Web 2 Ireland

Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO, announced the Euro S3 storage cloud at Web2Expo on Tuesday. An informed source has just let us know that the cloud will be served from their Dublin datacenters. This is the second major coup in this area for Dublin in a week.

As Vogels said on his blog:

This has been a frequently requested feature by our European customers for various reasons, better latency control being the most important one. This is very important first step as it brings Amazon Web Services closer to the world-wide application development platform our customers want it to be. There is a lot of work that still needs to be done to make the services the absolutely best tools for international internet-scale application development, but the ability to control where you store your objects is an important first step.

It looks like all that dark fibre will soon go bright.

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Comment posted by Michele
at 11/14/2007 5:32:18 AM

Amazon Ireland is the first Amazon to join an internet exchange and several of us are already actively peering with them at Inex

Michele

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 11/14/2007 5:42:36 AM

Now if only they'd let us buy something other than books from the co.uk site, I'd be a happy bunny Oh and enable all the same RSS feeds as the .com site!

Comment posted by Michele
at 11/14/2007 5:46:28 AM

Which RSS feeds?

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 11/14/2007 5:54:31 AM

My Purchases, My Wish List, My Reviews. All available on .com site as RSS feeds.

At the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin today, David Recordon from Six Apart gave an energetic talk entitled “OpenID: Emerging from Web 2.0″. David is Vice-Chair of the OpenID Foundation, and in this session he gave a comprehensive overview of OpenID, its current use on the internet, and the direction that it might take in the future.

Using his own website as an example, David showed how easy it is to link your identity to your personal home page – just two simple lines of code that will also give you the freedom to switch OpenID providers without changing your ID:

<link rel="openid.server" href="https://pip.verisignlabs.com/server" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="https://(username).pip.verisignlabs.com" />

He opted not to get too technical, and did not go into much detail on the OpenID authentication protocol itself, or the cryptography behind it, but focused instead on the functionality and potential implementations. While the technology has been around for a couple of years now, the use of OpenID has seen a surge lately, as companies like AOL and Orange assign an OpenID to all of their users. This is driven by the increased availability of OpenID as a means of authentication in web applications, e.g., Ma.Gnolia and BaseCamp, and by the inclusion of OpenID libraries in modern web frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails. David outlined how the development was influenced by the Linux software philosophy “do one thing and do it well”, thus allowing services and tools to built on top of OpenID, leading to unlimited potential.

The second half of the session was led by Martin Paljak, an Estonian OpenID advocate who developed open.id.ee – a OpenID provider which uses Estonia’s electronic ID scheme to provide a very secure identity on the internet. The advantages of a service like this becomes immediately clear in protecting users’ privacy. A number of recent high profile security breaches on sites has got people thinking about the integrity of their personal details online. In a Web 2.0 world without a central authentication framework such as OpenID, we are doomed to disclose our personal details to any new web app that requests it. Have you ever wondered why some random website is requesting your home address and telephone number? Each time we fill out a form on the web, the integrity of that information is at the mercy of the privacy policy and security of that particular website. OpenID means the only privacy policy that a user must agree to is that of the identity provider, thus decreasing the likelihood of a leak. Martin also pointed out how, in the Estonian case, the system gives protection against identity theft because when an account gets compromised, the government can re-issue a new digital identity.

Most people will agree that the widespread adoption of OpenID can only be a good thing, but it poses the question as to whether or not the concept a URI as a username is too much for ordinary users? I will confess to being mystified by the process at first, and the long list of OpenID providers to choose from was daunting. Regardless, it will be very interesting to see how OpenID develops, and whether or not it becomes the powerful standard that David and Martin envision.

ICT Ireland's latest report claims that Ireland is still a very attractive location for technology multi-nationals. I wouldn't expect them to say anything else but how true is it?

Large corporations go where the ROI is highest and that's it. The good old days of Irish-American VPs and Paddies sealing deals on golf courses are long gone. Whichever country offers the cheapest labour that is capable of doing the job and provides the best tax breaks, gets the gig.

