar power and blanketed Wi-Fi at the same time.

and Toyota created a bit of a news story with their new Prius advertising campaign:

Toyota planted five 18-foot tall “solar flowers” in Boston’s Prudential Plaza and provided free Wi-Fi and electricity that was “partially powered” by the solar panels attached to the petals and stem.

Think of where the roaming charges go. This money is not being used to build the Northern Ireland economy, they’re not being used to upgrade our infrastructure, build our schools or assist local business. The money goes somewhere else.

So, lets unwire Belfast. Let’s break the stranglehold on communications held by the mobile carriers where they can charge £6 per megabyte downloaded or uploaded which, frankly, drags us back to the dialup dark ages.

Tags: Commentary, Do Something Now, Social, Wireless by mj
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@DesTraynor pointed out this link on lukew.com.

There’s a really entertaining graphic illustrating the point below.

In other words, convergence has gone far beyond just adding camera to phones. We now have phones potentially replacing digital instruments, guitar tuners, GPS SatNav devices, pocket video cameras, compasses, voice recorders, barcode readers, remotes, dictionaries and game consoles.

I’d even hesitate to say that my laptop often has the additional purpose of being a ‘charger’ for my iPhone. Convergence? As my Twitter client on iPhone is better than the one I use on desktop, has my laptop been converged onto my phone?

Tags: Commentary by mj
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This was generated using Rafael Machado Dohms’ QR Code Generator widget for Mac OS X’s Dashboard.

I then tested it using Christian Brunschen’s Barcodes app from the iPhone App Store – which worked perfectly.

I’m interested in QR codes simply from the point of view of using it to hide messages, whether this be for my own nefarious purposes or for communicating ideas in a Alternate Reality Game.

Over the next couple of days I’m going to see what sort of data I can get in there and still make it legible for the iPhone (which has possibly the worst camera in existence).

Then the game will begin.

Tags: Commentary by mj
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