The world is in constant change as new requirements replace old demands. Software, like everything else has to adapt to its environment to avoid redundancy. The source cause of change can come in many forms. An organization has different needs for its products than when first compiled.

Repurposing can come around through the business processes of mergers and acquisitions. Or there is the need to adapt to new technologies like the Cloud if the software has to accommodate the need to transition to a web-based functionality.

There is also the case for providing for the software to change automatically to deal with harsh environments. This would be in areas such as aerospace where processes will have to change by themselves because there isn't the luxury of time to go in and make changes.

Professor Mike Hinchey, Director of Lero: The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, says that, “All our research is around the field of Evolving Critical Systems. What we are interested in is the fact that software has to change. We do the important background work that developers need to generate good quality software.”

“We are conducting research in the field of software engineering but we are also trying to be available as a resource to both Irish industry and multinationals who need help with software issues and software problems in various guises.”

Lero hasn’t been commercializing its own research to date but that is something that is on the cards for the future. At the moment, according to Mike, “We work with industry very much as partners.”

Lero recently announced that it has received funding for €16 million via Science Foundation Ireland which is to be matched by a contribution of €6.4 million from the commercial sector.

Mike explains further, “We have fifteen companies that have agreed to sign up with us for the next five years. They make commitments for financial contributions and contributions of their staff, equipment and software.

“They have problems they have to deal with and we have solutions. It is useful for us to demonstrate that our solutions work well in real-life and that it also solves a problem for industry."

Lero achieves that, "Mostly by reducing the costs but also by giving them a better product, and usually, giving it to them faster.

“The money is to fund the work that we will do with these fifteen companies and will address a broad range of areas from how you develop software to how you insure that privacy is maintained."

Safety is also a major issue and it is important to, "Ensure the quality of the software — If you put it into a critical application, obviously you don’t to kill people or destroy property. You need confidence that your software is working.

“Software needs to change and we want to do is change software for less cost than it would cost to replace it. But when we change it we want to know that it still works at least as well as it did before. Preferably, that it works better than it did before."

This announcement of funding cooperation between government and industry reflects another part of Lero's ambition, “We want to grow in our relevance to Ireland. We want to help companies develop better products and achieve their own goals of better software."

The desired outcome being that, "Companies will be creating jobs and hiring people and that is going to lead to growth and, hopefully, prosperity for the entire country.”

A recent article entitled Revealing Economic Terrorists: a Slumlord Conspiracy told the story of how an advocacy group in Los Angeles, by their use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) software, was able to supply the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office with information which led to the investigation and conviction of key members of an organized gang.

These criminals, often members of the same family, engaged in a racket to retain and make money from property investment by avoiding their responsibility to conduct proper maintenance, ignoring housing regulations and neglecting to fix building code violations.

The initiative to go after the slumlords came from a non-profit in Los Angeles called Strategic Action for a Just Economy, (SAJE).

To help them get a picture of the lay of the land and establish how organizations and people were connected, SAJE bought a software program for Social Network Analysis called InFlow. This program was first developed in the late eighties by Valdis Krebs, Chief Scientist and Founder of Orgnet LLC.

SNA is a systematic method used to identify the relationships between individuals, groups, organizations, and any other item that can be seen to stand alone on its own account. These are called nodes. It can then show how these nodes are interrelated by the links that connect them.

According to Valdis, “A node is basically defined as an entity that interacts with other entities. Nodes are usually persons but we can have groups or organizations.”

Jacob Moreno helped found Social Network Analysis as a discipline in the 1930s. He developed the sociogram — a graphic representation of people and their relationships. On a piece of paper, people were depicted as points, and their connections drawn as lines.

But, explains Valdis, “As everything was done by hand, progress was slow. The relationship diagrams had to be drawn and the data points entered into matrices by hand."

SNA had promise but it was unwieldy and time-consuming to use until the arrival of relatively easy access to computers and their processing power in the late sixties and seventies.

Combining the power of computers and the knowledge of how nodes in a network relate to each other came the possibility of being able to apply SNA concepts to all sorts of human organisations. This ranges from large businesses and their need for awareness for inefficiencies in their lines of communication to criminal gangs and the ability for law enforcement to identify conspirators and illicit cartels and take effective action against them.

In the slumlord case, SAJE, “Got the nodes by looking at the real estate ownership records. Their big ‘aha’ moment came when somebody said, ‘Did you know these two people are married?’ The buyer and seller were married. Another transaction went through a brother and sister — the sister had changed her name because she was married to someone else. So they started digging into the marriage records which were all available in the public system."

SAJE had talked to the District Attorney's office before, but once they showed them one of the first versions of the social network map showing how seemingly disparate owners were in fact related, officials became more interested in the activities of the slumlords.

But going after criminals is not the only useful function of SNA technology.

Valdis says that, “Most of our work is helping business people run their organizations more effectively. We look at who shares information. Who is a go-to person for advice and expertise.

“When we first talk to people we tell them we are offering them an X-ray or cat-scan of their organization that shows what goes underneath the surface — how things really get done."

People are often surprised at what is revealed. “They see things they expected to see but they also see things they didn’t expect to see. They see problem areas they didn’t know they had and they also see some positive things they didn’t know they had.”

For instance; “They may see some long-term employees who are well-connected but they didn’t realize how well these people keep the information flowing in their organization. They had just thought they had been good employees that had been there a while but hadn’t realized how important they acted as key links.

“What we can do with this software is either show and hide either nodes and connections in the network. So, we can show that if Mary goes away now, look what happens to your network. Take her away and all of sudden the network either becomes disconnected or the paths from one person to another become much longer. The network becomes much less efficient with her gone.”

But it is not all about the technology, “What I tell people is that the technology is important. It is good to have a tool that allows you to easily do this and manage and model network relationships. But what is important is understanding the sociology.

“Technology and sociology go hand in hand. It is the same when we look at business organizations or criminal organizations — you have to know what’s a node, what are the relationships, what are you looking for. What kind of data do you have? Can you make any kind of decision from this data? What other data do you need?

"You have to understand what you are trying to do. Your sociological understanding of that situation drives you and the technology hopefully supports that need.”

Should you wish to to pursue rogue landlords or would just like to have a handy action template for discovering networks of wrongdoers than this guide How to Research a Slumlord serves as an excellent starting point.

It was prepared by Andrea Gibbons who worked at SAJE and used InFlow as part of the slumlord investigation.

Image source: commons.wikimedia.org

"...and he now took the fancy that he would like to have the telelectroscope and divert his mind with it. He had his wish. The connection was made with the international telephone-station, and day by day, and night by night, he called up one corner of the globe after another, and looked upon its life, and studied its strange sights, and spoke with its people, and realized that by grace of this marvelous instrument he was almost as free as the birds of the air, although a prisoner under lock and bars. He seldom spoke to me, and I never interrupted him when he was absorbed in his amusement. I sat in his parlor and read and smoked, and the nights were very quiet and reposefully sociable, and I found them pleasant. Now and then I would hear him say, "Give me Yedo"; next, "Give me Hong Kong"; next, "Give me Melbourne." And I smoked on, and read in comfort, while he wandered about the remote underworld, where the sun was shining in the sky, and the people were at their daily work. Sometimes the talk that came from those far regions through the microphone attachment interested me, and I listened."

