Mícheál Ó Foghlú's Weblog

Nubiq is Nominated for the ITLG, Irish Times Innovation Award - Stanford on Thursday

The TSSG is delighted that Nubiq has been nominated for the ITLG, Irish Times Innovation Award Thursday 27th March 2007 at Stanford University, San Francisco, California.
On the evening, the ITLG will present honors to Intel Chairman Craig Barrett and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Micheál Martin TD for their contributions to the growth of Ireland’s technology sector. The ITLG will also present the Irish Times’ Innovation Award to a single Irish company that has achieved technical or business milestones and has demonstrated a capacity for international growth.

This year’s judging process has included the participation of the ITLG Board, Enterprise Ireland, Invest Northern Ireland, IDA Ireland and the Irish Times, each of which nominated highly innovative Irish companies seeking to grow their overseas presence. Unlike other awards, ITLG honorees are selected through an external nomination process.
The ITLG Board are:

• John Hartnett, Senior VP at Palm Inc
• Niall O’Connor, CIO of Apple Inc
• Rory McInerney, Vice President, Intel Corporation
• Barry O’Sullivan, Senior Vice President at Cisco Systems
• Tony Redmond, Chief Technology Officer at HP Services
• John Gilmore, COO, Sling Media Inc
• Conrad Burke, President & CEO, Innovalight Inc

The Irish Times and Irish America Magazine have also dedicated space in upcoming issues to profile ITLG finalists and ultimately the award winner. John Collins, one of Ireland’s most prominent technology journalists, has already interviewed Helene and a preview of the awards ceremony ran in the Irish Times on Monday.
Established in October 2007 and based in Palo Alto, California, the Irish Technology Leadership Group (ITLG) is a group of Irish and Irish American senior executives based in Silicon Valley, active in the global technology industry, committed to ensuring that Ireland remains a strategic area of investment and opportunity for US technology companies, and who are keen to support the growth and development of Irish-based technology companies.
TSSG Press Release

Megalithomania

This is a resource for anyone interested in Irish archeology megalithomania.com - Home. It covers megalithic tombs (like dolmens), but also high crosses and other sites of interest. GPS coordinates and pictures of locations are provided. Some sites may require permission from the private landowner to visit.

The night the IETF turned off IPv4

This is a good summary of the experiment at a recent IETF to disable IPv4 for one hour to test the issues with using an IPv6-only network infrastructure.The night the IETF turned off IPv4

After working on the new Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) for a decade and a half, the Internet Engineering Task Force decided it was time to turn off the old protocol (IPv4 or just IP). So this is what they did for an hour on the network used at the IETF meeting in Philadelphia this week. Network traffic plummeted from some 30Mbps to around 3Mbps as the meeting attendees who had IPv6 enabled could now only get at IPv6-reachable destinations on the Internet. Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for the Internet Society, who coordinated the IPv4 outage, considers the outage a success.

Views on Network Management

This article links to a well argued draft paper Why Telcos Don’t Get Networks. Abstract:

If there is a sector of the economy that should embrace network-based thinking, it is telecommunications. Surprisingly, the opposite is the case. The leading firms building telecommunications and Internet infrastructure increasingly emphasize consolidation, hierarchy, and exclusive control, rather than collaboration and decentralization. Regulators are dismantling legal frameworks that once promoted openness and interconnection, in favor of misguided efforts to incent proprietary investment. And many scholars, even those challenging the current drift of policy and business models, embrace a static worldview that is a relic of earlier eras. Network-based strategies are thus hard to find today in the so-called "network industries," even as such ideas flourish in adjacent digital information markets. This chapter explores the origins of this paradox, describes its manifestations in the legal and business environment, and traces a more hopeful future.

Metcalfe’s Law: more misunderstood than wrong?

An interesting discussion of Metcalfe’s Law Metcalfe's Law: more misunderstood than wrong?

The industry is at it again–trying to figure out what to make of Metcalfe’s Law. This time it’s IEEE Spectrum with a controversially titled “Metcalfe’s Law is Wrong”. The main thrust of the argument is that the value of a network grows O(nlogn) as opposed to O(n2). Unfortunately, the authors’ O(nlogn) suggeston is no more accurate or insightful than the original proposal. ... The typical statement of the law is “the value of a network increases proportionately with the square of the number of its users.” ... The unit of measurement along the X-axis is “compatibly communicating devices”, not users. ... Title of graph: "The Systemic Value of Compatibly Communicating Devices Grows as the Square of Their Number"

The Network Neutrality Debate

This is a great rant that pokes holes in just about everyone's arguments: LXer: Network Neutrality and an Internet with Vision.

In recently-aired plans by telephone companies, content providers who are willing to pay extra would get their content delivered at a higher bandwidth. While it's easy to wax indignant over telephone companies' presumptuousness in deciding what packets should travel at what times, it's harder to step back and take in the economic issues driving the proposed change. And there are technical questions about it as well.

Are Native Mobile Applications Dead?

There's been an interesting discussion on the internal TSSG technical discussion list in recent days spurred by this provocative post from Michael Mace, an ex Palm employee: Mobile Opportunity: Mobile applications, RIP. His basic thesis is that it is so painful trying to develop for so many hardware platforms (that currently make up the mobile handset market) that developers will inevitably be drawn towards mobile web applications instead, even though this certainly has its own problems. He claims the business model for mobile developers of native applications is so flawed that the web-based approach will inevitably win out. It is an attractive thesis and one that definitely appeals to me.

To see some of the other on-line contributions to this debate:

• 3 Million Platforms (Elia Freedman, CEO of Infinity Softworks - posted in October 2007 - the comments point out that Symbian is actually composed a number of incompatible platforms including various versions of S60 and UIQ)
• Mobile Applications are dead (Stefan - Feb 2008) with a nice tombstone graphic
• What's all that other software for? (Peter Harbeson Feb 2008) explains how much functionality there is already available via the web on mobile smartphones

Unlike many of my colleagues I have such to a UIQ3 phone, the Sony Ericsson P1i (others seem to have Nokia N95 or iPhones), and even with its limited web browsing capabilities (Opera 2.3.08) it is a really useful tool. The native applications I use are: voice calls and SMS, camera, PIM (contacts, notes, calendar - though I sync with Google Calendar), and a very useful SSH client. In an emergency I use email (but it's very slow to sync with my IMAP server that has hundreds of folders), being able to send email is definitely useful. I use the mini-qwerty-keyboard and the touch-sensitive screen with a stylus for hand writing recognition about equally. Ironically I really like the built-in FM radio and use this more frequently than the MP3 player - which I do use for podcasts and music using a 4Gig card for external storage. If the bowser were more robust I would definitely use it even more.