Ordo Ab Chao

Hi,
OK guys, here’s a summary of the new projects that we’re understaking and
some outstanding questions regarding both.

1) Beat FM
Development of new website incorporating online advertising, some animation,
SMS integration and content management. This is a notably tricky site with
lots of custom CMS components. One idea for a service is responding with the
song name and artist when a user sends an SMS to a BEAT premium number. We
have to technically work out how this could be achieved. BEAT favours using
Phonovation’s gateway. I presume this is all webservice based but we’re
going to find out. This work wasn’t in the specced price and we’ll be adding
another 500 euro (minimum) onto the price for it.

2) DeCare Amazon & Froogle catalogue management using StoreFront. We’ve a
meeting next week with DeCare. They’re extremely good technically and could
generate a lot of business for us if we’re recommended as they’re
“preferred” shopping cart for smaller retailers. Essentially this work will
involve creating a module to enable a new catalogue (2 different CSV
formats) to be automagically created and FTP’d to amazon/froogle. It
shouldn’t kill us to do this but the bad news is that we won’t get paid
until we show that it works.

3) SAGE custom software development
Spec to be provided by EVROS. Perhaps they might even pay us within terms
this time! We’ll have to charge steeply for this. Spec has just been
received 🙂

4) CREST Rating service with WIT. This is another freebie but would enable
us to automatically bill customers on the Wireless Network for VoIP and
other traffic. The CREST rating service works so it only remains to create
charging schemes for the VOIP based on our flat rates (easy) and to
interface with National Irish Bank’s direct debit interface (a web service
of interdeterminate complexity). We’re meeting National Irish next week.

5) Launching the phone service. We’ve now got a CPS offering so we can sign
up anyone, even if they don’t have broadband. We make 4 times the margin on
the standard VoIP service so that’s best but 10% is better than nothing so
let’s get cracking.

Regards,

…shane

//=============================
// Shane Dempsey
// Managing Director,
// Gaisan Technologies Ltd.
// e: sdempsey@gaisan.com
// u: http://www.gaisan.com
// t: +353 (0)51 304224
//=============================

Thought this was an excellent article on the seemingly endless saga surrounding Nigerian footballer John Obi Mikel. It’s well structured and clearly thought out. Read it here
The actions of the players’ agents (if indeed they are that) certainly appear to be highly cynical. In particular, the attempted circumvention of binding arbitration from FIFA in favour of a Norwegian court ruling wasn’t helpful. It’s difficult to argue with the contention that the player himself could have sorted out this mess if he’d adopted a more direct approach with both clubs. Still, given the intrigue of death-threats, kidnappings etc., it’s easy to argue there were mitigating circumstances.

Hi Peter,
It’s an excellent idea! It’s called AppCasting which involves using the
‘enclosure’ feature of RSS 2.0 feeds to deliver updates and release notes for
new software applications. The name Appcasting is by analogy with Podcasting,
which is the practice of delivering audio files as RSS 2.0 enclosures.

The developer publishes an RSS 2.0 feed, each item of which describes a new
release of a particular software product. The items’ descriptions may contain
release notes or other information about what’s new in this release.

Users with RSS aggregators which support the RSS 2.0 enclosure feature can
easily keep up to date with software fixes. Aggregators such as NetNewsWire 2
support downloading of enclosed content right in the aggregator.
Developers can
integrate RSS 2.0 tools e.g. into their code to perform auto updates.

To setup an update “feed” all you have to do is create your feed and in each
item include a line like:

In the example, the url attribute is the direct download URL for your app,
length is the length of the file in bytes and type is the file’s MIME type.

Have a look at this (http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/) for more
information on
feed tools.

regards,

…shane

Quoting Peter Lyons :

> Hi Shane,
>
> a question for you. I know RSS is a great way for distributing media files
> etc as in Podcasting. I was thinking of using it to distribute software
> updates and documentation for my applications. Is it a suitable technology
> for that do you think,
>
> Regards,
>
> Peter.
>
>
>