Copacetic

A kick right in the PC. Dell is going to preinstall the Google Desktop, toolbar and friends on all their PCs.

Ballmer must be having a shit fit!

Myhome.ie an excellent example of a defensible business that doesn’t need patents. Its got the estate agents on the hook and the punters are following. Very difficult to compete against and even more difficult to dislodge. However if I was to start a myhome.ie clone tomorrow here is what I’d add in order to compete.

1. Add free text search based on Street name, area, county. Use smart search capabilities to guess the appropriate search
2. Allow users to personalise search by geography so that searches are limited to on or more geographic locations (e.g. clontarf, Dublin) and a specific price zone (€800K to €1.2m) or house type (terraced) or other feature (south facing, back garden, off street parking)
3. Place search screen next to AJAX map of search area and blip properties on and off the map as search criteria are entered
4. Mousing over a house location on the map pops a DHTML window with a thumbnail of the property and the price. You can click from here to the brochure
5. Attach a PDF copy of the brochure to the web description
6. Provide an RSS feed for houses meeting my search criteria and support the use of multiple searches for this feed
7. Post selling prices of houses on the web when available
8. Allow searching of history of house sales (e.g. when was this house sold before and for what price)
9. Shrink the top banner and in general make the adverts more inobtrusive
10. Produce price graph and stats for areas and house types

The Irish Computer Society: Open to all but I would expect the onerous joining requirements (and complicated math:-)) to limit membership somewhat. It appears to lean towards academics given its emphasis on third level qualifications. You can join as an individual (well affiliate member) it will cost you €130 and for that you get subscriptions to a few magazines (ComputerScope is the only one I recognised) and a free ICS email account. They also offer a reasonable number of discounts which can add up. You get add some initials after your name (AMICS, MICS, FICS).

The Irish Internet Association: This is a business assocation for Internet businesses based in Ireland. Its focused on companies. Entry level costs are €220 and for this you get to participate in the activities of the IIA.  Other benefits are loosely described on about us page but no details are supplied. You get a listing in their journal and on their members page but given this is a search page this is a dubious benefit (if I know the company name, why wouldn’t I just visit the company website directly?).

The Irish Software Association: The ISA is an employers association and is actually heavily affiliated with IBEC. They don’t post costs for joining on their website (how coy!) but the price for startups is €400. Prices do rise on the basis of the number of employees in the company. Key benefits are access to employer HR data, surveys and the like.
So if you are an individual in the IT world and would like to join a society the ICS is probably your best bet. If you sell stuff over the Internet or are an ISP then the IIA is what I would go for. If you employ people in the IT sector then the ISA is the one for you.

Tom Raftery reports this amazing Decision by Amazon to stop shipping a whole range of products to Ireland.

This is on top of not providing an English speaking website priced in Euros.

Techwire reports on this beergut in reverse. All you need now is a backpack full of ice.

Netgear (via eHomeUpgrade) have today announced pre-order availability of a WIFI mobile. Retailing at $250 in the US and offering free mobile connectivity to the skype community when in WIFI range.

Once WIMAX takes off we can  expect similar devices to encompass this emerging technology (and as we know the devices will only get cheaper). Is it any wonder the mobile incumbents are scrambling to get into the broadband space.

I just got Outlook successfully installed from my  Microsoft Actionpack and Intellisync gets flogged to Nokia leaving me high and dry.

My original plan was to sync outlook with my Yahoo address book and calendar, giving me the best of both worlds. Guess we’ll have to add Address book and calendar  management to the Secantus user story list.

Wired reports on a gizmo that makes kerrygold spreadable.

Mark Shead writes a great blog about enhancing your digital life. He got me hooked with his article on MacTheRipper a DVD ripper program for the Mac.

He also has some good tips for configuring multi-room Tivo from a single Tivo system. God forbid we should ever get Tivo in our little Island backwater.

How in the name of all that is sane can a modern business get away with a piece of Web Crime like the truely awful Rabobank registration screen?

So there is the usual sloppiness you regularily come across on “my first web form websites”, things like having to scroll the page to fill in all content, poorly identified mandatory fields, failure to highlight all mandatory fields above the fold etc. However worse is to come.

As this is a joint account, there are duplicates of all fields. So no surprises when I clicked next and got a utterly useless message Office Number must be a number. There were two office numbers, and they both looked like they had numbers in them to me. Much visual scrutiny finally identified a space inside the first business number, an artefact of cutting and pasting the number from a application that understands that phone numbers are not actual a member of any of the normal integer groups defined in mathematical theory.

So finally got to a summary screen and realised I’d forget to change my partner’s name to “Ms”. No problem thats what the back button’s for. But no, arrrggh, the back button flips me past the registrations screen to the start of the whole process and all my data is lost.

This is the “The straight talking online bank”.

I don’t think so mate….