There can be only ONE!

Published on December 4, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Anyone who knows me know that I firmly believe that in the end, there will only be one - one device that is and that it will be the mobile phone - the one true convergent device - one device to rule them all! Anyone who thinks otherwise, is just plain daft and out of their tree. The proof? If any proof is needed, you need only look at the iPhone - bah, rubbish, I hear you cry, it doesn’t do MMS, Copy and paste and lots more, but that’s not my point - the point is that the iPhone today is more powerful that the first bondi coloured iMacs that came out 10 years ago. Don’t believe me - see this comparison here - iphone wins on all counts. Taking that a step further and future-casting, the phone you will have in you pocket in 10 years time will be more powerful than the desktop or laptop you are reading this blog on today, it will connect with your bluetooth keyboard so you don’t have to type on a small device (that is, if typing is still the preferred input method!) or else it will project it’s own keyboard like itech’s Virtual keyboard (see here). But what about the display, well, as of today, you won’t have to be squinting at your tiny screen either - the first mobile phone with integrated projector is now available…The Lanye N70 - complete with it’s iPhone rip-off menus.

You can actually buy this phone here for just $345 and although it needs two batteries to perform it’s projection trick at the moment, that’s sure to change. So you heard it hear first - in 2018 all we will carry is our iPhone like device and that’s it - at work, at home, at play. It will store and manage your entire digital life, project it’s screen to make it sufficently large not to loose your eyesight, and provide you with an appropriate input mechanism. Someone’s over at the now defunct www.inewidea.com already had a mock-up attempt at this, but I think they missed the screen bit, but worth a look all the same…

Can I call myself a futurist now?

Talk to Entreprenuers? Me?

Published on November 13, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

On the 1st of November, I was asked to give a talk to an Enterprise Start course run in the Enterprise Acceleration Centre (where MobaNode has its offices). First reaction was that I was happy to be asked (even after I found out I was second choice to Jan Blanchard of Tourist Republic, who says he had to go to a wedding - yeah right! ). Second questions was why me? I’ve only been at this Entrepreneur stuff for a year or so, and what lessons do I have to impart? However, I agreed nonetheless and had to get my thoughts together to what I was going to tell this audience of 18 or so start-up business hopefuls and how I was going to fill my hour slot! Here, in summary, is what I told them…

  1. Support - Get support on your side early. Friends and family are a given, if you don’t have them on-board you might as well stop immediately. For support, I meant many of the support structures that are out there - Enterprise Ireland, City and County Enterprise boards etc. As much a we (in the tech community) moan and groan about ‘em, they are very useful for funding, networking, introductions, profile building and mentor-ship. Sure, they don’t always hit the mark, you can get stuck with the development advisor from hell and you could loose the will to live filling in their forms, but the supports they give can be very useful, and could mean the difference between stating or not, hiring an extra employee or not etc. Very importantly, get to know your main contact in any of these bodies before you need to ask them for money - it’s crucial that they understand you and your business. You wouldn’t walk in to meet you bank manager for the first time and say “Hi, how’s it going, can I have €30k”?
  2. Network - network like hell. Get out there, attend events and meetings in your space. It is cringing sometime to walk up to strangers and say “hi - my name is Shane”, but you never know where you might meet your next customer/client/partner/financier. Look around, there’s many meet-ups happening everywhere, some organised, some un-organised, but many worthwhile. Key points though -  do network - don’t stand at the bar talking to your mates (I’m pretty guilty of this though sometimes!), have an exit plan - if you get stuck in the conversation from hell, have a slick exit planned “Excuse me, but there’s an investor over there I must grab” and the key one - if the event is rubbish, quit, quit early, and get back to work! Use online netwroking tools too - LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter, Blogs, FaceBook etc.
  3. Explore your market - not from the pages of a book, or Enterprise Ireland’s research library, or on the Internet - get out there, put some shoe leather down, and talk to your customers. See what they think of your product, what they are looking for, what they would pay for it etc. Real world market research!
  4. Once launched, or ready to talk about your product, PR the hell out of it. Journalists are lazy, so if you hand them nearly complete copy, chances are they will only be too happy to run your story - particularly if it is a STORY - not just a product placement or PR guff.
  5. Learn to do the things you can do, or like to do and outsource all others - especially the stuff that you are crap at, or that takes you too long - there are plenty  of people out there who can do it better, cheaper and faster than you. Use sites like odesk and elance to recruit virtual workers. As a start-up you do have to be a “jack of all trades” but not “master of all” - there is help out there.
  6. Get your proof of concept out there as quick as possible - THIS is your market validation - not some glossy biz plan that says “you are going to be number 1 in your market”! Don’t be afraid to to show up with something incomplete, chances are, if you wait till all features are perfect, you’ve missed your opportunity. Always be in beta, always be improving your service/product.
  7. Opportunities are there, even in a recession. Some of the best (Tech) companies were started in recession - Apples, Microsoft etc…but don’t take my word for it, Paul Graham wrote an excellent blog post on it and you can read it here