On the upside, there are plenty of positive signs; Google's expansion in Ireland is given as the strongest evidence that all is well. Intel, HP and IBM still have huge operations here and they are generally at worst static and in some cases growing. However the obstacles are getting greater with each passing month; salaries are high, software development is now commoditized, transport infrastructure is a joke and, most important of all, there is a dearth of qualified people available to hire.

You would expect that a start-up like LouderVoice would do all its work locally but we had to offshore all of our work after severe difficulties in finding anyone to do it and then getting an Irish quote which was 4x the non-Irish one we went with. I know of several other Irish start-ups who have teams in Poland.

There are even several Indo-Irish companies where project management happens in Ireland and the coding is done in India. In fact there are many multinationals here where the Irish software development team are now just PMs for Indian teams. How long before the PM jobs go there too?

On the surface, Microsoft's announcement of a $500m datacenter in Dublin is another vote of confidence. But then you see that only 15 people will be employed there. The datacenter has more to do with the enormous fibre pipes that were built during the bubble and tax breaks than the knowledge economy.

As long as times are good, the multinationals will probably continue to come here, but as soon as the squeeze happens, either to the global economy or to individual corporations, they'll be gone as quickly as you can say SFO-BLR. We need to concentrate instead on building great Irish companies that compete globally. Our reliance on multinationals continues to foster an employee mind-set rather than an entrepreneurial one. The cycle must be broken.

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There is a great run-down on the venture deals completed in Q3 over on Finfacts. The total investment was up and nearly hit €30m but the number of deals was at five. Yes international readers, you read that right, not five deals per VC, five deals in the entire country.

We know we are far behind the UK and the US in terms of maturity in this area but five deals is just embarassing. How many were done in Israel in the same period? Should Enterprise Ireland be re-evaluating their €170m bank-rolling of the VCs here particularly when one of them used that leverage to build a fund which invested in a UK company first?

It looks like most early stage tech companies here will have to rely on the revamped Business Expansion Scheme to raise capital. This is a scheme which allows investors to get almost half of their investment back via tax refunds. This type of investment is often called dumb money by the more sophisticated investors but my gut tells me that if Ireland creates the next Facebook, it will be backed by the so-called dumbos.

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There is finally a practical use for the front facing camera on your 3G phone and it comes in the shape of remote medical consultations courtesy of the Kerry-based 3G Doctor.

The mobile telcos have never been able to live up to their own hyperbole when they paid billions for their 3G licences. Apart from faster data connections for mobile warriors, the services have taken forever to trickle out. This one has the potential to be huge and Ireland is the perfect place to launch from.

Getting medical attention in Ireland is becoming more and more of a strain. From queuing for hours at GP clinics just in case to out-of-hours services that only work if you live in big towns, we need something to reduce pressure on the system. Here in Cork if you need out-of-hours help you call SouthDoc and a nurse triages you over the phone. They err well on the side of caution and seem to always tell you to come into the clinic. The problem is that phrases like bleeding profusely are far too subjective.

Imagine then that you arrange a call to the 3G doctor on your phone. They can actually see your complaint and can decide if [a] you are fine, use a band-aid [b] you need to go to a clinic for some stitches or [c] you are bleeding to death, call an ambulance. This remote view of symptoms is far more efficient and is a major help to those who live rurally. It is also a full diagnosis rather than the basic Q&A that e.g. the VHI or NHS helplines provide.

Obviously they cannot do prescriptions but I cannot wait for the day when this is possible. In years to come, we will hopefully see a range of home diagnostic equipment which would allow doctors to say for sure that you have a bacterial chest infection, please go to the pharmacy and get Augmentin-Duo. Companies like BiancaMed with their non-invasive health analysis systems are sure to be at the forefront of that if it does happen.

This is one of those service that just clicks with me, it just makes complete sense. Both the HSE here and NHS in the UK should be actively working with and supporting these guys to make this service accessible and known to as big an audience as possible. It really is a win-win for doctors and patients.

Of course it could be extended to deal with a particular annoyance of mine – OAPs filling up GPs waiting rooms every day with non-complaints. Could a service be created that leverages retired doctors to deal with these OAPs? It would be another pressure-reducer on our creaking health systems.