The above text is an extract from a somewhat prescient article entitled "From the "London Times" of 1904" which was written by Mark Twain and published in 1898. In this story, Twain predicted a system that was eerily similar to the Internet and to the networking and chat sites we use today. The device used to connect with others was called a telectroscope, and it was enabled through an international telephone connection.

Some 66 years later on an edition of the BBC's "Horizon" programme, Arthur C. Clarke spoke of virtual conferencing and communications systems, removing the need for physical presence to do one's job:

"I am thinking of the incredible breakthrough which has been made possible by developments in communications, particularly the transistor and - above all - the communication satellite. These things will make possible a world in which we can be in instant contact with each other, wherever we may be; where we can contact our friends everywhere on earth even if we do not know their actual physical location. It will be possible, in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London. In fact, if it proved worthwhile, almost any executive skill, any administrative skill, even many physical skills could be made independent of distance. I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating in patients in New Zealand. When that time comes, the whole world would have shrunk to a point and the traditional role of a city as the meeting place for man would have ceased to make any sense. In fact, men will no longer commute, they will communicate. They won't have to travel distance any more; they'd only travel for pleasure."

Now, of course, we have become familiar with just how real these predictions of online networking and communications have become. With 800 million active users at present, Facebook is on track to have 1 billion users during 2012 and over 250 million photos are currently uploaded to its service daily. On YouTube, 4 billion videos are watched every 24 hours. Twitter has 1 billion tweets posted each week and around half a million Twitter accounts are being created every day.

And, there are lots of other social media sites, blogs, microblogs, wikis, social bookmarking, curated news, etc. We are floating in a social ocean, but there are so many islands to visit, and too much stuff is being created to keep up with it all (see also "What is the Social Semantic Web and Why Do We Need It?".)

Information overload is a pressing problem, and many of the pilot projects from the European Union's FET (Future and Emerging Tech) programme, due to pitch for full status in mid-2012, are tackling this issue, both directly and indirectly:

IT Future of Medicine aims to bring together the masses of medical information created around a patient, by using analytical and clinical data from the patient to create an individualised model.

FuturICT is creating an observatory for studying the way our living planet works in a social dimension.

The Human Brain Project is building computer models to simulate the actual workings of the brain.

RoboCom aims to improve our quality of life, creating robots with perceptual and emotive capability: we can only hope that they will also help with incoming flows of information, telling us what is important to know right now.

Guardian Angels are zero-power sensing devices to assist us with health care, the environment, and more: again, bringing context to the information that is all around us.

There's also a Graphene-related pilot. Here, at New Tech Post, we have previously covered Graphene, a material that will make computing devices run faster, replacing silicon in circuits to not only improve performance (by processing information more quickly) but create new applications.

Digital technologies have been woven throughout our daily lives to a level such that they have become another essential service, just like electricity or clean water. It costs to have these services, and wastage of resources is also important for the digital universe, but there is another aspect to keep in mind: the sheer volume of digital data being created every day.

More than a year ago, IDC published their "Digital Universe Study" in which they looked at the amount of digital information created and replicated in the world. They published some interesting observations:

• 75% of our digital world is a copy (25% is unique).
• In 2010, the amount of digital data was 1.2 zettabytes (1.2 trillion gigabytes). This is equivalent to a stack of DVDs stretching to the moon and back.
• In 2020, this amount is predicted to grow to 35 zettabytes (35 trillion gigabytes). That's a stack of DVDs reaching halfway to Mars!

Thankfully, those brainy researcher-types are also creating systems to help us to find the info we need: building new search and discovery tools; devising ways to add structure to unstructured content (see our article on Linked Data and the Semantic Web), including images, audio and video content; making new information management tools that incorporate notions of prioritisation, classification and automatic deletion; and implementing better methods for trust, privacy and accountability.

A new science - termed "data science" - has emerged, and companies like Facebook now have large teams of data scientists working on their "big data". Finding meaning somewhere in these masses of data involves research into big data analytics, data mining, leveraging networked knowledge, the visualisation of results, etc.

Computing power is also worth thinking about in relation to this growing amount of data: both memory storage and processing speeds.

Current consumer-oriented memory storage drives can hold about 2 to 3 terabytes of data. Every 15 years, storage capacity roughly increases by a factor of 1,000. In a 2010 Scientific American piece, Paul Reber, a researcher at Northwestern University in the USA, estimated the storage of a human brain to be around 2,500 terabytes (other estimates vary this up or down by a factor of 1,000). If that is true, we would therefore require about a thousand consumer 2.5 terabyte drives to store the contents of a brain. Therefore it is not unreasonable to imagine we could store a brain's capacity on a single "memory" drive by 2025 (if we could actually copy the data off of a brain somehow.)

In terms of processing capabilities, estimates for the brain are that it can carry out anywhere from 10¹⁶ flops (floating point operations per second, a measure of computer microprocessor speeds) to 10¹⁹ flops. Current supercomputers operate at about 2.5 x 10¹⁵ flops. Using Moore's Law (which states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years), the theory is that we could have supercomputers capable of human brain speeds by 2025 (10¹⁹ flops.) By extending this to 2040, this grows to 5 x 10²² flops (equivalent to the aggregate processing speed of 5,000 brains.)

However, there are opposing trains of thought in relation to computers being able to emulate a human brain. Many say that the brain is much more than just storage and processing: consciousness is required. The Guardian recently reviewed a book that talks about exactly this issue: Bryan Appleyard's "The Brain is Wider than the Sky."

The futurist and founder of Singularity University, Ray Kurzweil, has said that in 2040, by his estimation, we will be able to upload the human brain to a computer, capturing "a person's entire personality, memory, skills and history." (See the full Kurzweil interview from 2009 in the Independent.) Why should this be a one-way transfer? Arthur C. Clarke also predicted in that same Horizon programme that we could upload to our brains, learning new skills and languages while we rest.

Whatever your opinion on the above, let us look forward to a future where the overload of information on today's web will feel like a messy second-hand bookshop when compared to the orderly library of our personalised digital universe.

Thanks to Josephine for her help with this article.

One of the important takeaways from John Breslin's recent article, Dealing with Information Overload, is that as we move further into the 21st Century in order to be able to cope with the rampant growth of data, all the services needed to manage it and make it useful will also have to grow at a relative rate.

This rapid creation of data is the most significant phenomena of modern times. (Just for argument’s sake I include Global Warming in that claim as it may be data modeling and prediction that will be what will help us survive and manage the changes.)

But this growth is largely built around innovations that allow for more of the same with less time cost and energy. More transistors on a chip using new materials and manufacturing processes, and so on. Moore’s Law predicts this fairly well.

However, the real quantum leaps in progress will come from new ways of accessing the data that we already have and are adding to daily. By re-collating information and applying it in ways that perhaps were totally unintended to what it was originally collected for we can expect significant new results and insights that can really inform change and development.

These leaps won’t be intentional but will be the inevitable consequence of using better information, more effectively, efficiently and profitably.

The first step is to connect the people who have the data and who want it to be useful and meaningful with the people who can do just that. The former, in this case, is the Irish Government and the latter are the members of the Irish Software Association (ISA.)