So, they were my top tips, I hope they went down well - please comment and add you own start up tips if you have them. Ronan Skehill from mobile start-up YourPinPoints.com made some nice comments on his blog about it…so glad to see someone got something out of it.

Dancing on the street corner…

Published on October 21, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Courtesy of Hope the (very big) dog’s blog from the cool guys at Modern Green (hello Steve, Gavin, JB the DJ and Amanda), I came across this Elbow video. In the video, a guy standing on the street corner does some great tricks with a “Condos for Sale” placard. While Hope thinks that all placard folks should do this, I kinda liken this guys antics with some of the retail bluetooth deployments I’ve seen - to quote Shakespeare - “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. What’s the point in having to wait to download and install an application on your phone, and then to have to browse through it to find that you’ve got a token for a free coffee with your sandwich and all you came in for was a pint (litre these days) of milk!

Mobile media is all about content. Provide targeted, relevant, location aware content and people will use it even if it’s branded. Send just ads, and people will do what they do with their TV’s - change channel, or turn it off. In the bluetooth world the customer has the power to choose - so give them what they want - not what you think they need.

By the way - buy the Elbow album “The Seldom seen Kid” - it’s superb…

Work from accross the corridor…

Published on October 20, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Back in my previous life at Magnetictime we shared the top floor of a building with an email marketing firm called Narragansett Technologies and we shared the odd water cooler moment and a couple of games of darts (yeah - fooseball tables are old school, Darts are the latest tech craze!). Out of MagneticTime, and 1 year on in MobaNode and our paths have crossed again. Chris Byrne, Narragansett’s founder came to me with a few collaborative ideas and 2 weeks ago, Dave Ewing from Narragansett used a MobaNode Node whilst giving a presentation during the Irish Internet Association’s conference entitled “Word of Mouse”. Dave used the node to deliver a wap push to an online survey form. Chris Byrne, has written a guest blog post over on the IIA site - click here for link, but here’s the post in full…

A guest post from Chris Byrne in Sensorpro about a new way to serve feedback surveys at conferences.

For the Irish Internet Association (IIA) Word of Mouse conference, we needed a slick way to get attendee feedback.  As a survey vendor, it’s a simple task to deploy a survey with all the bells and whistles you would expect, like via email, popup, link, twitter post or embedded in a blog - but on this occasion we wanted something a little different. We wanted audience reaction in real-time without the expense and hassle of gizmos.  So how about Bluetooth then?  After all, many in the audience had a gizmo already – a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone (or cell phone, if you prefer!) Thanks to a snappy response from Shane at Mobanode we had our survey deployed on his Bluetooth box in minutes.  As soon as we hit the “fire” button, the survey was deployed to 23 phones with just 1 rejection - not a shabby response rate! Roseanne from IIA was live twittering - so she had the twitter world peeking over her shoulder. Not only did this method garner dynamic feedback from the immediate audience - but also picked up twitter eavesdroppers with the browser link. If you want to try  event feedback that is different, is relevant and a gizmo that actually works - then try this.

Thanks Chris for coming to MobaNode with the idea and we’re looking forward to working on some future cool stuff with you…

No speak since June…what’s up?