One area I discussed with David Doherty from 3G Doctor was Microsoft's HealthVault. I wondered if their own Health Record was in competition to it? His answer impressed me

HealthVault is one of the more open health record solutions and as with all the others we'll be doing our utmost to work with it. However at 3G Doctor we provide patient tools and this is more of a health care provider tool. We find it hard to see the mass market appeal of a stand alone health care record for consumers because patients find it hard/impossible to appreciate the value.

The average patient is several years away from being comfortable with the idea of HealthVault but I think they are more than ready for a service like 3G Doctor.

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Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 11/29/2007 8:54:00 AM

Thanks for all that great extra information Fiona.

I've suggested your service to a few people who had conditions that could easily have been figured out over 3G rather than forcing them out in the cold to visit SouthDoc!

Comment posted by Dr Kavanagh
at 11/29/2007 8:32:22 AM

Hi Conor,

Thanks for your enthusiasm for 3G Doctor I'm sorry to hear of your disappointment with waiting room times.

Clearly 3G Doctor is all about taking the wait out of getting professional advice but I'd have to slightly disagree with you on the burden you suggest that OAPs with non-complaints have on our healthcare system. Not only have their contributions paid for the building of the healthcare systems that we have today but their use of the services are unavoidable and limited. In fact, statistics show the vast majority of care costs are currently spent on chronic care conditions and although many older people suffer with these, many are preventable and are determined at a much earlier age resulting in more expensive and much longer overall care requirements.

Although we would be delighted if older people felt comfortable using 3G Doctor to avoid having to travel in the cold weather to attend a clinic for some minor advice or guidance, we feel that even more value could be generated by using early and interventional care initiatives that could help younger people avoid and prevent against the development of major chronic conditions. At 3G Doctor we have made available a tool that enables the creation, management and storage of a personal health record and health diary. All this requires patients to have is a 3G mobile phone (no wires, PC, Monitor, webcam, mouse, keyboard here!) and they can begin to take control of their own health information safe in the knowledge that they have the advice and support of our health professionals on hand at anytime.

Because 3G Doctor brings patients closer to healthcare professionals with greater levels of convenience and privacy it is in an unique position to help prevent against the onset of many chronic diseases which asides from cost are also associated with many other quality of life issues for patients as well as friends, family and carers. This is particularly important for conditions which have significant lifestyle or social elements to them eg. obesity & related disease, smoking, alcoholism, depression, eating disorders, etc.

If any readers would like to learn more about this I'd suggest a recent (FREE) report by the Californian Health Foundation which can be downloaded from here:

http://www.chcf.org/documents/chronicdisease/HealthCareUnpluggedTheRoleOfWireless.pdf

As for your comment on the possibility for cooperation with the NHS and VHi you'll be pleased to know that in 2008 we're set to announce cooperation with a large number of NHS clinics in the UK who want to support their patients with out of hours, minor advice and international services (eg. if they leave the UK on business/vacations). We'd love to do the same with the Irish systems and think there is also an enormous opportunity for the Irish public healthcare system to leap frog many of the expensive eHealth mistakes made by the NHS' (such as the £12 Billion NPfIT programme) to deliver Irish patients a completely personalized mHealth service that would also take advantage of this countries affinity with mobiles and wireless.

We greatly appreciate your comments and those we have already received from the interesting readers of your blog.

We look forward to seeing you soon!

Fiona
3G Doctor Ltd

Comment posted by AlexiaBlogs Blog Archive Red Links 8/11/07
at 11/7/2007 11:03:42 PM

[] 3G doctors – the future of far-flung and out of hours medicine? Via Conor of BlogNation Ireland. []

Comment posted by   3G Doctor Signals the Return of House Visits by Conor's Bandon Blog
at 11/7/2007 10:04:55 AM

[] written all about it here. I'd be interested to hear what you think and whether the 3G coverage is good enough yet so []

Dion Hinchcliffe is playing a blinder at for the last 45 minutes or so over here at Web2.0 Berlin on the subject of widgets, bagdes and gadgets.

