I was chatting to Eoghan McCabe this morning at Open Coffee Dublin and we sowed the seeds of an idea, a Paddy’s Valley Trip to London primarily to attend a London Open Coffee event but also to meet business partners, VCs etc. the usual suspects in other words.

All are invited. More detailed plans will follow. I already have Anton recruiting in Limerick.

Who knows, we might make a night of it! 🙂

Proposed date 24 April 2008.

24-April clashes with Web 2.0 Expo. Im suggesting a new date, 8th May 2008.

Candidate Requirements:

PutPlace is looking for a developer to build a Mac version of its existing Windows client software. The ideal candidate will have demonstrable experience of building whole applications on Panther, Tiger and Leopard. Ideally with Objective-C using the Cocoa framework. Knowledge of Python, Django, SQLite and PostGres will get you bonus points.

We are not looking for ten years experience but we are looking for enthusiasm. The candidate must be smart and be able to get things done (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html).

Working Location:

PutPlace is based in Dublin, but we realise that the world’s Mac programmers don’t live in Ireland. So while we are happy to pay for you to relocate to Dublin, we are also happy for you to work from your current location. However that location must be within two timezones of Dublin.

Our working model is based on the scrum development model and everything is hosted, so working remotely is not as difficult as it might sound.

Package:

We pay market rates and above for the right people. We offer stock options and a health plan. We also give you the ability to build someting from scratch that will make real world users happy.

About PutPlace:

PutPlace is an online service that helps home users manage long term storage of their digital content. We are all accumulating digital stuff at a tremendous rate. Scientific American reckons we will have over a terabyte of data stored in our homes by 2010. That’s ten times what is stored on an average PC today. What’s more, we will create over a terabyte of data every year after that.

PutPlace provides you with an online backup service that backups up all your digital content, across all the devices in the home and recognises the fact that these devices are related to each other.

PutPlace then recreates the relationships between the content in your home, the stuff in your backup and anything you have shared or published on the web. If you ever want to find a file again, where it came from and where it went to is as important as what’s inside it. Every digital copy came from somewhere originally and PutPlace finds that original and links all the copies back to it ,so that you can track every piece of content you own over its complete digital lifetime.

PutPlace is Digital Memory for your Digital Lifetime.

Got this in the mail today from the Digital Media Forum.

Dear Joe.Drumgoole@putplace.com

The Digital Media Forum has secured funding through InterTradeIreland, the Skillnets initiative and Enterprise Ireland to support companies wishing to attend the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (22nd – 25th April 2008).

This will be a competitive process and successful companies will receive €1,500 towards the cost of attending the conference. Only one attendee per company may be supported. For details of the application process, please see the attached PDF.

To register your interest in attending please contact Irene Kavanagh –  irene@digitalmediaforum.net – with a brief profile of your company and your reasons for wishing to attend the conference.

If you have any further queries, you can contact us at 01 4893602.

Regards,

The Digital Media Forum Team

So get your applications into Irene, lickety split.

A song, “Bring it Down”, by an old eighties band called The Redskins was buzzing through my head this weekend. They were specifically talking about capitalism and Thatchers Britain, but I reckon the lyrics make it pretty good anthem for what Pat is trying to do with the network operators.

(BURN IT UP!) BRING IT DOWN!

You’ve never had it so good
The favourite phrase of those who’ve always had it better
Burn it up!
Realise the altogether

Bring it down
Burn together
The altogether’s an insane thing, insane thing
Bring it down
All together
The altogether’s an insane thing, insane thing

You’ve never had it so good
The favourite phrase of those who’ve always had it better
You never had so much is the cry
Of those who’ve always had much more, much more than you & I

Burn brother burn
Fight together
This altogether’s an insane thing, insane thing
Bring it down
All together
The altogether’s an insane thing, insane thing

Burn
Insane thing, insane thing
Insane thing, insane thing

Burn brother burn
Let’s burn Together
Burn brother burn
Burn, burn, burn
This insane thing, insane thing
Burn brother burn
Burn sister burn

Spurn the lie
They use to justify
This insanity!
The inhumanity!
Of this insane thing

Burn brother burn
Burn, burn, burn
Some’s got it easy
Bring it down
The altogether
Keeps getting better for the few
Who’ve got it good to start with …

So Flash isn’t good enough for the iPhone.  Not having a rich client on the iPhone is nonsensical so Steve must have a flash-like play up his sleeve. Perhaps Microsoft and Apple are cooking up a little SilverLight pie?