Published on October 15, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

This blog has been pretty quiet since June. I’d like to say that the reason it’s been so quiet is that I’ve been kicking back, relaxing and generally enjoying life in a place such as this…

…but in reality, life’s been far from a beach and more like this…

…but thankfully so. It’s been a busy summer for MobaNode with things really kicking off business-wise and hence no time to fill in and update this blog. However, and this is probably a HUGE crime in the Blogosphere, but I’m going to try to address this gap by “back-filling” the blog - SHOCK, GASP, HORROR! It’s not that I’m making stuff up, but rather, I would like to chronologically fill the blog back in to make up for the gaps and keep it as a “LOG” of what MobaNode has been up to. What events we have done, interesting stuff we have seen, and what lies in-store for MobaNode in the future.

So, if I may be so bold, the entries after June 11th (Yo! Inspriation) will all be “back-filled” now, and then normal (if indeed sporadic blogging is normal) service will resume I promise…

Yo! Inspiration…

Published on June 11, 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

There’s nothing better than meeting someone who’s done it! Business I mean! Recently I went along to a talk by Simon Woodruff of Yo! Sushi and Dragon’s Den fame.

Very impressive indeed. Enterprise Ireland sponsored this event, which was a surprise, and even better, it was on my doorstep here in Limerick. What wasn’t a surprise was that the EI guys messed up the projector just before Simon arrived and their collective brains couldn’t fix it! However, Simon’s talk was much the better for it, as are most talks without silly presentation material - it was off-the-cuff, polished, he worked the room and was animated and exciting. I’d highly recommend anyone to go to see Simon if he’s “playing” at a venue near you. Some of his wise words I jotted down -

Successful people work hard - but annoyingly some don’t…

Successful people don’t succeed all the time…

Passion is no longer good enough - you have to be outrageous, different and creative…

The more “ticks of failures” you have, the closer you are to success…

Search all the parks and streets in all the land, you won’t find a single statue to a committe…

Life is what happens when you are busy doing other things…(I think it was Lennon who said that)

After closing the deal to sell Yo! Sushi, the lawyers suddenly turned into people…

“CANI” - Constant and Never-ending Innovation

In the future, what you stand for, will be every bit as important as your product and price…

You can read as many books on business as Amazon can shove through your letter box, but for me, nothing beats meeting and hearing from people who have been there, done that, and bought the T-Shirt.

The Evolution of the Mobile…

Published on May 28, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Conor O’Neil of Louder Voice (www.loudervoice.com) pointed this one out to me, and it’s well worth watching. The video highlights the evolution of the mobile from 1985 until today, illustrating all the key milestones along the way. It’s an amazing testament to an industry that didn’t exist 23 years ago, and has now spawned thousands of companies, giving employment to hundreds of thousands of people, and more importantly - connectivity, closeness and a voice to over half the worlds population.

Required watching for anyone in the mobile space…

Material Girl thinks mobile is the future too…

Published on May 6, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Madonna, somewhat of a serial earlier adopter in my view, and although heading towards her fifties, shows she’s in touch with her audience by doing a live concert from New York, available exclusively via mobile.

Press Release -

Madonna fans in the UK and 13 other countries will be able to watch her perform live in in New York - on their mobile phone.

Streamed live from the Roseland Ballroom, exclusively outside the US to Vodafone customers, the concert celebrates the release of the pop queen’s new album, Hard Candy.

Wednesday’s performance will be the first time Madonna plays live songs from her new album.

Vodafone customers in Cyprus, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Romania, South Africa, Spain and the UK will have access to the show via their mobile phones on Vodafone live! and streamed via their PCs at www.vodafone.com/music.

They will also be able to interact with other online show-goers and select camera angles to move around the stage to get the best view.

“Offering millions of fans around the world live, interactive access to a unique, intimate Madonna show is a powerful way to showcase a new album,” said John Reid of Warner Music Europe.

Madonna’s latest hit, 4 Minutes, featuring Justin Timberlake, stayed at the top spot in The Official UK Charts Company’s singles chart this week.