The second in a series of workshops organised under the chairmanship of Brendan O’ Reilly from the ISA's Procurement Group will take place:

ISA Public Procurement workshop - Open Data - Technology in Search of a Problem?
 — IBEC 84/86 Lower Baggot St, Dublin from 11am until 2pm. 
Register via www.software.ie/events or contact: Patricia.Keogh@ibec.ie 01-6051582.

According to Brendan the series of workshops are in the context of, “A focused agenda. What we are always looking to do is improve our market share on behalf of the members with the government. That’s the purpose of the group.”

Over the last two years the members of the Procurement Group of the ISA have been meeting the technical architects or CIOs of various government agencies such as Revenue, Agriculture and Social Protection to discover what is at the top of their list of priorities.

Using this knowledge of what solutions government might wish to procure, Brendan says, “What we then do is run a workshop on each of those themes. It is about what might happen at some point in the future and the products which our members might build. The reason people should attend is for the opportunity to meet government buyers. It is getting people into the same room and talking to one another.”

Brendan is clear about the importance of this sector for software producers. “Data is a very valuable resource. There are various different agencies providing datasets which offer potential for people if they can join them together and add value. But it’s a lot of cost. You have got to invest quite a bit to be able to that and then you have to figure out recover that and monetize the opportunity around open data.

“There are very few people out there attempting to do it but that’s because there’s not enough knowledge out there about how to monetize it.”

People now know that if you don’t want the world to know about something than don’t post it on the internet. (Sometimes sadly, but sometimes entertainingly, that particular message hasn’t quite reached everyone yet.)

For individuals it is quite possible to disappear from view online for most businesses this is neither a desirable or worthwhile option. After all, online is where the customers are. However, while a company can control its own postings it has no control over what others may say in response.

Leaving libel issues aside, these comments, whether they are hurtful or not, are a mine of invaluable data that, if thought about and acted upon correctly, could help the company shape a profitable future or enable a non-profit to have a more effective presence in ways that could not have been anticipated otherwise.

Data mining is a set of tools and techniques that enable individuals and organizations to find out how the data that they themselves are generating is being received, reacted to and given meaning by others. Correctly interpreted the results can show how a given activity or series of activities are being perceived by others.

This technology deployed in the fields of Business Information and Analytics is being found to be particularly useful and powerful. It can find the answers to the questions that any organisation that has an online presence has to ask itself on a consistent and regular basis. Such as:

Is what we are doing working?
Do people know we exist? One reason for the absence of sales may be the absence of knowledge about your product.
Do people care that we exist? Are customers seeing our product story as being relevant to them?
Is our offer appealing? Would people appreciate a bit more taste in the design and presentation?
Do people like or dislike dealing with us?
Are people interested but just not quite enough? What woud it take to make that sale?

These are just a few of the thousands of questions to which a new breed of specialist companies coming into existence in the big data space are able to retrieve meaningful answers. They have the technological capability to measure customer sentiment from many sources including the social media channels and be able to provide long-form analytics for business insights.

One such company is Polecat who are based in Dublin, Ireland. They have an R&D team in Bristol, in the UK, and an analytics team San Francisco, in the US.

According to John Peavoy, the Head of Sales at Polecat, “The company has done a lot of research into linguistics, machine learning and search algorithms. The team out of Bristol have created an engine that provides very relevant results to any search terms that you provide.”

The information acquisition platform is a program called MeaningMine which provides visualizations and graphs that can describe the health of a conversation: Key topics, key phrases, sentiment, magic quadrants around influencers and their key roles in a conversation.

"MeaningMine is a browser-based tool that allows you to enter various search terms, manage them, filter them and iterate and immediately see the results of any term you include in the research."

John goes on to describe the MeaningMine interface, (screenshot above,) "You have a Google-like interface on the left. You have six standard visualizations or graphs, which are all customizable, on the right sid of the browser page. As you enter more terms into your search you can see the effect it has on either increasing or reducing your results. It makes the results more representative of what you are trying to find out.

But this just the start. According to John, "We are also continuing to add visualizations. At the moment we have visualization around; top number of citations, the health of a particular conversation which is like an advanced sentiment analysis, top organizations, top people and top phrases and words.

"The next level of visualization, the more advanced visualizations which we will be introducing over the next quarter will include a force by sentiment chart — a graph that shows both positive and negative sentiment along a time axis. It provides a very strong snap shot of how a conversation is evolving or has evolved. It allows you to identify where you may need to engage with the stakeholders."

Gartner estimated the business intelligence and analyis market to be worth over $10 billion in 2010. This is data derived from the software sales of big players such as SAP, Oracle, IBM etc. Another guesstimate, based on a broader base of platforms and tools, suggests the market could already have been worth as much as $50 billion two years ago.

Either way, the indicators show that the business intelligence, analytics and data-mining market is very much in the boom stage at the moment.

"The Irish organization has grown from two people at the end of last year to nine right now. We may be up to fifteen by the end of 2012. We are well on target to hitting thirty people in the Dublin office within three years if not sooner."

Trading in stocks and financial markets can be a complicated process. A cursory glance at the news at any time over the last five years would tell you that even the so-called experts have a tendency to get it wrong more often than not.

Laurentiu Vasiliu, a researcher at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), at NUI Galway, founded Peracton to help both individuals and corporate multinationals negotiate the complicated and volatile stock markets.

Laurentiu was not initially motivated by any desire to enter the financial sector, though. Rather, he was led to the markets by his team at DERI’s research, which lent itself particularly well to the complexity of financial investing.

“We initially started our research looking at complex decisions and negotiations. So it was more a kind of theoretical approach,” says Laurentiu, who originally hails from Romania.

“We started an R&D project with Enterprise Ireland initially. We always knew that this could have multiple applications, and finance was one of them.”

The research project with Enterprise Ireland yielded MAARS, which stands for Multi Attribute Analysis Ranking System.

The MAARS platform algorithms can analyse the hundreds of parameters, across thousands of stocks, to show any would-be investors what options most closely mirror their desired investment portfolio.

If you are looking at US stocks on the main exchanges like NASDAQ, or the New York Stock Exchange,” explains Laurentiu, “Altogether there are maybe 4,000 stocks, and each stock describes up to 200 financial parameters.”

For an investor who wishes to exercise due diligence in their financial dealings, the sheer level of detail involved in analyzing hundreds of stock options, renders it impossible to do so, “The human brain just can’t work in this way” he says.

The tools which currently exist to help investors analyse stocks are, says Laurentiu, “Quite primitive," in only flagging as suitable stocks which exactly match your investment criteria.

“With this approach, an investor would lose many good stocks. Even if they have a very good strategy they could get only 60 percent of the eligible stocks that are out there. They would miss 40 percent. And who knows? Maybe there are really good stocks they just can’t see.

“So, this is what our algorithm does, it’s able to trawl the mass of equities and extract the closest fit and they are received in a ranked order.”

There have been attempts, he says, by the big financial houses to design similar programs, but there is no room for error in the world of finance.

“This is not trivial research. For somebody who wants to choose between ten types of apples, you don’t need a complex algorithm, but if you want to spend a half million dollars in one go for a particular set of stocks, then proper research and due diligence have to be exercised.