Dion took it from scratch and assumed incomplete knowledge of the subject by the audience – not a bad idea as there are certainly VC’s, bricks and mortar retailers (& myself) etc present here amongst the geeks.

Here is my attempt at a summary of Dion’s explanation of the basics:

A Widget is a mini programme which can be distributed with a copy and paste – many blogging platforms will even allow you to choose from a directory of widgets. A Badge is a display of content which is pulled from other sites i.e. YouTube. A Gadget is a more formal widget model from Google and Microsoft

Key Aspects:
-Supreme ease of consumption and distribution, radical ease of use gets the uptake copy and paste is best
-Connects to their underlying sites to provide value
-Have a business model baked into it driving site traffic, content consumption etc

The power of widgets:
-Makes your web app's functionality and content portable
-Users do the work to broaden you products distribution 27/7
-Widgets supply mash-up

Who uses widgets and badges:
-Consumers and end users
-Developers and prosumers
-Businesses

Finally, Dion is firm in his view that Google will deploy widgets to help them reach their trillion dollar company target.

I took some quick notes from a couple of  sessions this morning – keep an eye out on the  Web2Expo site for the slides becoming available.

Business Models for Web 2.0 Companies

Christian Leybold of BV Capital provided a good overview of business models (all advertising) and statistics – sites used as examples during the presentation are BV investment companies)

Opening line that presumably will follow through the presentation – Follow the traffic (and then worry about the money). According to Christian, some 8 of the current top 20 companies in Alexa traffic rankingswere not in it 3 years ago.

Less than 4% of advertising revenues go to the social networks – compared to the traffic these sites get, that’s a pretty small slice. Could virtual items be alternative to ads – incredibly popular example is Cyworld (Korea).

With social networks you cannot afford to spend money in acquiring users, you must have critical mass and you must scale, scale, scale. Gave example of fotolog.com – $12m invested, 12m accounts created so a buck for every single user account. Tiny amount compared to silly times in the late ’90s; clarifies that we don’t confuse investment cost with customer acquisition cost – the latter figure of course is next to zero.

So why is advertising on social networks difficult? You need to know what cusotmer wants NOW! People in social networking mode are not in buying mode; at the same time high repeat users are extremely attractive to advertisers given the profile they are exhibiting.

So how do the leading networks increase ad revenue? Myspace and Facebook are launching today (“Selfserve” and “Pandemic”) solutions for this; very different to google adsense, targeted to usage patterns on the network. While facebook developer platform has been succesful, it is poor in terms of monetization. Summing up – scale audiences are becoming their own ad networks.

What can you do if you are not MySpace and Facebook? Gave example of Glam Media. Buys advertising in bulk from advertisers that fit with the brand. Also Peanut Labs : aggregates “Gen Y” surveys from market research firms. Incredibly, people happy to spend 15 mins filling out survey for a 50 cent reward – people lose track of time when they are online…

Why does Video work online? the fact that you can track via analytics who-watched-what is attractive; video advertising is great for brand awareness; gave all the well known examples of monetisation – pre/psot roll, invideo, promotialal content, sponsorship, search/display advertising, Pay per view. Of course, advertising works best if the content is differentiated and long (no point in a pre-roll on a 1 minute clip). trad. media companies have discovered that it is better to put out popular TV programmes via ad supported model online, rather than using PPV. North of $20 on CPM for video.

Then talked about local advertising – a huge market, but presenting ads in local content skyrockets ad prices (at least 3 times as expense for Adsense local adverts, e.g. restaurant+dublin). So though local advertising is attractive, the cost is prohibitive; local businesses by and large are not familiar with online process and fail to see how they can track and assess how well they are doing. Coupons in local press are where it’s at for them, and what these businesses are familiar with; Getting scale for keywords like “dentist” in local area is very, very tough and very tedious to scale in each market. you could partner with some one elses salesforce, sell some one elses ads, or charge users for premium content. A bit like Angies List -they provide reviews of local businesses, often interviewing people as they leave stores. Then uses a subscription model, often along the way providing coupons from selected businesses; Another provider is Reach Local – they provide a managed service to small businesses for google ads; focus is on easy to understand Ad sucess metrics and reports.

