I am planning to rent a car to head down to BarcampIreland. Budget looked like a good bet and their prices were competitive. So I booked my car but noticed as a I was filling in the payment form that they levied a €25 euro airport pickup fee. This seemed a bit steep as the car itself only cost €40. No bother, sure I’ll move the pickup to Drumocondra. No joy there however, there is similar €25 euro fee for pickup in a “City Centre location” as the woman said on the phone. So basically no matter where you get your car in Dublin you’ll suffer a €25 surcharge that is buried in the small print.

The final screw job is a €30 euro cancellation fee if you fail to cancel the book within  48 hours.

Use Argus instead, cheaper and better in everyway with no hidden surcharges.

EirePreneur reports that Google Calendar can now send SMS alerts in Ireland (seems to support all the major carriers according to the pull-down). I just tried and the setup worked. Now awaiting my first notification.

This really puts Google Calendar on the map for me…

I attended the BT Mashup in London last Thursday (21st September). The subject of the talk was,

…Digital Lifestyle Aggregators (DLAs) and how the emergence of this service layer will be the key battleground during the next few years

The panel was impressive with Marc Canter (who coined the phrase Digital Lifestyle Aggregator), Tariq Krim (of Netvibes fame) and Sam Sethi of the recently launched TechCrunch UK. These guys were joined by some boosters from Etribes (Simon Grice) and BT (Steve Stokols), who sponsored the whole gig. Tony Fish vigourously moderated the complete proceedings.

Marc gave a quick intro to Digital Lifestyle Aggregators which he described as Portals 2.0.  He then gave a lightening fast history of the space which I can summarise as,

• Early 90’s: Portals 1.0: My Yahoo! Killed all innovation in the Portal space
• Mid 90’s: Ofoto, Shutterfly, Personal Identity
• Late 90’s: Blogging, RSS
• Early ’00’s: Social Networking, VOX, HabboHotel, CyWorld
• Advent of Hierarchy: LuSpaces, AIMPages, Netvibes
• All based on Open Standards Interconnection

Stephen Stokols then hit the stage with an advertorial for BT Contact. This is an unlaunched BT service that will give people an online contact manager with RSS feeds, skype, instant messaging and presumably other services in the future. Steve recokons they can make more from the users they gain on BT contact that what they lose on lost voice revenue. I asked a question about how they would make this transition and while Steve gave a fudgy answer, Marc piped in with “They are loosing these customers anyway, whether they do something about it or not” which covered that base.

Steve proposed the following key trends:

• Blurring industry lines (Telco vs. search vs. aggregator vs. mobile)
• Advertising as a key revenue stream in the future
• Realtime PC communications (VOIP and video)
• Social networking
• It no longer about switches its about software
• Names instead of addresses

Nothing ground breaking here, but unusual to hear it coming out of a telco representative’s mouth. According to Steve BT has 18 million fixed line customers (nice money if you can get it).
Another interesting factoid I picked up is that Al Noor Ramji is now the CEO of BT. Ramji cut a swathe through Swiss Bank Corporation in the 90’s completely revamping their IT department and setting a trend for all the other banks in the City of London by focusing on technology as a key differentiator. This may be the reason BT is taking such a radical approach in cannibalising its existing customer base.

Simon Grice then talked about Etribes  which he described as ‘MySpace for Generation X’ i.e. 35 to 55 year olds.  All the usual stuff is provided, blogs, home pages, forums etc. Apparently its a personal publishing platform…. hmmmm!

Netvibes founder Tariq Krim then talked about they got started basically scratching an itch around managing lots of RSS feeds.  Word of mouth has netted the company over 5 million users. Good man Tariq!