“There are many things to be taken into account as algorithm stability and algorithm flexibility. To add as many parameters as you want and go for as many stocks as you want, and at the same time to be safe and consistent,” he says.

For this reason, Peracton’s MAARS platform is not suitable for amateur investors, and some experience of finance and stock markets is necessary.

“This is a professional tool for traders but also we are looking at investment clubs, who know more about investments,” says Laurentiu.

Peracton currently employs three people in Galway, and one in Dublin. Two employees are based in Oxford, England, while three employees are based in the United States, divided between Boston and Silicon Valley.

There is currently some revenue coming in from deal with a major financial house, details of which Laurentiu is keeping firmly under wraps, and the plan is to develop the Irish, UK and US markets, before moving on to Asia and the Middle East.

For now, the focus is on constantly improving the product. “Every six months we are releasing new versions of our equity selectors.

“We are addressing stocks, mutual funds, bonds, ETFs, so we have modules for different types of equities. And we are improving and adding more and more functionality also for the user.”

There’s been an explosion in terms of the number of people using social software over the past five years. Social software allows people to connect, communicate and collaborate over the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are prime examples, but there are lots of other social software platforms including forums like boards.ie, blogs and wikis. Now social software is starting to infiltrate consumer electronics.

We’ve recently seen Facebook's move from being mainly used by people on personal computers to becoming huge on mobiles – half a billion people now use Facebook on mobile devices (that's 60% of all Facebook users). But as people want to keep up-to-date with what their friends are up to, we may notice Facebook, Twitter and other networks starting to pervade our lives even more through 'traditional' devices like TVs and radios and new gadgets on what is termed the ‘Internet of Things’.

This is starting to happen already. Samsung's Smart TV system allows you to update your Facebook or Twitter status using a TV remote. You can also view updates from your contacts, while watching TV at the same time. As more and more people watch TV shows through their computer, many TV manufacturers are aiming to make the traditional TV set more interactive and interesting by integrating a wide range of apps, not just social networking add-ons, but social communications and video apps including Skype and YouTube.

Applications like Zite, Flipboard and StreamGlider on tablets already create tailor-made magazines of news content based on your social network account and what you like. In the future, on our radios, we can imagine no longer being limited to a selection of news and songs from a fixed set of radio stations, but rather having our own personalised radio channels where the content comes from the feeds we have on Facebook or Twitter. This would include audio renderings (text-to-speech) of the top news articles our friends are reading, a selection of real-time status updates about friends' activities, or just songs that our contacts are listening to.

Although they've been around for a few years, the cute-looking rabbit-shaped device called Karotz (from Violet) was a big media hit at this year's Consumer Electronics Show. Karotz is a WiFi-enabled device that can sit in your kitchen or office and read out tweets or status updates through the swipe of an RFID (radio frequency ID) tag or by using its speech recognition system. Just say "Facebook" or "Twitter" and it will read out a selection of the latest updates from your friends, or private messages from your followers. But you can also send updates from a Karotz to your social network of choice, for example, by taking photos from its built-in camera using a pre-specified voice command.

At DERI in NUI Galway, “Semantic Web” research looks at how the content from various social software platforms like social networks, blogs or wikis can be defined and linked so that it can be better utilised by computers and made more meaningful for end-user consumption. But DERI is also carrying out research into sensor networks and the “Internet of Things”, such that information relevant to a particular context can be presented to us through the various devices we use in different places (work, home, holidays, etc.). I would expect that as the web develops further, these technologies will become more user friendly and will be more pervasive in our lives.

Happy Pi Day

As well being the birthday of Albert Einstein, the 14th of March also happens to be Pi Day. Although not as significant or important (or as useful) as Towel Day which follows a mere 72 days later on May 25, we feel at NTP that we should do our best to commemorate the occasion.

Pi is determined by a circle's circumference beiing divided by its diameter. It does not matter how large the circle is so we have a resulting constant which denotes the ratio between the diameter and the circumference as always being approximately 3.14. Which so happens to be today's date. (If you are in North America.) Pi Day officially begins at 1.59pm.

In the spirit of Brainpickings and OpenCulture we have decided to curate some items available on the web that shows some of the practical utility and cultural importance of pi.

That the whole universe is constructed in such a way that a simple relationship between a shape and one its mathematical properties can be so powerful and important is a source of fascination and wonder. Even if you don't care for the math, the fact that these constants exist and that we can use them to further our own understanding of the world around us is something to celebrate.

In the image at the top of the page we have the first 1,000 digits of pi. As pi is an irrational number it produces a non repeating pattern of digits. Do they stretch on to infinity?

No one knows. Alexander Yee and Shgeru Kondo have processed pi to 10 trillion places and no pattern has been discovered. Once a pattern occurs pi becomes finite which should make things interesting in a philosophical sense.

If all mathematical constants such as pi could be absolutely determined then there would be no way to prove the existence of infinity. But anything finite has an edge so what do we edge onto?

On a lighter note,my favourite trip around pi:

This was all done with dominos which places it under firmly under the heading of something to do while waiting for the sun to come out:

We were going to add a musical section but it was hard to pick a winner. Although many were clever they tended to reflect the composer's own musical milieu.

At the Pi10k you can select your own notes and a key to play them in. An algorithm will map your selection to the number pi up to 10,000 digits. Even within the limits of the program it is hard not to be hypnotized by the results.

If this is the first you have heard of Pi Day then your time available for celebrating the day may be confined to some minor socializing this evening. But don't despair — Towel Day — a global event you can really look forward to and participate in, is only 72 days away so you might just want to prepare yourself properly (get a new towel) and conserve your energy for that particular shindig.

It is one thing to bet on horses, or whatever else that may take one's fancy, but it is a somewhat different thing to bet on those bets. In the former, the money is wagered against a given set of odds and that money is either returned as part of the winnings or is lost forever. The bet itself has no value outside of the predicted outcome.

In the latter, the speculation takes place around the nature of the betting activity itself. As information and mood changes in the betting market, injuries, jockey changes and so on, the odds shift. The individual bets have been commoditized and form a market that can be represented by an index in which people can now wager on whether the odds will get better or worse and it now becomes possible to buy or sell those predictions.

As betting activities become a market in themselves it becomes possible to profit from forecasting market activity rather than forecasting a winner. Taking positions on these possible outcomes allows for a number of very important things to happen.

As you are speculating on a change in the market rather than the outcome of a given race then because values tend to change over time the value of a given wager will also change. This allows for the possibility of being able to buy and sell your position according to the specific terms of the market you are on and not be stuck with a bet on a horse, or whatever, which has no transferable value once the money has been laid down.

Since the wagers in this system have inherent value and can be transferred by buying or selling then some sort of mechanism is needed to manage the transactions. This is where Oddsfutures comes into action.

“CEO, Marc Butterly, along with his brother and CTO, Andrew have created an exchange where these sort of speculative transactions can take place.

Marc explains the genesis of Oddsfutures, “We’d seen the direction of the online Forex and financial spread-betting business. We didn’t think there was a lot of product innovation there. We saw that the betting industry is ripe for the opportunity to use a new product like this.”