The concert went out a few days ago, and is still available to view on some operators portals. The carriers said it was the first time a live concert was broadcast simultaneously on mobile around the globe as fans sang along in unison at the venue. The four songs performed by Madonna have also been archived on Verizon Wireless’ Vcast Performances channel, which will be available to Verizon Wireless customers throughout the month. Exclusive video footage of Madonna, Timbaland and Justin Timberlake’s remix recording session is also available on the carrier’s video service.

Wonder would she like to send video highlights out via Bluetooth at her concerts? If so Madonna, you have my details…

You didn’t come all this way to watch TV now did ya?

Published on April 9, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Spotted an interesting review in the Sunday Times In Gear section this weekend (here). Joseph Dunn writes -

One of most irritating ironies of going to live sporting events is that you would probably have got a better view if you’d stayed at home in front of the television.

and I couldn’t agree more. When attending a live sporting event, or any event for that matter, you’re there for the atmosphere, the sense of occasion, the camaraderie of the gathered fans and the spectacle of it all. Indeed for some it is just the case of saying that they’ve “been there”, but for most it’s a shared experience. However, as Joseph Dunn points out - what you gain from the live experience, you loose out in the detail. Yes there are big screens to relive moments, but they aren’t great at the detail either when you’re a rugby pitch away. To solve this problem, and the subject of Joseph Dunn’s column, a Canadian firm Kangaroo TV (www.kangaroo.tv) has come up with a handheld gadget that receives live broadcasts in a venue. These units are available to hire for the duration of an event and show live feeds of the action along with various info and data too.

My take on this? Great idea, good concept and very much a plus for some sports e.g. Formula 1 where much of the action takes place out of sight. But, for most sports and events it begs the question - “You didn’t come all this way to watch TV now did ya?”

However, highlights and other action, delivered directly to fans mobiles, before, during and after the event so that they can be relived, kept (not rented) and shared with friends - now that would be something! Then again, I would say that!

Digital Ireland: Generation Mobile

Published on March 28, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Great piece in this month’s Digital Ireland supplement with the Irish Independent entitled Generation Mobile by Marie Boran. It leads off -

We are the connected generation, the information generation, and the mobile handset is both our lifeline and our badge of honour. Without our mobiles we feel loss, that something’s missing; our connection to the people we love, the world we live and work in and our means of staying informed and entertained.

Our mobiles are an expression of self. At once they are a fashion item, an expression of status and wealth and power.

Very soon there will be more mobile devices in the world than people. Entire industries will feed this device, from finance and banking to art, media and entertainment.

The mobile generation is right here, right now. Are you ready?

The full article is too large to reprint here, but you can read it here on the Silicon Republic website.

There’s some great people interviewed for this article - John Herlihy of Google, Travis Katz of My Space, John O’Shea of Zamano, the mercurial Pat Phelan of Cubic Telecom, Rachel Channing of 3 and of course yours truly (hence this post!). Here are some of my mutterings amongst this esteemed company -

Of all these players, the iPhone is the one that has changed the nature of the game and not because everyone is using it, says Shane McAllister, CEO of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi marketing firm, Mobanode.

“It alone, more than any other phone, has sparked thousands of ‘the future of mobile’ debates.
“It changed the game by pairing your phone with your computer, creating the mindset of a phone as an upgradeable, feature-rich device. Heretofore, you bought a phone, kept it for a yearor two and then upgraded to the latest model.”

and

“Android will certainly impact the industry and lead to innovative applications, but its effect on the consumer will be harder to gauge,” says McAllister.

“Most people stick with what they are given – hence Windows proliferates in the desktop world despite more robust and user-friendly alternatives like Linux or Mac OS X.”

and lastly, and getting in the final word as I do -

“Humans are social animals, we love to talk, interact and communicate, and anything that facilitates that will succeed: it is the social tool of choice,” says McAllister.

“The mobile started off as a business tool, but now with a mobile penetration in Ireland of 114pc, it is ubiquitous and essential.

“The personal nature of the device, coupled with its portability and small size, means it has impacted people’s’ lives more than any other previous technology.”

I hope these quotes stood up to scrutiny! Thanks once again to Marie for the coverage.