I just read this daft “postmortem” about FormSpring (a social ask-me-anything Q&A site which is shutting down after $14m of funding but it had “been challenging to sustain the resources needed to keep the lights on.“). Ok, I lie. I gave up reading and just did a Ctrl-F for the phrases “profit”, “revenue”, “business model”, [...]
Home» rant
Startup Pubbish-ness
I might be about to commit professional hari-kiri here but I wanted to push back on all the startup love I’ve been hearing. I attended the Cork Pub Summit event yesterday evening, organised like a local mini-Web Summit to provide a place the tech community to meet and local startups to pitch their ideas. It [...]
Software has no intrinsic value
Someone asked me today about the value of a piece of software and how we go about measuring that. Here’s my reply: Software is no different from anything else: it’s only worth what you can sell it for. As such, software has no intrinsic value — the world doesn’t need more software just for the [...]
What’s the point of education?
Today is the day that thousands of school students receive their Leaving Cert results (that’s their last exams before university, so translate it accordingly for your country). It inevitably prompts the same news stories each year (X students got 600 points! Exams are getting easier! Maths/English/whatever pass rates are dropping!) but it also makes me [...]
Licensing Software (and lessons for Professional Photographers)
Many moons ago, I used to hang out on The Business of Software forum and one question kept coming up again and again: “How can I stop pirates stealing my software?”. Software has a long history of using licence codes, dongles, licensing servers, online registration, phoning-home activation, obfuscation and many other security techniques to ensure [...]
Corporate Double-speak
I got this email at work today… Note: If a SEMP UI/Common Dopo deployer must consciously choose to use/leverage TOM, then make sure you have both a DEU with SEMP UI/Common Dopo as well as a DEU with TOM. * acronyms changed What?! It’s like a rejected scene from Office Space. Please shoot me if [...]
KISSmetrics’ Bizarre Pricing
I’ve been using the beta version of KISSmetrics on Shutter Scouts to track conversion rates. Frankly, this was more of an experiment as the site hasn’t really been promoted and opened up yet but I wanted the get the analytics infrastructure in place first. KISSmetrics allows you to track events in a user-specified conversion funnel [...]
“A Sign of the Times”
I’m going to swear now so turn away if you disapprove “A sign of the times” “In these difficult times” “The world we live in” “At least you still have a job” I fucking hate these stupid platitudes which are currently being banded around in boardrooms up and down the country (including ours, this morning, [...]
Women and the Economy
I haven’t a clue how this sexist, offensive rant was ever published in a national newspaper but I do think that the re-energisation of women in the Irish workforce has been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the influx of women into the Irish workforce was the main reason for our rapid economic growth. [...]
What’s up with Waterford?
What the hell is going on in Waterford? I mean, I can understand being upset at losing your job but staging a sit-in? What are they demanding? To be let back to work? I just don’t understand the mentality. The company is losing money hand over fist so I can only assume that these workers [...]
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