Customers pick the direction that the market is going to go, “That the price of a given horse or team is going to go. If they think the price will contract they will buy it and if they think it will 'drift out,' in odds speak, they sell the price.

If you think a horse is going to drift out, i.e., it’s going to be less favoured in the market then the market will put up the potential return for a bet on that horse and you sell it. If the market’s perceptions of its chances of winning increase then you buy it. You profit from forecasting market activity rather than forecasting a winner.

“Effectively, you are speculating on an index so it is basically a zeitgeist punt. ‘Do you think the zeitgeist is right or wrong? Which way do think it is going to go?’ It is for anyone who has an opinion about value in sports or in sports markets.”

An important aspect for the future growth of Oddsfutures is that bets are seen as an underlying commodity like coffee or wheat. Therefore, Oddsfutures are providing a commodity trading service in a derivatives market which is not seen by the relevant U.S. authorities as gambling.

This allows for a wider geographical set of clientele, “We are not classed as gaming so can take American customers. In the UK and Ireland we would have people who were trading in exchanges already and are looking at it as a hedging instrument. But it’s also for informed sources on a given sport who already use some of the betting sites.”

Marc says users have trebled since last November but it has taken some time to reach this point. “It took us about a year and a half to build it. We’re fortunate that we have a strong CTO in my brother Andrew. It took a while to get things right.

“We have added an API recently which allows other people to develop trading platforms on top of our exchange. I’d say that within two months we would see a new generation of API driven products.”

A future hope is that Oddsfutures will end up being the reference index for pricing.

According to Marc, “That’s what happens when futures markets are successful. People go to them to look at what the prices might be because that is where the early money is and where the smart money would go.”

Home Page picture: Racehorses by Degas

It is great to have a wonderful idea for an app or a site that others would want to engage with and benefit from in some way by using it. But apart from direct patronage, either personal or via foundations and suchlike, there are only four ways of monetizing an app or a web-based business

• Sponsorship: Payments are made over an agreed period of time based on the past, present and expected performance of the site or app according to an agreed set of criteria. Sponsorship often involves preferential positioning of the sponsor’s brand.
• Sales: The site or app is funded from a portion of the profits generated.
• Subscription: Charging a fee to access the content of a site.
• Advertising: Sites or apps sell a portion of their screen space in order to catch the ‘eyeballs’ of visitors.

Out of these three by far the biggest source of cash for a site or an app is advertising. In the first half of 2011 ad revenues in the United States were almost $15 billion.

Of course, increase spend in one area can mean reduced spend in another. It is possible in 2012 that online ad spend will supersede print.

The big area of spending for advertisers is still television. Both in the UK,(£4.36bn) and the US, ( Roughly, $70bn.)

With the inevitable arrival widespread internet TV use it may no longer be possible to make a valid distinction between the two.

If we were to invert the situation and have no online advertising what would we have on the internet? Very little in my view. All the big social networking sites would have to charge and other services which we view as free would have to be paid for directly. Either through subscriptions or donations. (An interesting question is would Facebook et al have been anything like as successful if usage fees were attached?) All business sites are brochures and while acting as portals to their content they would still have to generate a profit somewhere down the line to make it worthwhile.

It does not take much imagination to see that without advertising the internet would be nothing like as useful, powerful or prevalent as it now is.

Advertising is a necessary function of internet activity and is here to stay but it does not happen by itself. Somebody has to pull the levers behind the curtain.

According to a report released at the end of last year Google controls 44% of global ad spend on the internet.

The amorphous and decentralized qualities of the net are its two most attractive aspects — for me anyway. But if advertising is absolutely key to the economic validity of the web and 44% of that is controlled by one company then we have something that is neither amorphous or decentralized.

There is simply have to much control of an extremely important part of our lives in the hands of one company.

In all of Ireland's local authority areas there are emergency plans available to be immediately implemented should disasters happen. These incidents can take place at airports, military establishments, factories and other industrial sites. Also, many of the facilities would have their own crisis management protocols. The procedures involved for taking control of these incidents would be well-documented and in many cases well-rehearsed.

The Irish Government's 2008 A Framework for Major Emergency Management has this definition for a major crisis:

"A Major Emergency is any event which, usually with little or no warning, causes or threatens death or injury, serious disruption of essential services or damage to property, the environment or infrastructure beyond the normal capabilities of the principal emergency services in the area in which the event occurs, and requires the activation of specific additional procedures and the mobilisation of additional resources to ensure an effective, co-ordinated response."

An Garda Siochána, the Health Service Executive (HSE) and the various local authorities are the relevant bodies responsible for the handling of emergency situations. According to the Office of Emergency Planning any of the following scenarios could be considered a major emergency:

• Severe weather
• Flooding
• Chemical spills
• Transport accidents (air, sea, rail, road)
• Accidents at sea
• Major pollution incidents at sea
• Bomb explosions / suspicious packages
• Nuclear incident
• Influenza pandemic
• Animal disease outbreak

The two key aspects in dealing with any emergency are a coordinated response from the relevant services and rapid access to the area concerned.

However, rapid access depends on specific knowledge on where an incident is taking place and how to get there. At large facilities the main entrance may not be the best place to access a site. This can be either because of blockage caused by traffic or its remoteness from the epicentre of an incident. At a very large disaster many of the responders would, by necessity, come from farther afield and therefore would have little or no local knowledge to aid them with their navigation.

Compounding this issue is that Ireland is bereft of any kind of post code or zip code system apart from few numbered postal districts in Dublin and Cork. Other than using map coordinates there is no national, standardized method of identifying a given property or location.

To address the issue of being able to send first response teams effectively and efficiently to specific geographical location the HSE has incorporated Loc8 Code data into the emergency response plans for Wexford, Waterford, Cork, Kerry and Limerick.

Loc8 Codes not only identify a given property like a regular post code but are accurate enough to identify given points of a property such as alternative entrances. They can also specifically identify geo-locations that would be used in emergency situations such as standby sites for relief vehicles and personnel.

According to Gary Delaney, CEO of Loc8 Code, "When a plan is activated for a particular site. It is usually first responders, such as the fire service, Gardai and ambulances that go straight to the site. In going to a site they may be directed to a back entrance as the front entrance is blocked up so now all those entrances would have Loc8 Codes on them.

"To minimize disruption around the site of a disaster Gardai can be directed to a location with a specific Loc8 Code to manage traffic flows.

"The emergency services are fitted with satnavs and they just punch in the Loc8 Codes and go straight there. The crisis managers don’t have to give complicated instructions to the emergency services to make sure that they go to the correctly specified place."

“Loc8 Code can do the same thing as post code but can do a lot extra. Ring buoys, standby emergency areas, back and side entrances to facilities are not property.

“Supported by the Irish Water Safety Council we are now starting to put Loc8 Codes on ring buoys for life-saving along waterways."

For Gary, "It is very significant that the HSE is using Loc8 Codes. A government agency has accepted Loc8 Code as a robust service."

Gary developed the idea for Loc8 and all the supporting technologies have been developed in-house.

“That was all done with the support of Enterprise Ireland and everything to do with Loc8 Code is our own IP.”

