John Whelan is Off Portal and Off Net!

Twitter replacing this blog

catch me on Twitter on Offportal for personal stuff and TrinityResearch as microblogging is the only way to go forward

posted by alatto @ 4:11 PM 0 comments links to this post

Look out for the fake CE mark from China

While researching the CE mark for a campus spin out company in TCD Sonitus , I cam across the fake CE mark. This means "China Export" but looks kinda familar does it not? Good youtube video on this also.

So all those toys your children are playing with may not be so safe after all.

posted by alatto @ 12:46 PM 0 comments links to this post

Digg SWARM for Twitter Search

Conor McKenna sent me this interesting link regarding a Google-Twitter mashup. Very interesting as everyone keeps talking how you can use twitter to monitor news events (e.g. Gaza, Mumbai Hotel attacks etc.) but in my experience it is even hard to find out how to a basic Twitter search.


Even this mash up still doesn’t really work as I tested it and the stories are not connecting in any meaningful way. There is huge room for a cool visualisation tool that shows stories linking in real time in the way that DIGG SWARM does.

posted by alatto @ 10:43 AM 0 comments links to this post

Eircom's NGX and IGoPeople

I had a visit last week to Eircom's bright and shiny new HQ near Heuston Station in Dublin. Of particular interest is their new demo centre dubbed NGX. I attach some pictures taken with my iphone.



Also I understand from that Campbell Scott (former head of Products and Services at O2) has left his role as Head of Consumer Products in Eircom to set up an interesting start up IGoPeople. This is a social networking site that enables consumers and brands to interact. I believe it is very close to launch and you can sign up for the beta.

Labels: Eircom NGX igopeople

posted by alatto @ 9:36 AM 0 comments links to this post

Trinity Research and Innovation ICT OpenDemo

I have been busy organising, with Tara Tracey (Industrial Liaison Manager at TCD), a Open Demonstration of ICT technologies available for Commercialisation.
We will be showcasing the latest exciting technologies developed by TCD researchers in Information Technology. The format will be open demos, so no more Death by powerpoint but rather hands on demos located in the rather cool and funky Science Gallery with refreshments served to fuel the interaction. I took the picture above with my iphone.


Examples of the types of technologies to be shown include:

* web 2.0 animation tool
* automatic image annotation through cross modal learning
* software defined radio toolkit for next generation cognitive radio networks
* hand wash monitoring device for hospitals and food industry
* p2p video streaming on t'interweb
* video based adaptive e-learning
* token based payments system for VOIP on WiFi
* building a wholesale hosting exchange
* spam prevention through email microcharging
* game authoring tool for mental health therapies
* sentiment index for financial markets
* p2p web search
* immersive experiential selling tool

and lots more.....

To register to attend please go to the registration page on the site.

posted by alatto @ 10:55 AM 0 comments links to this post

Searchme

Checkout www.searchme.com. Nice interactive visual search. wher you can scroll through thumbnails (well let's call then "hands" as bigger than "thumbnails") of the sites like the pages of a book.

On subject of search we all saw in ireland much hype about the "Irish" challenger to google cuil.com. Not so cuil I am afraid as the search results are dismally poor when compared to Google. Try seraching fro soemthing obscurish or google-whackish and compare. I tried searching for "xeritel" par example.

Another thing: why is black the new white when it comes to search backgrounds?

Stephen Barrett's teanm here in Trinity College have devloped some very interesting next generation P2P search technology. Watch this space

Labels: searchme cuil

posted by alatto @ 2:11 PM 0 comments links to this post

Nokia Mosh - worth a try

Nokia's Mosh multimedia community hasn't been a huge success. How do I know this ? well for one the site boldly displays number of registered users - I believe I was member number 62,250. Also the fact they don't use www.mosh.com but the rather more cumbersome http://mosh.nokia.com doesn't help either.

Anyway the idea is great - a community driven mobile and fixed portal for mobile content and applications. I downloaded the (free!) client and after playing around with it for a while it is the applications section that really seem interesting. Mosh is a great source of of freeware for your mobile. My one grip with the UI is that you can't search by device so it is a bit hit and miss.

posted by alatto @ 9:32 PM 0 comments links to this post