Just tried the latest version of the Sony Ericsson client software. It failed to install but did manage to reduce my path definintions to two entries, FireFox and some  Teleca rubbish (presumably the duffers they out sourced the client work to).

Great phones, shite software.

I suggest anybody with a Sony Ericsson take a look at Floats Mobile Agent as a alternative.

Padraig throws off his choker tag to win a fantastic British Open Championship, Christ did he make us sweat though. I thought he’d had his “Van Der Velde” moment when he went into the water twice on the 18th.

First European winner of a major in eight years and its an Irish man, It doens’t get better than that!

1. I’m performing an illegal manoeuvre and the Garda might notice
2. I’m only changing lanes
3. I’ve passed my test
4. I’m on my second provisional license
5. I’ve stolen this car
6. I’m driving a white van/taxi/mercedes/BMW
7. It should be obvious from my road position what I’m planning to do
8. I’m running this red light (see reason 1)
9. Using my indicators runs down the battery
10. I used my indicators yesterday

Nice link from Darren. We’re seeing more and more of these futurescape videos on YouTube (btw, how cool is your site when people don’t bother to hyperlink it anymore). They are all good.

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.