There is no cost for creating your own Loc8 Code for a given location but for larger organizations who need a different kind of support a licence fee is charged. Loc8 Code also makes money from a point of sale system that enables the accurate delivery of parcels and goods.

The opportunity presently exists for Loc8 Code to be taken up and used for the identification of locations in Ireland as the tendering process for a post code system has been in abeyance for over a year since the last election. To be able to direct emergency responders to a given site with the accuracy and lack of ambiguity that Loc8 offers would certainly be worth considering for nationwide application given the amount of lives that could be saved by such a system.

Sir Jonathan Ive makes an incredibly important distinction between the words better and different in this interview in the London Evening Standard. By having done something better, in the sense that he uses it, then something new has been created.

Whether ‘better’ takes the form of an incremental improvement or results in revolutionary change something new and different now exists. However, the resulting consequences from having done something better are independent of the thinking and work that goes into the improvement. New and different are the result of doing something better and not the other way around.

Contrast this with so many tech startup people whose starting point for innovation begins with a sentence that goes something like,“Let’s do something that will change the world.” Or,“Let’s do something new and different.” Admirable sentiments but simply the wrong place to start.

It’s easy to see how people can put the cart before the horse. Entrepreneurs are constantly being told to, ‘find a need and fill it,’ ‘anticipate the next new big thing,’’create a unique market niche,’ ‘differentiate their offering' and so on, ad nauseum. It is jargon masquerading as reality.

There is the fear that if entrepreneurs don’t show potential investors something brilliantly original with an astounding USP they will not get funded. In turn, both believe that the only way to distinguish themselves in the market-place and attract customers is to pass off novelty as being the same thing as creativity and innovation.

Doing something new purely for the sake of doing something new doesn’t work. Doing something better is what matters. There were social networks aplenty before Facebook but they did it better. It is not a matter of personal opinion, almost a billion people attest to it every day with the use of their most precious commodity — their time.

Then there are variations on a theme. Over the last couple of years I have heard hundreds of elevator pitches. Nearly all of them describe the proposed service or product as being like this or like that or as a hybrid of this and that. Only a very few of them proclaimed that they were going to do something better than anything that has gone before.

Underpinning the idea of making something better are possibility and opportunity. In Ireland the primary source of possibility lies in the creative imagination and vision of our entrepreneurs and the opportunity lies in the world-class research that is coming out of Irish universities.

The essential base for innovation and growth is here but the thinking needs to shift from being different for its own sake to being different because things are being done better at every level than anyone else and that makes us better competitors in the global market.

Every innovation that we produce here is equal to any innovation produced anywhere else. That is the true nature of the global village of technology, specifically in the form of the internet, has brought us. There is no longer a parochial, provincial backwater to hide in where having limited ambition can be seen as a 'good thing.'

My, entirely, personal view for why Irish technologists and entrepreneurs do not step up and take the lead is simply cowardice. Not only is it unreal or misguided to have one’s ambition be limited to being the number one purveyor of a given product in Ireland (or even Europe) it is also cowardly. In the same way doing something ‘new’ and ‘different’ is a cowardly way out of facing the real opportunities and challenges that we have in front of us.

Doing something better than anyone else means being the best. It is an act of leadership and a defiance to the cloying norms of social tyranny that work to confine and stymie initiative, progress and original thinking.

Leading an innovative startup that has the courage to be the best in the world by using the possibilities of opportunity to things better than anyone else is the purest and loneliest kind of leadership there is.There is no politicking and backhanding one’s way to positions of power that you find in the power structures of corporations and government. You are judged by one thing alone — Is what you are doing or what you have better than anything else that is out there?

Be brave, be better, be the best. If nothing else, it's better than the alternative.

...using GIMP and Wikimedia Commons (1, 2, 3).

The winners of CodeNinja, the app development competition for NUI Galway and GMIT students have been announced. First prize in the individual category went to GMIT, with NUI Galway scooping first prize in the group category. The competition was designed by local businesses and academics to train and encourage students to be creative in the cultivation of their own tech ideas. Individuals and groups were encouraged to build web and mobile applications, and were given a number of tutorials and workshops along the way.

The first prize of €500 in the group category was given to the app ‘What’s the Score’, created by NUI Galway students Mike Rockall and Con Crowley, who are both from Oranmore. ‘What’s the Score’ is a mobile application for taking scores during any type of sports game, and for reporting both ongoing and final results through a website to interested parties. In their decision, the judges cited its easy usability for small sports clubs and teams, including Facebook user logon functionality, and also highlighted its strong commercial potential.

Group winners and NUI Galway students Con Crowley and Mike Rockall, who are both from Oranmore.

First prize in the individual category went to GMIT student Cathal Mac Donnacha from Rossaveal, creator of ‘iSpeak’. This application allows people with differing native languages to communicate with each other through a Windows Phone 7 Mobile application. One person speaks in their phrase, it is converted to text and sent to a translation service, and the result is spoken to the second person in their native language. The application was selected as the individual winner due to its novel use of both software APIs and hardware elements like the phone’s accelerometer to achieve its aims. Cathal won an iPad for his winning app.

Individual winner and GMIT student Cathal Mac Donnacha from Rossaveal.

Runner-up prizes were awarded to the group project ‘Message in a Bottle’, a web app where people cast short messages into a virtual sea and others can choose to read and keep these messages or throw them back in the ocean, and to the individual entry ‘Implexis Adiutor’, a crossword solver application for Android phones.

John Breslin, NUI Galway Lecturer in Engineering and Informatics and co-founder of New Tech Post and the StreamGlider app for iPad, said: “We were delighted with the high standard of apps developed as part of our inaugural CodeNinja competition. It was great to see a range of areas targeted, from sports to leisure games to language translation. We are hoping that this will be the first in a series of CodeNinja events to raise the level of app development skills amongst Galway’s student population that will then diffuse into industry as our students take on roles in local Galway companies.”

Damien Costello, GMIT Lecturer in Software Development, said: “Competitions like CodeNinja are a great initiative. It is an ideal forum for students to showcase their creative abilities and their programming capabilities to their peers and to local industries. It allows our students to take their mobile development skills learned as part of the Software Development course to the next level.”

Judging the competition were NUI Galway’s John Breslin, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Dr Jim Duggan, Information Technology, Dr Michael Lang, Business Information Systems, Clodagh Barry, Bright Ideas Initiative, and local company founders Paul Killoran, Ex Ordo, Michael FitzGerald, OnePageCRM and Dave Kelly, BeautyBoss. Professor Chris Curtin, Vice-President for Innovation and Performance at NUI Galway, presented the prizes.

Last week we published an article about how simply doing things better is a more creative and interesting option than trying to be different for the sake of being different. The idea for the post came from an interview I read with Sir Jonathan Ive.

The possibility always exists that almost everything and anything can be made better because technological development never stops. There are always new innovations providing new opportunities for improvement.

But somehow these ideas on design and innovation do not seem to have been noticed by the manufacturers of the television and cable industry.

Last weekend, I helped a family member switch over to cable. Up until then I had not been particularly motivated to think that deeply about finding a design solution for watching television. How hard can it be? You select a channel along with the appropriate volume and off you go — easy peasy. However, with the arrival of almost 200 new channels it seemed that 200 new buttons to press also turned up.

