I watched Ripple Software win the €10,000 prize at the Dockland Innovation Awards last night.

Ripple provide a market analysis and strategy selling engine for the top 100 Ebay sellers (interesting fact: 40% of sales on Ebay are generated by the top 1% of sellers). There USP was the ability to analyse trades on Ebay using multi-lingual analysis of the trades on all the localised Ebay sites around Europe.

They beat off strong competition from Paydaq (low cost western union style money transfer targetting Eastern Europe) and Webtalk (VOIP for businesses).

There were also some “commended” awards and I was particularily taken by DataKraft who have a Rapid Application Development Environment for .NET that takes up where Access leaves off.

Infoworld reports briefly on the ObjectWeb EasyBeans project,

The ObjectWeb open-source consortium announced Wednesday the creation of the EasyBeans project. EasyBeans aims to offer a pluggable, easy-to-use, open-source container based on the EJB 3 (Enterprise Java Beans) spec.

Ho, Ho dream on, you lost me at the EJB part. Once I’ve mastered this “easy to use” EJB container can you sign me up for the Easybrain(tm) one week brain surgery course.

I’m sure the ObjectWeb guys are sincere and their software is going to be easier to use than most EJB container bogosity, but as my friend Tom says, you can’t polish a turd!

EJB – Just say no!

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.

This natty little site will automatically generate IBAN numbers for Bank of Ireland and AIB. IBAN numbers are required for several kinds of Electronic Funds Transfer. Most specifically (in the case of Irish Startups) Enterprise Ireland requires them.

ApacheCon Europe is in Dublin this year, woo hoo!

Free Download Manager

Originally uploaded by Joe Drumgoole.

My day job company is currently part of a government funded incubator program called Hot House. Now this is a great program (I’ve talked about it before now) but they currently have a problem with their broadband and our connections keeps dropping.

If you are downloading in IE or Firefox and the network disappears underneath you, both programs just hang around for ever pretending that they will restart uploading. However the restart never happens. (Well okay, it might restart but not in anytime frames I’m interested in waiting for).
I was expressing my frustration with this a few weeks ago when Ciaran recommended Free Download Manager. Well it does what it says on the tin. Fully plug replaces the download function in IE and Firefox. Gives you a single place to schedule, manage and restart downloads. Finally it seems to run a bit faster than the standard download tools as well.

Jotform is the funkiest AJAX application I’ve seen since the genre was first described. It allows you to design web forms online. It really shows your the level of interactivity that is possible with a well built AJAX application.

Good job!

FreeMind

Originally uploaded by Joe Drumgoole.

I’ve be using this FreeMind mind mapping and outliner software for about two months. I gotta say, its the best piece of software I’ve downloaded in a long time.

Very easy to use, runs on Windows Linux and Macs, comes with fantastic online help and can generate output formats in PDF, SVG, PNG, GIF, HTML and open office.

Robert Cringely posits a fascinating strategy for Apple based around distributing rental video using the SOL Blockbuster chain as a distributor.

Robert is always value for money.

Pretty good analysis from Clay Shirky of why you me and just about any body who isn’t an A-list blogger is unlikely to become one.

Oh well there go my plans for global domination…

There is a follow-up by Clay on his blog.