Category: Uncategorized

I was going through some old publications and presentations today and found a blast from the past. At a Feb 2004 “Mobile Europe” conference in Bremen, Germany I made the following predictions for 2010

Trends are:
• Mobile phone will be commonly used for M-commerce and web-browsing.
• Mobile presence of organizations will develop.
• Community-based WLANs/WWANs start a powerful movement “Broadband for everybody” [This will] strongly impact pricing for telco data services
• Integration of form and function, like:
– Mobiles/PDAs/Stereo/credit cards/ car keys etc. will merge
– Mobile Services and Internet Services (&Technologies) will merge
– An increasing number of mobile services will make use of /require contextual
information about subscribers (location, profile, etc.)
Predicting the future:
• As mobile and Internet converge, even small companies or individuals [1 guy in a garage] will be able to provide complex telecoms. services
• Open Source Community will be increasingly important in telecoms software
– development. API standards will open up the network.
– The need for revenue generating services will ensure interoperability and/or standardisation.

I think it’s fair to say The Road isn’t the most optimistic movie made over the past few years. It’s certainly thought provoking about life in a post-apocalyptic future. I viewed it as a learning experience which could save me a lot of time, unpleasantness and limbs in the event of an apocalypse. Here are some important lessons I learned from watching this movie.

1. NAMA is a waste of time and money.
2. Nobody bothers to look behind them in a post-apocalyptic future
3. You won’t need to describe anything as “bleak”. It’s a given!
4. There’s a light somewhere that needs to be “kept alive”. It’s unclear whether it’s battery or mains operated.
5. Coke will finally win its long battle with Pepsi for cola supremacy. It’s not so much “The Real Thing” as the “Only Thing” if you want to quench your post-apocalyptic thirst
   Continue reading “Things I learned from watching The Road”

Could write a book about this I’ll keep it to a single rambling post! I was reading this article in today’s Irish Times. The conclusion appears to be that we don’t have a world class education system and that some tech companies are finding recent graduates poor. This was described by Craig Barrett at the Farmleigh conference last year and more recently at the described December 2009 meeting between the management of tech multinationals based in Ireland and the minister for education, Batt O’ Keefe.

Many multinationals, O’Keeffe heard, were reluctant to recruit from certain colleges because of concerns about standards. There were even suggestions that several institutes of technology (ITs) and one university were on an unofficial recruitment “blacklist”. At the core of the problem was grade inflation across the education sector, from Leaving Cert to third-level degrees.

Continue reading “Ireland’s “education deficit””