What a waste.

The quality of the television in terms of audio and video was excellent. The problem lies with the remote controls. Their basic purpose is to provide function selection from a user defined location such as a couch or an armchair.

The only real drawbacks from this method of human/technological interaction are the effects on waistlines and the triggering of innumerable domestic arguments.

Why are remotes so unwieldy and why do you have to have more than one of them? Well, one answer would be the standby of lumpheads everywhere, “Well, that is the way we’ve always done it.”

Technical issues could be advanced as a reason. After all coding infra red light to pulse in a certain manner so that each part of the TV system knows what is being asked of it must be a devilishly difficult and Herculean task.

If that were really true, which it is not, then you have to wonder how we ever made it to the moon.

Steve Wozniak came up with a one unit fits all device, the CL 9, back in 1985. It worked but was limited by the technology of the time and one totally bizarre design flaw where if the battery that is soldered to the main board goes flat then that is the end of the device.

Of course with the iPhone and the iPad no one seems to think that its nuts to have a device dependent on a battery that you cannot change. Bit of a deal-killer back then, though.

TV manufacturers regard the specifications of a television set as being the deciding factor in making the sale. They seem to assume that no one buys a TV based on how they feel about the remote control. Hence, they see them as a necessary cost on which the least amount of time, money and design effort should be spent. There is no denying that it shows.

It is a bit like buying a BMW and finding you have a coat hanger for a steering wheel.

This lack of care in the design process has resulted in homes across the planet littered with ugly, unmanageable lumps of plastic that are simply not fit for purpose. It is an ergonomic nightmare compounding itself into an environmental mess for no other reason than callous lack of thought or consideration.

But imagine if you could control your domestic entertainment devices with your smartphone or something of that ilk?

After all, they are, mostly, intelligent and they work. They are able to harness the immense power of the internet. Listings and the setting of record times could be done from websites.

On immediate benefit is that the awful, clunky, unhelpful and inefficient inbuilt cable “guide” can be simply done away with. (Here is a classic design failure in its own right. Something that is supposed to make it easier fo you find and view programmes actually gets in the way and slows you down.)

Almost certainly, a few dozen great ideas for improving human/TV interactivity could be crowd-sourced through any of the app stores or online market places within days. For instance, there could be apps where you can easily share what you are watching so others can join in and comment along with the programme.

All of this is would be so much better than the hard to use, unwieldy mess we have now.

The only advantage that the current controllers would have in this bright, new world is that you would not have to throw them away when the battery goes flat.

I think we might have moved on from that issue being a deal-killer now.

No one is going to solve the issue of global warming overnight. It is going to take long-term thinking and planning based on real data — not hopeful stabs in the dark fueled by wishful thinking. Along with rational thinking and clear reasoning we have to change outlooks and attitudes while making a serious effort to develop new habits that will to lead to the beneficial behaviours that will be substantially less damaging to our planet and the quality of our lives.

Since we are going to have to work across the generations to solve the most important problem of our time then we need to start with our children. More than 22% of Europe’s population attend a school every day. That amounts to more than 107 million students and more than 3 million faculty, staff and administrators.

Most of these schools that these children attend are either very old or were low cost builds on tight local authority budgets. But they are what we have and in many ways they are the ideal place to implement the changes that we know are necessary.

The European Commission thinks so too. It has funded the VERYSchool project as part of its greater aim to reduce energy consumption by 28% by 2050.

Four schools are part of the pilot scheme, two in Italy, one in Bulgaria and the other in Portugal. At the technological heart of the initiative is the Energy Action Navigator (EAN). It is designed as a decision-making tool with the ability to integrate hardware and software with readily available technologies.

With 25 years experience working in the areas of energy efficiency and sustainable building/development Alfio Galatà is ideally suited to help lead the VERYSchool project.

According to Alfio the Navigator allows the energy manager to apply, “What we call action management. In general the Navigator will supply the manager, case by case, with the best automatized scenario. The automatized scenarios are a catalogue — a playbook in the Navigator. The Navigator, using experimental data, will check which of the parameters are not automatized and suggest modifications.”

They have the possibility to simulate some scenarios and be able to [make decisions.] It can also suggest the best technology they can use. If you look at the market, everyday we discover there is a new ICT solution or a new ICT proposal to do something.”

If you have to make a decision it is easy to be confused about what is on offer.

“Once we have identified one automatized scenario we are able to provide the decision-maker with a complete set of information. ‘To do this you can use this type of sensor and this type of sensor costs this much in the market.’

“Information about scenarios are cataloged in an intelligent database. You can have descriptive answers about what is available. What are the things you can do? What are the technologies and systems available to you to implement the solution? The implementation will also cover the ICT selection and also costs along with the payback period."

All this operates within the framework of the new ISO 50001 standard. It puts, “All the action management in a closed loop control called PDCA — Plan, Do, Check, Act. For any action that you might do there is always feedback.

“We are technicians and we are trained to find technical solutions but we strongly believe that the public awareness campaign and the role of knowledge sharing is [important] for this project.

"Technology is not enough to achieve results. We need to merge technology with the organisation and people’s behaviour. So, knowledge sharing is extremely important.

"There is the school manager, there is the facility manager, there is the energy manager, and there is the property manager. Included in this managerial mix are the people for whom the building exists, the teachers and the students."

The students themselves are referred to as ‘learning users’ and can give input to the process by such means as questionnaires.

“Students are our future. We need to prepare them. This is a key concept that we have clearly in mind."

Alfio points out that VERYSchool is a result orientated project as opposed to pure research. "We have four technologies that have been integrated that constitute the Navigator.

“One is Enerit’s platform which 50% of the Navigator relies on.

“Then we have other software from a Scottish company, IES that deals with simulations. When we identify a scenario the IES software will be able to simulate it and provide very detailed information in terms of energy performance and carbon emissions which we can combine with cost analysis.

"We have technology at field level that performs the building control.

“All this information will be put together in the Navigator by our partners at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences where a user friendly interface is being developed.”

“We strongly believe that we need tools like the Navigator. We are moving from the building to the district. It is recognized that it has a huge potential for hitting the targets the the European Commission has committed to for 2020 and then 2050.

“Enerit, one of our partners in the project, claim that through action management alone they can save up to 10% on energy consumption. We think 28% is a doable target."

VERYSchool is funded by public money. Alfio and the consortium of organisations involved in the VERYSchool project are keen to acknowledge the role of the European Commission for making this project happen.

The Kno.e.sis Center at Wright State University is host to one of the largest Semantic Web working groups in the United States. Its most important task, according to Amit Sheth, LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar and the Center's Founder and Director, “Is doing world-class research and creating world-class innovators.

“The simplest way to describe what we do, is that we use semantics to empower a variety of things in Web 3.0: dealing with social data, traditional data, the web of things and cloud computing. For example, working on the interoperability of applications over the cloud using semantics — plus other interdisciplinary projects.”

One of Amit’s current projects is twitris, an online platform that analyses social media activity from a variety of perspectives.

Amit says that with twitris we obtain a, “360 degree analysis of all the social signals that we can find. There are multiple ways that people offer their views, opinions, data using social media.

