Eddie Hobbs gave the keynote address at the recent it@cork conference.
It was a wide-ranging, interesting and very topical talk.
This afternoon I published a recording of his address on the it@cork blog. It is 55 minutes long (including the q & a at the end) but well worth taking the time to listen to.
I know I said the it@cork conference was really good – well, I’m not the only one who thought so!
Over on Confabb, Salim’s conference site, there are lots of good reviews of the conference and of the individual speakers.
This is going to be a very useful resource for it@cork (and the individual speakers) moving forward as we’ll be able to point back to Confabb to show how much value the attendees got from the conference.
If you were at the conference and haven’t left feedback on Confabb, please do so. Thanks.
[At the outset, let me say that any comments I make on this event will be coloured by the fact that I was one of the organisers!]
Ok, with that out of the way, I think yesterday’s event was a tremendous success! There were over 250 people attended (Catherine can give me exact numbers but I think 250 is pretty close to the ball park).
The speakers were almost all great, both in terms of the content and the delivery. Tom Corcoran sums the day up nicely on the RAI Centre blog.
The speaker’s slides will be up on the it@cork site in the next couple of days and I hope to get the recordings of the talks from the a/v company and podcast them on the it@cork blog in the coming weeks.
Thanks to everyone who helped make the day the great success it was.
Jacques-Etienne Grandjean is the Senior Director, Comm Sector Western Europe of Microsoft. Jean-Etienne’s presentation title is “Are Desktop Applications the way of the past?”
Jacques-Etienne is unfortunately doing a sales job on Microsoft Live rather than addressing the actual title of his talk. Not once, even when discussing search, did he mention any of Microsoft’s competitors.
Shame really ‘cos, while Microsoft are behind in this space, a couple of their Live offerings are quite good but not mentioning the better products of their competitors, devalues all of Microsoft’s Live offerings.
Eddie Hobbs led off the talks at the it@cork conference this morning. His talk focussed heavily on energy and the coming energy crisis. What is the Irish government’s plan when oil reaches $200 per barrel? [Hint: it is up there with their dealing with an asteroid hitting Dáil Eireann plan].
The average distance food travels in the US from field to fork is 1,500 miles. How will the rise in oil hit that? If you are in airline stocks, get out of it!
Money will flow to businesses that help businesses become more energy efficient. Also there will be a move to longevity in products – repair rather than dispose of faulty goods.
When selling to investors, avoid tech jargon, put the financials on a CD and concentrate on telling a compelling story.
The first of the speakers for the it@cork 2006 Business and Technology conference flew in last night.
Salim Ismail, founder and CEO of Confabb (coincidentally a conference aggregation site!), is taking a couple of days before the conference starts to drive around beautiful West Cork and Kerry.
Salim will be arriving back in Cork tomorrow evening in time for the blogger’s dinner which is on in Luigi Malone’s (don’t judge the restaurant by the website!) at 8pm.
The conference line-up is impressive (but then again, I would say that having sourced several of the speakers!) and I can’t wait to hear what the speakers have to say.
My good buddy Salim has taken the covers off his latest venture Confabb and it has received a glowing review from TechCrunch, amongst others.
Confabb is a conference aggregation and organisation site. It has a database of over 16,000 conferences and the ability to log in and add more or use the site to help plan a conference.
Robert Scoble has posted a great interview with Salim where Salim talks about how they brought the site to launch without spending any money!
I’m looking forward to seeing Salim when he comes back to Cork for the 2006 it@cork conference to speak about global domination on a limited budget – an apt talk for Salim, methinks!
Eddie Hobbs is an Irish television presenter and financial adviser. He is also a speaker at the 2006 it@cork annual conference where he’ll be speaking about advantages of investing in IT as opposed to property.
I will be interviewing him tomorrow (Tuesday November 7th) as part of the pre-conference podcasts.
If you have any questions you’d like me to put to him, feel free to leave them in the comments.
In my excitement at being shortlisted for the Netvisionary awards and in coming quite high in Justin’s Technorati-ranked Top 100 Irish blogs, I missed something fundamental – the fact that I am doing well is a very poor reflection on the state of business blogging in Ireland.
What do I mean? Well, one of the things I do on a daily basis is consult to companies on Social Media (blogs, podcasts, wikis, etc.) and their potential as tools for collaboration and communication. Yet, looking through Justin’s ranked list of Irish blogs the first business blog* I spotted was Ice Cream Ireland in 56th place! That’s an indictment of my work and an indicator of the lack of business blogs in Ireland.
We ran a very successful five week Business Blog Training course in it@cork in September and October. We are considering running another because there is a demand and the feedback for the last one was so good.
Hopefully efforts like this will mean that the Netvisionary Blogger category will have business blogs in the shortlist next year and not geeks like me!
*Business blog in the sense that the blog was set up to help promote a business (Murphy’s Ice Cream in this case).
I upgraded to a shiny new Intel based MacBook Pro recently and I love it.
One problem that I hadn’t anticipated was that the Audacity plugin for exporting to mp3 is not available for the Intel Mac. I use Audacity all the time for editing my podcasts and for creating the mp3’s which I publish on PodLeaders.com and on the it@cork blog.
I kinda cheated in finding a way around this – I downloaded the Windows version of Audacity and installed it on my Windows XP installation on Parallels on my Mac. This version of Audacity can export to mp3 no problem.
So now, I am editing all my podcasts (and exporting to mp3) using Windows on the Mac – (yeuch!). I’ve no doubt there is a more straightforward way to do this but this is the hack I came up with being a blogger of very little brain!