EirePreneur

Killing two birds with one blogger

Marqui recently generated quite a hubub in the blogosphere with its paid blogging program. And while they may be achieving their objectives in getting huge blogflow I agree with other commentators that this marketing technique will be a short lived success. Novelty is a large factor on this occasion but there's something all too false and forced about it. I don't think its sustainable.

Much better is the approach taken by Irish company Nooked who recently hired software developer and high flow blogger Diego Doval on a contract basis. Perhaps Nooked hired Doval on foot of his excellent programming credentials alone but, as a company who provide an RSS publishing service for corporate communications and PR professionals, I think they're being fiendishly clever in realising that they are not only availing of the services of a great technologist but also a great marketeer who might instantly leverage his own blog flow to the advantage of his new 'sponsor'.

I may be wrong of course but if you had a choice between two equally skilled programmers, one with a large link cosmos and one without, which would you employ? Of course! In fact I have a business idea of my own that I'm going to be running by Diego very shortly. If we come to an agreement then I'll expect to kill the two birds of programming and marketing with one blogger.

Email is broken? Nonsense! It was never more useful

On the same day that I installed the Mozilla Thuderbird 1.0 email client, I discovered that our Gmail account has been POP enabled. I don't need all the features of Thunderbird, such as RSS aggregation (which I still outsource to Bloglines), but I will be using it instead of Outlook Express from now on. That decision follows three months of using Mozilla Firefox exclusively for my internet browsing. More and more I'm becoming less and less dependent on Microsoft's software in the running of our business.

Gmail has also been a huge productivity boost for myself and my business partner in Louisiana. We share a single customer support POP address, based on our domain address, but before Gmail came along we found that

1. It was very difficult to track who had responded to which customers, even by BBC'ing all the time which just led to extreemely messy inboxes.
2. Spam had become a nightmare, demanding huge amounts of screening time every day.

Gmail solves problem (1) with its conversations paradigm. This makes an incredible difference to how we deal with customer support and follow ups. Either one of us can jump in at any point in the conversation without overstepping the other and in full knowledge of all foregoing discussion.

But the solution to problem (2) is the one that clinches it for us. I'm amazed that more hasn't been written about Gmail's brilliant spam filters. I can honestly say that it's artificial intelligence is more accurate at detecting SPAM than my human so-called intelligence! Ok, so it has the advantage of reading the whole email whereas I used to make a decision based on the headers alone but still it's uncanny how precise it is. We did have quite a few false positives in the beginning but I would say that now it's at least 99% accurate. Yes, really. Let's put it this way - Spam has become a non-issue for our business. And only a few months ago I could have only dreamed of that as a Christmas present.

Most of the time the Gmail web interface, because it's so cleverly coded, is pefectly useful for our needs but the new Gmail POP download feature is a very welcome addition for remote working. Not only can I now use Thunderbird to work offline with my Gmail but, even more productively, I'll be able to use the excellent ProfiMail on my Nokia 3650 (soon to be 6630) to auto-check for new items in the inbox and notify me with an audible alert.

So, forget all this talk about email being broken - with the right tools and services it's never been more useful.

Marc's voice is coming from Galway

Marc Canter is currently blogging about FOAF from Galway, where there are "lots of fresh faced Irish semantic engineers" apparently.

Software Startup: reality blog

Lachlan "I don't link much" Gemmel seems like a reluctant blogger and could do with loosening up a bit but nevertheless his Software Startup blog should be interesting to follow.

"I've quit my day job and put aside a year or two to develop and sell a software product. If you've thought about doing something similar check back with me every so often and learn from my inevitable mistakes."

Sounds like another 'reality blog' which makes it all the more promising. Should be compulsive 'viewing' for software entrepreneurs.

Mobile Olympics News

It's amazing what kind of web service a good programmer can throw together in a few hours nowadays. Take the excellent mOlympics - a mobile olympics news aggregator from Russell Beattie for example. Works wonderfully on my WAP 2.0 endowed Nokia 3650 such that I can filter just the news of Irish atheletes if I wish. Mind you I've already tired of reading about Cathal Lombard :(

Opening out semacode to all MMS phones?

Simon Woodside of Semacode.org points to the Wired News article about his mobile phone barcode reading software. One point made in the article that really struck me was -

"Complicating matters, the Semacode reader currently runs on only a handful of Nokia camera phones that use the Symbian Series 60 operating system. Moreover, the reader does not support the WAP browsers that ship with most camera phones. ("It would be a usability debacle," Woodside said.) That means most users will have to install a full HTML browser -- either Opera or Doris, depending on the phone -- at additional cost."

But I wonder why can't the Semacode reader be a webservice? All cameraphones support MMS, right? So you could just send your barcode snap to the Semacode webservice which would then WAP Push the associated URL. This would get over the the two obstacles mentioned in the article would it not?

Or am I missing something here?

clevercactus share

Congratulations to Irish blogger Diego Doval and the team at clevercactus on launching Share, "a private and secure environment to share files with people you know. It is simple, easy to use and, best of all, it's free!"

I look forward to learning more about it after Diego has had some sleep. I might even download it and give it a spin.

Open source software for a frugal business

It goes without saying that every small business entrepreneur should look for cost savings wherever possible. Strangely though, as obvious as that advice may be, its all too often ignored when it comes to software. Why do so many of us pay so much for software of which we'll only ever use a fraction of the features? Especially when there are cheaper or even free alternatives?

Bernie Goldbach explains today how Tipperary Institute saved at least EUR 20,000 of subscription fees on open source online distance education software. And just yesterday I made a proportionally similar saving myself!

For the last few years I have, no doubt, caused my business partner in Louisiana endless frustration by not giving into her exhortations to buy Microsoft Excel. I'm no anti-Microsoft zealot but I just don't see the point in paying a premium for hundreds of features I'll never use. The only reason I have Microsoft Word is because it came pre-loaded on my PC!

But yesterday I downloaded OpenOffice, a very fine open source alternative with word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing modules. It's a hefty download at more than 60MB but well worth the wait, even over a 56kbps dial-up!

Its early days yet but so far I'm more than impressed. I've already been able to draw up very useful trend graphs based on our website statistics without having once to refer to the online help. I'll post regular updates on my progress with the various modules.

And my business partner? She still can't believe I'm such a cheapskate but at least now she's happy she can share her fancy projections ;-)