Hans Rosling gave the opening address at the 2007 it@cork Technology in Business Conference.
His talk was incredibly eye opening as the Trendalyzer software he developed shows how the world is “double inversely logarithmically unjust”.
Watch and enjoy!
I gave a talk at the it@cork Green IT event yesterday entitled “Reducing your Costs and your Carbon Footprint”.
The talk goes into some detail on how Cork Internet eXchange, the cork-based data centre I am a director of, achieves hyper energy efficiency.
It is also worth noting that tomorrow’s OpenCoffee session is in CIX. Hope to see you there.
We held our Open Day in CIX a couple of weeks back. We invited local businesses to come in and have a look at the data centre infrastructure before we closed up all the ducts and hazardous areas.
We also invited Intruders.tv to come along and film the event. They did and they published the interview they did with Adam and I the other day.
http://new.intruders.tv/swf/flvplayer.swf
The Open day was the day after the it@cork conference so I was quite tired. Watching the video now I realise I messed up on some of the figures! Typical data centres operate at 30% energy efficiency (not 70% like I said in the video) and CIX is rated to operate at 80% energy efficiency due to the innovative technologies we outlined in this interview.
Last Wednesday I had the very great pleasure of collecting Prof. Hans Rosling from the airport to bring him to the it@cork conference (where he kicked off the day with an inspirational presentation).
In the car, on the way to the conference though Prof Rosling made a comment which I thought was extremely unusual for a university professor. We were discussing someone he knew who has been successful despite not having finished his formal education when he said “Education only hampers learning”!
I think it is safe to say this is quite an unconventional view for a professional educator!
I am back in Cork after the Eventoblog conference in Seville over the weekend.
Now I am helping with last-minute preparations for the it@cork conference. It is on this coming Wednesday and it is going to be a real ‘wow!’ event. Apart from the incredible speakers that are lined up, the delegate list is like a who’s who of the techosphere in Ireland. The networking opportunities are going to be superb.
If you plan on going and you haven’t registered yet, do it asap in case you unwittingly miss out!
The Eventoblog conference was great. I didn’t understand most of the talks (my excuse is that they were in Spanish!!!) but I had a fantastic time meeting the Spanish blogging community and the social events which were laid on were excellent.
I’m slightly less terrified about moving to Spain now!
[Disclosure – I’m the Chair of the it@cork conference organising committee]
A big congrats to Pat Phelan and the Cubic lads on Cubic Telecom’s winning the it@cork Leaders Award in the Emerging Company category.
Pat was up against some very stiff competition and I am glad I wasn’t involved in the judging ‘cos I know Tom Keane of Nitrosell and Paul and Frank from YouGetItBack as well as Pat and any of them would have been a great choice for the award.
The Awards night was a fantastic success and I think I can safely say that this is set to become an annual event.
Other winners on the night include Treemetrics, TCH, and Abtran.
John Collins did a really professional job as MC – his look back over the last 10 years brought waves of nostalgia.
If I had to criticise anything about the night it would be that the talks dragged a bit in the middle of the evening but this was due to the fact that it was a double celebration, the Awards and the 10th anniversary of it@cork’s inception. As such this is unlikely to be an issue in the next nine Awards nights!
[Disclosure – I am on the Steering Committee of it@cork and Pat is a client of mine]
These next few weeks and months are manic busy.
I think I need to clone me!
I see Jaiku were bought by Google yesterday. What is Jaiku? Jaiku is what Twitter would be if it worked reliably and had neat functionality. I’m delighted for them.
If you don’t currently have a Jaiku account then you may be out of luck because in the notification email sent out by Jaiku last night they said:
In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now. But fear not! All our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will continue to be able to invite your friends to Jaiku.
I’m not sure what happens to people who are invited in this period, do they go into a holding pattern, or are they left in but the amount of invites is limited. The faq is no help there.
This is great play by Google who are demonstrating that they have their finger on the pulse. I can’t wait to see what other announcements they are going to make in this space – Robert Scoble is hinting at big news in the Orkut arena in early November.
Jyri Engstrom, Jaiku’s founder gave a great talk at Reboot and I tried to get him to come to speak at the it@cork conference this November. Unfortunately he was busy (now I can see why!). Maybe next year Jyri!
As Chair of the organising committee for this year’s it@cork Technology in Business Conference, I’m delighted to announce that the program has been announced and registrations are now open.
The conference is on the 28th of November in the Radisson, Little Island. This year’s theme is Connect and Innovate and we have a spectacular line-up of speakers including
Early registrants will have their name entered into a draw for free copies of Wikinomics.
This morning one of it@cork‘s members forwarded us an email conversation he had with John Burns, Monster‘s Business Development Manager in Ireland. We were incredulous when we read it.
It started with an email from Monster’s John Burns to 189 recipients and CC’d to our member (!). Our member replied to John that this was spam and
…coming from Monster, most unprofessional. Worse, you exposed everyone’s email address to one another without their permission
Unbelievably for someone working in an online organisation, Monster’s John Burns seems to be unaware of the data protection legislation and responded to this saying:
These email addresses are part of a networking list from http://www.itcork.ie and are all available for everyone to see.
I do appreciate your concern chris, (i will keep my eye out for the bloggers!!!)
The legislation surrounding this kind of behaviour is very clear, data can only be used for the purposes for which it is obtained. We in it@cork were obviously naive in publishing the members directory (since taken offline) but that doesn’t confer on anyone permission to harvest that address list and spam them.
The Irish Data protection Commissioner takes a very dim view of this and has the power to levy fines of up to €3,000 per address spammed (so potentially €570,000 in this case).
it@cork is a not-for-profit, IT professionals networking organisation, based in Cork. I am on the steering committee of it@cork, helping out with the running as much as I can in a voluntary capacity.
