Copacetic

Did London this weekend en famille including the Star Wars Exhibition, the London Eye, the Lion King Musical, and of course the Dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum.

The Star Wars Exhibition was held at County Hall, the erstwhile seat of local government in London. It was quite surreal for somebody who remembers Maggie Thatcher evicting Ken Livingstone from County Hall to sit in the still intact council chamber while a group of youngsters enjoyed Jedi Training.

The London Eye, keeps Maggies flame alive though with a good capitalist helping of “pay double” to skip the enormous queues. Still great views all the same.

For a man who hates musicals I have to say the Lion King Musical at the Lyceum was stunning and reminded me strongly of several of Macnas outings in recent years, with its stunning visuals and use of the whole theatre as a platform.

My kids love dinosaurs (do you have kids who don’t love dinosaurs? call 1-800-dinosaur-help) so the Natural History Museum is always a winner.

The short story, London is a great place to bring kids, good weather or bad. There were a thousand other things we had to pass on this time.

I mentioned the idea of movies on USB key sometime back. Well an Irish company called PortoMedia has gone and implemented it (actually they were already building it when I posted the blog entry). They have a kiosk that will hold 9000 movies (an average high street video store stocks about 800 titles) and they can load a movie into a USB key in about 2 minutes.

The IEDR continues to convince itself and nobody else of its value with its latest hint that it will “allow personal names”. The people who run IEDR continue to delude themselves that they are running a valuable service by tripling the price of .ie domain registration (compared to domains like .be and .dk)  along with the imposition of punitive controls over the allocation of elements of the namespace.

Do they not realise that nobody outside a tiny clique of geeks has any comprehension of the value they add. The idea that the man in the street (whether its O’Connell St or Wall St) is going to suddenly trust a domain because it has a .ie domain is utterly staggering in its naivety.

As for squatting, their efforts to prevent it have intrinsically limited the applicability of the .ie domain. Why would you bother registering when the expense and effort together make the overall transaction to high.

My advice, fire everybody at the IEDR, license the rights to godaddy.com for 12 months and keep and eye out just in case the Internet stops spinning on its access. If the Internet hasn’t collapsed in 12 months pat yourself on the back and go register <myname>.ie.

Walter is worried about my previous posts. I think Ireland is knee deep in Entrepreneurs, but we can’t do a straight import of ideas to make Ireland plc. work in the IT sector. We need to invent our own solutions and try and direct our problem solving capabilities to areas where our brethren in overseas (US, China, Vietnam, India) can’t compete. Numbers games won’t work here so smarter focus at much earlier in the pipeline must rule the day.

I can pitch you a 60 second idea, in fact I have a limitless universe of 60 second ideas. But nobody is investing in your idea after 60 seconds. And I have worse news, nobody is going to invest in you after your pitch at NextWeb, or Essential Web ‘07 or any of the other favourite rites of passage for startups.

What investors are going to invest in is simple,

• Market opportunity: A big and growing market, without strong incumbents, where you’re company has an unfair advantage.
• Great Team: Stupidly off the scale technical brilliance will get you somewhere here, but is that you? Are you as smart as Sergey and Larry. No I didn’t think so, So great team means great engineering guy, great marketing, great sales guy and/or great “did it before” guy. Or some combination of the above.
• Style, Fashion, Vogue: Investors are herd animals, advertising, social networks and media sites are big at the moment. If you’re pitching something else, prepare to queue.

One minute pitches are the entrepreneur equivalent of shitting in a bottle. Very dificult to achieve and one you’ve done it nobody is interested in the results.

Conor talks about bootstrapping startups in Ireland and the idea sounds good at first blush, but this is Ireland, not America or India. When YCombinator gets to pick the best of Stanford or Andy Bechtolsheim gives 100,000 dollars to two guys with an idea  the demographics have already done there work.

Populations of multi-millions trumps populations of 4 million everytime. I hate to burst people’s bubble, but we simply won’t generate as many entrepreneurs in Ireland as India or the USA, and even if we could we don’t have a touchstone tech  centre where you can go and expect to find them.

What can we do? Go back earlier in the supply chain, get this stuff into the schools, and then we have some hope.  Sorry to rain on the parade guys.

ReadWriteWeb has a nice writeup on Glubble, a Firefox plugin for Parental control. It has some nice features including,

 Glubble lets you set up child accounts in two flavors: for kids who can read, and kids who can’t. The main difference is that the pre-read accounts, as they are called, don’t display a URL and search bar, so kids instead navigate by clicking on icons and links to pre-defined sites.

…

Glubble comes preloaded with a set of approved websites. These include kid friendly sites like Fisher Price, Barbie.com, Animal Planet, Disney, and Nickelodeon. It also appears that every site in the Yahoo! Kids Directory is available for kids protected by Glubble (at least, every site I clicked on worked). Yahoo! Kids lists over 57,000 web sites in its directory, so there are a fair number to get started with.

So lock up your Internet Explorer and go Glubble.