This was followed by a panel discussion where the debate went to and fro between the panel and the audience. Some commentary I caught (but without attribution, sorry, I was scribbling furiously),

• YouTube suceeded by allow early and easy embedding (no adverts, just the YouTube logo)
• Only 1% of users currently use RSS, what about the Gen-X-ers who just don’t get RSS? How long will it take before Web 2.0 passes the Mom test? (i.e. Mom can use it on her own)
• Web 2.0 is about owning your own content, with the ability to syndicate your content via microformats (with copyright notices if needs be)
• Web 2.0 needs to move outside the RSS community (after IE 7.0 is adopted?)
• GYMAA : Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Apple, AOL will control our future if we let them
• Every application will have a menu item Add Friend in the future
• NetVibes found its customers “analog style” i.e. in MeatSpace
• Apple and Google will promote a closed system for DLAs if we let them
• I want to aggregate my life, but I don’t want to be aggregated
• Turn on the fibre, only 3% of available optical fibe is turned on. Telcos have a stranglehold on this commodity
• How do you generate trust? Make it easy to leave a service and take your content with you
• Bebo and MySpace are Digital Content jails
• DLA’s will go away (e.g. disappear into the infrastructure)

A great session which covered a lot of ground in a short period of time. Would have been even better if the whole day had been set aside. Well worth a trip to London.

So I flew back into Dublin with my family last night at around 8.30pm. When I arrived at the rank the first taxi driver refused to take us because he didn’t have booster seats for my children (aged 3 and 5, no that he asked or cared).

The rest of the rank then proceeded to refuse in the same way with mutterings of “2000 euro fines”. In the end we abandoned the rank and got my sister to drive in and pick us up.

So a quick search of  The Taxi Regulator website yielded no information of any such restrictions. I await an email response from the regulator as to whether such a regulation exists.

What did other visitors with children, without recourse to getting a lift, do on Sunday night?

I use taxis a lot, and I meet more good than bad taxi drivers, but this blanket refusal, especially as it deteriorated into “they won’t take you, I can’t take” has left a sour taste in my mouth.

Amazon continues to move away from book selling. After S3 and EC2 along comes fulfilment, They will store and ship your stuff. Great for power sellers.

Conor directed me to an “oldie but goodie” article by Joel (of Joel on Software fame) about pricing for software. In it he debunks price segmentation and focus groups amongst others as mechanisms for determining price.

Required reading for anybody selling software for a living.

I found this page tonight with a bunch of old saws, but good ones all the same. I particularily like this one by Deming which predates agile programming, but could have been written for it….

Deming’s 14 points

1. Create constancy of purpose.
2. Adopt the new philosophy.
3. Cease dependence on mass inspection to achieve quality.
4. Minimize total cost, not initial price of supplies.
5. Improve constantly the system of production and service.
6. Institute training on the job.
7. Institute leadership.
8. Drive out fear.
9. Break down barriers between departments.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and numerical targets.
11. Eliminate work standards (quotas) and management by objective.
12. Remove barriers that rob workers, engineers, and managers of their right to pride of workmanship.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
14. Put everyone in the company to work to accomplish the transformation.

Pretty cool png file listing the relationship between all the Linux distros (well certainly all the ones I’ve heard about, and some I haven’t).

Click to zoom.

If you ever wanted to know what the early eighties was like in Dublin this song by Paul Clery of the Blades covers all the bases perfectly.

Downmarket

In an unfamilar bed
In a unfamiliar room
There’s a throbbing in my head
I’ve succeeded I presume

Everything’s black and white and grey
Living from day to day to day
I suppose I can’t be choosy, when there’s not too many choices
With the problems of the nation
I’m not waiting at an airport
I’m not waiting at a station
I’m standing at a bustop, Downmarket, Downmarket

On a rainy afternoon
On a gambling machine
Same old jukebox, same old tune
It’s hard to break and old routine

Everything’s black and white and grey
Living from day to day to day
I suppose I can’t be choosy, when there’s not too many choices
With the problems of the nation
I’m not waiting at an airport
I’m not waiting at a station
I’m standing at a bustop, Downmarket, Downmarket

It’s a fatal resignation
When there’s nothing left to hope for
In a hopless situation

I’m not waiting at an airport
I’m not waiting at a station
I’m standing at a bustop, Downmarket, Downmarket

Paul Clery

I seem to have hit some weird threshold in stumbleupon for the article Joe’s Ten Rules of Commercial Software Development. My webstats are up 753% for the article with 137 visitors today. For comparison I usually get about 40 or so visitors per day. Anybody know how stumbleupon works to promote your site?