EirePreneur

No Experience Required but a Fund worthy idea would be nice!

So Thursday night is the new entrepreneurship night on RTE TV. I was looking forward to The Fund but didn't really expect too much of No Experience Required. As it turned out The Fund was quite boring with not a single knock-out idea on show while No Experience Required was unexpectedly entertaining and even saw two of the Advertising Creative wannabes jetting off to Malta to research a billboard campaign. Tough life, eh?

You've got to wonder though if RTE made enough advance effort to get the word out about The Fund. With a €25,000 prize on offer I was amazed at the poor ideas paraded infront of the judges. Ok, not every good business idea needs to have wow factor but I was at least expecting one that would give me 'now why didn't I think of that?' envy.

By the way, RTE are at this very moment (1 to 2 pm Friday 3rd March) hosting a live webchat with career adviser Mike Fiszer who prepped each candidate before interview on last night's episode of No Experience Required. Congrats to RTE on showing embracing the web just a little more.

An Irishman in Spain, the adventure continues...

Kaycee and his girlfriend are finally on the road to Spain

"Saturday, we´ve hit the road and shot through Holland
(enjoyed that) and Belgium (wet and miserable) until
we reach Northern France.

Back in monolinguland I rack my brain for my store of
French, learned in secondary school and even in
college, but mostly forgotten. The fact that I´ve been
learning Spanish recently has, I´m convinced been
pushing French expressions out of my mind too.
In the town of St Quentin, I muddle through some
formalities with the campsite guardian and Mel and I
settle down to make our first meal. When we finish and
go outside for a wander, we discover it´s dark, the
office is closed and so are all the gates. We´re
imprisoned behind low level locked gates operated by
swipe cards, of wich we have none."

Keep up with the adventures of an Irishman travelling through Spain on Irish In Spain.

Astonishing image of Ireland

This is, without doubt, the most beautiful map of Ireland I've ever seen. Be sure to download the astonishing 4Mb full size image for full effect..

I find it fascinating to correlate the image with the this rainfall one from Met Eireann which confirms the (relatively) dry microclimate we enjoy here in a major area of county Limerick, in the rain shadow of surrounding hills as dramatically emphasised by the Earth Observatory image. I regularly observe rain and mist clinging to those hills while completely avoiding us here in the basin.

Doc Searls coming to Dublin

So Doc Searls is coming to Ireland for ICT Expo. I hope he's there the same day as me!

ICT Expo 2004, here I come!

I haven't attended the ICT Expo in Dublin since 2000 so yesterday I decided that it was time to revisit the RDS for this year's event.

The only thing that has put me off for the last three years is the long return journey from my little corner in the south west of Ireland. As my first sacrifice in starting my own business was to sell my car the choice for me has been between an 8 hour return journey via bus or a combination of bus and train.

This year I wirelessly enabled my laptop by getting a bluetooth dongle that can speak with my Nokia 3650. Its a great combination that allows me to do much of my work from pretty much anywhere in the country, which would ease my mind about spending a day on the road. But I'm still a rather impatient traveller.

Having observed, over a number of months, Aer Arann's apparent monopolisation of the Irish Examiner's front page it occured to me that I might at last have a reasonable alternative. And much to my delight I was able to book a return flight from Kerry Airport yesterday for only EUR 69.90 return. That's only a small premium over a train fare, and the airport at Farranfore is quicker to reach than the train station in Limerick.

The only downside was in the final stage of the booking procedure on Aer Arann's website. After submitting my credit card details and clicking on the process button my browser remained in some kind of endless loop. The instructions advised that it could take anything up to a minute, and petitioned my patience, but when I came back a half hour later, after tea, and saw the browser status bar still transferring data I decided that enough was enough and closed it down.

I was of course using my new browser of choice - Firefox - so it could have been a bug. But I've generally found the software rock solid so I'm loath to make it a scapegoat. Anyway, all it took was one phone call to Aer Arann customer service this morning to verify that my booking had indeed been taken and to get a plain text copy of my 'ticket' sent to my email. Yes, Aer Arann 'is a ticketless airline, therefore, you will be required to present your reference number at check-in.'

So here's looking forward to a great ICT Expo 2004 and an enjoyable round trip.

Luggage-free travel

I previously suggested that there might be a business in taking the hassle out of travelling with luggage bags. Today's Sunday Times tells us about Luggagefree, a company who grokked the idea before me, even if their service is for more affluent travellers than I was imagining.

Customers phone an order to have their luggage shipped. Then they don’t see it again until they arrive at the beach, ski resort or wherever else they may be headed. They don’t have to cart their bags around the airport, wait for them at a conveyor belt and open them for security.

Now that's the way I'd like to travel!