I’m speaking on behalf of FON at the National Telecoms Forum on Wednesday March 8th in the Burlington Hotel. The event is run by First Tuesday Ireland. I will be honoured to be speaking alongside such industry stalwarts as Charlie Ardagh of Magnet and David McRedmond of Eircom. We’re going to be talking about consolidation, convergence and getting broadband penetration levels up. It will be an interesting discussion, well worth the admission fee (and they even throw in lunch). If any of my loyal and patient readers are there, be sure to come up and say hello.

There is a thread on Edward Tufte’s website about the use of IVR systems. I take an atypical view on this – I think that consumers have a completely unrealistic expectation of telephone customer service. It’s just too expensive to provide. Progressive companies need to come up with other support channels, or better still they need to come up with products and services that don’t need as much handholding.

The video of the talk by Suw Charman in Trinity College in cooperation with the TCD Legal Workshop is now available.

Part 1 – Begins with introductions by Eoin O’Dell.

Part 2 begins with TJ McIntyre in full flight.

Thanks to Ole for sorting out the video!

Digital Rights Ireland has invited Suw Charman of ORG to Dublin to meet and to speak on the topic of government and privacy in a digital age. Come see her this evening at 6.30 pm in TCD. We know the notice is short but please come and give us your support.

I’m at an NSAI meeting today about the future of standards for wireless LAN. Basically, the issue is this. There are two proposals, one from the Chinese (called WAPI) and another from the West (802.11i, proposed by the UK). These have to be voted on at the relevant international standards body, and ICTSCC has to make a recommendation about how Ireland should vote.

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The aspoke.com initial offer has been a big success and we’ve sold a lot of laptop skins! We’ve also had an opportunity to work through our production systems. We’ve improved our printing system and introduced new finishing procedures, so the product is getting better and better all the time.

Our initial special offer (EUR 18 including taxes and post and packing anywhere in the world) ends this weekend. The price will go up to around 27 euros. So go on, if you’ve been thinking about it, get your order in now!

Adrian Weckler makes some observations about how grans and kids are getting ripped off on pre-paid mobiles.

In fact, the appeal of the prepay phone isn’t the cost. People don’t buy prepay because it’s cheap. They buy it because:

– they are unbanked/have no credit.

– they want to keep control of how much they are spending on their bill. (this is at least part of the reason why average revenue for prepay customers is higher than for billpay).

– they don’t want a printed bill arriving at their home, for whatever reason.

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Dublin City Council has a pretty decent planning permission search service. It’s been around for a while, but the user interface has really improved over the last few months. There are still some difficulties accessing the scanned documents that accompany every application, but it’s definitely getting better. The software comes from a company called SwiftLG

Digital Rights Ireland is looking for your support. We urgently need money to support our work. We’ve achieved a lot so far, but we need your help to go further. Go to the DRI ‘Support’ page to make a donation.

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