Thoughts on starting a new tech business in Ireland
For those that give out about how crappy the camera is on the iPhone, then ditch it altogether and get your finger out instead and you might just get published! Here’s a video of an amazing illustration by artist Jorge Colombo who drew this entire New Yorker cover using Brushes for the iPhone, a $4.99 drawing app.
You can see more of Jorge’s work here... and even buy limited prints here…
Getting a new website sorted is pretty hard, it always takes a back burner to any projects, especially the paying ones, and in the end it drags on and on. Hence, the current MobaNode site is out of date, text heavy and most importantly doesn’t showcase the Mobile content work we’ve created for clients. In an attempt to address this, I’ll drop the MobaNode showreel in here so at least here is some eye-candy to look at…
MobaNode Mobile Content Demo Reel from Shane Mc Allister on Vimeo.
This clip, excuse my video capabilities, demo’s some of the mobile content campaigns that MobaNode has been involved in.
The new website is under construction and hopefully will be up live soon enough to better showcase our work. In the meantime, enjoy the content above.
I had previously posted a neat video showing the evolution of the Mobile over the years (click here) but here is a site with a great rundown of the key phones produced between 1983 and 2009.
Amazing to see the advances, and also to see what we took as “state of the art” at the time. Running down through the models, it seems that I have owned 17 of the phones featured - so does that make me a mobile junkie? Thankfully the day job allows me to pass off this habit as a business expense! Enjoy the nostalgia…
Just downloaded the wordpress plugin for my iPhone. I’m hoping that this will allow me to more frequently post as for me, blogging is a downtime activity and I seem to be having less and less downtime these days. Hence the iPhone app should enable me to post during my “dwell” times - on a train, plane, in traffic, waiting for someone/something or indeed anywhere you like - and I’m not going to divulge where I am now as I write this! 
Looking forward to testing the power of it!
Microsoft came out with this vision of the future. Great promotional video, great concepts, so if they can dream this stuff up, why do they spend all their time tinkering with versions of Windows and Office?
Please Microsoft - stop developing updates to crap we don’t need, shut down all current product lines, keep a skeleton staff to man the support lines (okay - slightly larger than skeleton I agree) and go off and instead of 1 Microsoft, create 40 start-ups who can think quietly, act decisevly and dream it all up again!!
As an update to my earlier post on the T-Mobile Flash Mob style Advert in Liverpool St station, it would seem that Life imitates Art imitating Life on February 9th when Liverpool Street Station was forced to close for around 90 minutes after being over-run by dancers mimicking the T-Mobile “dance” television ad. According to reports, more than 13,000 people congregated on the station concourse for a silent disco at 7pm, organised through Facebook.
The flashmob prompted police to close the station for fears of overcrowding, and some arrests were made for public order offences. People had travelled from all around the country to be part of the event, and the concourse was so congested that there was very little room for participants to dance. Some climbed on top of ticket office machines and notice boards to perform their routines, while one man stripped naked on a raised platform to cheers from the other dancers.
Here’s the link to the Facebook page for this - click here. At present it has over 17 thousand members, and the next silent Flash Mob is set for Trafalgar Square! All in good fun eh - except if you missed your train home?
CNN has an article here - click here.
Yep - this has been posted on the web a few times recently, but on MobaNode’s two recent visits to London recently, it was everywhere - the CBS digital screens in the underground were hoofing the video out. Anyway, a great traditional Media take up of Flash Mobs influence…Here’s the T Mobile ad as it ran…
So the ad itself is pretty good, but more interesting is all the underlying preparatory work that went into it -
On a personal note, a good friend of mine who does “hedge” stuff with money in London was thrilled to be accidentally part of the action. Not so thrilled however when T-Mobile timestamped the video as 11am and he had already told his bosses “look what happened me on the way into work” - oh the perils of social media!!
Barack Obama loves his Blackberry, Gordon Brown loves his Nokia as seen in this clip from Davos when Mr. Brown was speaking at the opening of the World Economic Forum and he was rudely interrupted….by his own phone!
When asked who was calling “I’m not telling!” he replied. I bet you it wasn’t Brian Cowen anyway, our esteemed Taoiseach probably uses a payphone to get through to the switchboard of Downing Street - I doubt he has a direct line to Gordon!
Over the Christmas Web 2.0 came of age - why, how, On what basis do I make this statement? Was it mass adoption? No. Was it mentioned by Pat Kenny? No. Did my mother understand what it was? Definitely No. Did people divert all their banking stocks into .com shares? No. What really triggered it was seen on my breakfast table and captured below…(excuse the out of focus photo - iPhone is not great at Macro pics)
A little hard to read perhaps in the above picture, but here we have Pat the Baker’s Bread in conjunction with Bebo and Muzu.tv (well done Mark and Ciaran) - what a combination! Old school sliced bread meets social networking and (legal) online video - who’d have thought! Pat the Baker have jumped into Web 2.0 and there’s been lots of chat on the interweb about it (see Damien Mulley’s post here), but whether good or bad, worth it or not, one thing’s for sure - Web 2.0 was on my breakfast table, and that’s gotta be a good thing for all of us.
Christmas is here and it’s time to say thanks for some clients who have been good to MobaNode over the year - so what to give? I know we’re in the middle of a recession, and Christmas parties have been cancelled and all that, but still you’ve got to say thanks right? So, what to give? Hampers? Too impersonal and 30% is crap stuff anyway. Chocolates? A bit stingy! I’d have liked to give tech stuff, someone said iPod Touches but c’mon, this is a start-up, not Amazon.com! So it boiled down to the old favorite - Booze!! But not any old booze - MobaNode does things in style and hence “Chateau Moba” was born (or grown, cultivated, whatever…)
For those lucky few, you will be receiving a Case of these rare vintages. If you didn’t receive a whole case and maybe only a bottle or two, then don’t complain, just give me more work next year and I’ll take care of you! Enjoy and Happy Christmas…