Microsoft need a serious partner to put SilverLight on the “its not a Windows only play” route. Steve hates giving license fees to Adobe and would prefer to have his own solution. So barring that the best spoiling play is to get into bed with Microsoft. Who knows what deal he could get from Microsoft on the back of that bet, better support for Microsoft Office on the Mac, or even access to the Bejing Olympics for Apple technology…

Justin has produced IrishPulse, a nice little Perl hack to track all us Irish Twitterers.

Justin rules.

I  was thinking about Pat Phelan’s Paddy Tax press release today and the general unofficial cartel situation that infects Banking, Telcos, Network operators and Supermarkets in Ireland.

None of these guys really compete and maybe its us, not them. Not that we don’t want them to compete, but there just isn’t enough of us to make it worthwhile. Nature teaches us that in situations where many competitors strive after scare resources the result is that they typically partition the resources so that direct competition is eliminated.

So what we get in Ireland is the appearance of competition with no real attempt at radical differentiation or elimination of the competitors. Our own inability to complain directly  combined with our gift for complaining publically then creates the illusion of a disgruntled population when in fact it would take dynamite for most o2 users to move to vodafone and vice-versa.

So here is what I suggest. If you are really (and I mean really, as opposed to something to pass the time over a cup of coffee)  disillusioned with your network operator service contract, your bank or your supermarket, then switch. Then switch back. Then switch back again. For banks and network operators the cost of churn is enormous, for supermarkets the fluctuations in cashflow can cause chaos.

Somebody in Digital once said to me, to create the conditions for organisational change you have to inflict pain. Well creating churn is a great way to inflict a little organisational pain on our buddies in Irelands Cartel Economy.

I participated in todays Enterprise Ireland Startup Class of 2007 out at Leopardstown Racecourse. EI do these events so well that you’d have to ask why they don’t find and excuse to do them more often. Everything was laid on, Artwork and company logo, booth, power supply, leaflet holder the lot. All we had to do was plugin out laptop, which was where sods law kicked in because I’d forgotten my power supply. Katherine Lucey our COO came to the rescue with a mercy mission to her house to pick up a replacement.

79 companies were represented, each with its own booth area. The cross section of companies spanned catering, bio-tech, enterprise software and even a consumer play. Made some great contacts with both partners and investors and hope to exploit those connections in the coming months.

Pat Phelan writes a great post/press release on the O2 iPhone Paddy Tax I mentioned on George Hook’s Newstalk technology slot last night.

I see Version1 have been spraying a press release all over the place in the last few days trying to put the fear of God into every company director in Ireland regarding software license compliance.  Today in The Computers In Business section of the Sunday Business Post I see the same numbers quoted, directors can face up to 5 years in prison and/or 127,000 euro fine for failure to comply with software licensing laws of Ireland. Note the “can” the last vestige of the press release scoundrel.

What they fail to mention and what the BSA try and make as ambiguous as possible is that these penalties are only available to the criminal courts and software license infringment at the company level is always a civil matter.  For it to be criminal you would have to be an actual software pirate who was copying Microsoft Office and reselling it on Moore Street.

Needless to say the civil remedies are all financial are are targetted at redressing lost revenue.  So be in compliance, but don’t waste your valuable business time worrying about it.

I run a software company, and have worked for software companies that sold software for a living all my life, but I find the BSA and version 1’s tactics extremely distasteful.  I can see a lot of money being wasted on fruitless audits in the coming weeks as company directors who read these rehashed press releases in the papers start to question their Managing Directors and CEO’s as to there state of compliance.

Irish Industry has enought to do trying to  competeing with the rest of the world without pissing away its time doing hours of busy work trying to generate more money for the company that foisted Vista on us all.