Conclusions – Christian thinks we are on the cusp of seeing ho advertising will REALLY work on social networks. For local online advertising though, it will continue to be difficult.

Designing for a Web of Data Tom Coates of Yahoo is an engaging and energetic speaker and gave a good presentation to a packed audience. My only quibble was that while he had every right to talk about Yahoo product and specifically Flickr, a key theme of his talk – “gather all the data you can” – is probably an easy one to promulgate in the context of online photo storage. Please note that some of this was difficult to capture because some of the messages were contained in the slides (keep an eye on Web2Expo Site/Slideshare) for slides over coming days…

That said – data is the most important thing (echoing Tim O’Reilly here) – the pages are actually less of a big deal in todays web.

Toms 5 key Points of Designing a web for Data

1. You site is not your product

example of twitter – twitterific built around the api; the product is a mechanism for the person to commuicate, but the website is only a tiny part of it; only 10% traffic is generated from it – the rest from the API. this is indication of web data. other examples given pownce, last.fm, etc.

the web of data bleeds into the real world -

- physical object responds to/viduslaised data from the network – eg nabaztag, ambient orb, wattson; all of these are wifi enabled devices sucking data from various sources. also mentioned waeather underground – home weather stations, but also people just entering weather data directly.

2.Play well with others (why it’s good to design for recombination).

Lots of opportunities for your product to do well if you play well with others. why would you open your product?

- drive people to service

- people will pay for them

- as advertising or to put yourself into the ecosystem

- makes your servie more attractive with less central development

The network effects has great potential as a result.

- Examples : map mashups in general – stamen designs do nice stuff.

- talked about Yahoo FireEagle – service about location. currently 50k geotagged location in wikipedia.

3. You can never have too much data (how to make excess manageable).

4. Ways to make a data service

- open up a dataset of your own

- build one with your users

- enhance one dataset with another.

flickr has gone up 500m photos in last 30 days 1.8 billion photos currently. amazing.

capturing metadata

- at production time

- direct analyis of the thing concerned (speech, facial)

- user contributed

- behavioural analysis

5. Hierarchies can not take the weight (from navigation to path finding – from hierarchic to weblike exploration).

Gave examples of redesign of Yahoo UI over the years and Amazon – how you can burrow into the data, coming from different angles;folksonomies and taxonomys can live ok together; top navigation is just a jumping off point; use visual hierarchies to guide user.

Donncha O'Caoimh is the man behind WPMU on which blognation runs and is one of the lead developers in Automattic. He has just released WP Super Cache which enables WordPress and WordPress MU sites to deal with large traffic loads and avoid the dreaded Slashdot Digg effect.

It sounds like a serious improvement over WP-Cache which I have tried and discarded several times due to it not playing nice with other plug-ins.

He'd also like everyone to Digg it, so he can show how his server isn't even breaking a sweat when running the new code!

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Writing this from the Saul Klein moderated session at Web2.0 Berlin So far my colleague/traveller, Jonathan Ryan & I have met:

- Kevin Peyton of Electric Mill
- Ben Mosse, formally of EI but who has recently joined Associated Press in New York
- James from Dublin whose surname I will pick up later over a coffee
- Alan O’Rourke from Spoiltchild

So far, so good. Venue is massive – some overflowing rooms are helping to create the type of intimacy so necessary at these events – step outside the building though and you get a feel for massive scale of the Berlin Messe campus…

Anyone else from the auld sod over??

Joel Spolsky – famous blogger – is to present the keynote speech at Irish Java Technologies Conference on this Wednesday night at Cineworld, Dublin.

The keynote will be followed by a Panel, chaired by Ralph Averbuch of ENN, which includes Spolsky and James Strachan, CTO of IONA.

Additionally, delegates that register for the conference online will enter a raffle to win a private champagne audience with Joel Spolsky at 30,000 feet over the Irish Sea, as he fly's on to Cambridge.

event previously mentioned here