“Micro-blogs are short, informal. You can’t easily apply traditional processing techniques because they don’t have good structure. There is a lot of slang, there are a lot of new terms that come up, there is a lot of dynamism; changes in terms of topics. There are multiple perspectives.

“Analyzing this kind of text is challenging.”

The idea for twitris came to him as he watched a tragic series of events unfold on the social media channels. “On the 26th November, 2008 I was glued to the computer watching what was unfolding in Mumbai, India. That was the day when the terrorists struck. I noticed that the terrorists went from one place to another place, and then another place — there was a spatio-temporal thematic unfolding of the event.”

“On social media we were getting news ahead of the traditional media. We were getting stuff at a different level of granularity, at a different speed. We thought we should find a way to analyze the whole thing. Because you not only have just tweets, you have links to flickr and links to articles. People put up map information and diagrams. All these things act as pointers towards knowledge about a new event.

“So we started building this system for spatio-temporal thematic analysis. Later on, we stumbled across another dimension of analysis that we called people content network analysis. In many cases, with people such as journalists, politicians and students you can tell where they are coming from by their profile.”

At present the three subject areas that twitris is covering in extensive detail are Occupy Wall Street, the US elections and corruption in India. Twitris is able to provide answers to such questions as when you network, who is talking to who? How does information spread? How do you acquire audience? And how do you become an influencer on a particular topic?

According to Amit, “There is some very interesting analysis about Occupy Wall Street. What can we learn from each of these snapshots on different days on how the movement is changing? Is it involving more people? Are they able to convince the people? What is the role of academics? What say politicians? What say journalists? What’s happening in the particular discussion?”

It is possible to detect rumours, counter rumours or even start rumours in order to shape opinion. Amit says, “I can study the reactions to my actions and calibrate my activities.”

This ability to not only analyze data but to also interact with it makes the capabilities of twitris very attractive to many potential users. Political organizations can keep better track of public sentiment, brand managers will be able to see how their products are performing. Anyone who needs to about or makes a living from predicting, measuring or just observing social trends could find this technology very useful.

The technology is currently available for commercialization and, “It is all semantic web technology. All the tweets get tagged and there massive amount of triples generated. There is a very healthy combination of text analysis and semantic web analysis that is going on behind the scenes. There is heavy use of RDF.

“Even though it all looks social media in the underlying semantic web technology plays a very critical role.”

True-colour image of Ireland on an extremely rare, cloudless day.

Out of a population of 4.59 million there exists in Ireland a potential workforce of just over 2 million people. (Currently, the unemployed account for a sickeningly large 14.3% of that number.) However, by virtue of education and temperament only a very small subset of those available to work are either willing or able to involve themselves in the challenges of entrepreneurship in the tech sector.

For the budding or experienced technology-based entrepreneur who feels compelled to make manifest an inner vision to create a great product or those who may simply fancy their chances, then there is no shortage of facilities and help. Enterprise Ireland contributes funding to 33 incubation centres. There are also a number of enterprise centres situated around the country.

For those moving from academia into the commercial world there are 10 Technology Transfer Offices. Each of them based in a third-level insitution.

Then there are programmes like Launchpad and Catalyser at the NDRC in Dublin and Endeavour in Tralee. These courses are designed to give a real-world shape to an entrepreneur's vision within a compact time frame.

Of course funding is an issue but if (a big if) a project fits the right profile and is able to tick the right boxes then monies are available.

In 2010 (most recent figures) Enterprise Ireland (EI) was involved in the allocation of €463.6 million of government funds, "For the development and growth of Irish enterprises in world markets."

EI contributes a portion of that money to a number of seed and venture capital funds. In combination with these other funding organisations over €500 million was available to Irish entrepreneurs of which just over €80 milion was disributed over the period 2007-2010.

Contrast with the US where in the last business quarter of 2011, $1.8 billion was invested in 238 software companies. Although, it is not fair to make a direct comparison due to the different sizes of the Irish and US economies, population and so forth. But in the global economy of tech innovation and enterprise these figures give a good indication of the size of the game being played and where Ireland really stands.

Graham Royce, Mentor at the Hartnett Centre, Limerick Institute of Technology, and Manager of the New Frontiers Programme which is run in collaboration with Enterprise Ireland.

At the moment he is currently assessing the potential of over 80 possible participants for the next Enterprise Start programme.

An essential issue with Irish tech entrepreneurs, he claims, is not one of brains or ability but of attitude, “To me the big thing is not so much about the money being there or not being there. It’s about get off your arse and do it. Those guys in the tech world who have an inkling of an idea of what it is all about and know where to go and what to do have literally got off their arses and done something. I don’t know what it takes to switch people on.

“If you talk to people in Silicon Valley it’s not a case of, “We’ll see.” It’s about how do we do this? Who do we need to talk to? We need to talk to that person there or this person here. Get that person on the phone.

“The attitude in America is completely different. They’ll give me a whole list of names of people I can talk to. It opens up the doors and sets things going. Whereas if I talk to someone here...It’s like the old-fashioned can of treacle, where you open the lid and stick the spoon inside to prise anything out."

Despite the consequences of the economic boom having turned out to be so dire, Graham claims that not everything everything needs to be tainted by the fallout.

“The Celtic Tiger wasn’t all bad. There is this impression that all of the Celtic Tiger was absolutely horrendous and it wasn’t. Some phenomenal companies were produced in that time. Towards the end of the Celtic Tiger in 2007 and 2008 there were some really big hits. Also, it is the companies that started in 2008, 2009, 2010 that are coming to fruition."

Despite the reluctance of many Irish entrepreneurs to step down from the stands and whole-heartedly engage with the game of business Graham emphasizes that raw talent is not the issue.

“Each month I go through the 25 top startups from Silicon Valley. Last month, eight of the companies had received between $5.5 and $8.3 million dollars. None of those eight companies would match what’s being done in this building, in Galway or in Cork but look at the money they have been given.

"Silicon Valley is awash with money but it is not necessarily awash with good projects."

With that in mind, Graham says that we should focus on the creators and innovators, the people who have ideas and are able to implement them.

"We can put sales people on top but we cannot build techies. For techies to be in the position to start up companies it takes years upon years of work. What we want to do is understand the technical person, understand his idea and turn it into something people outside can see."

Click on images for larger view.

The tendency to Google for forward-looking events or search the web for things that happened in the past is closely linked to the health of your nation’s economy according to recent research. A joint study,"Quantifying the Advantage of Looking Forward," from scientists at University College London and Boston University has found a striking correlation between a country’s per capita gross domestic product and how future-oriented its citizens’ internet habits are.

"The digital traces left behind by our interactions with modern technology form extensive behavioural data sets which are accessible through data mining, offering unprecedented potential for a better understanding of collective human behaviour," said Dr.Tobias Preis, researcher at Boston University and visiting lecturer at UCL.

Sifting through Google logs from 2010, Dr Preis and colleagues computed the ‘future orientation index’ or FOI for 45 countries based on whether their searches included years in the past or future. The results were interesting: economies with higher GDPs exhibited equally higher scores in the future orientation index.

The countries to score highest on this index of online search habits was Switzerland with 1.43 and Australia with 1.42 while Vietnam, Morocco and Pakistan scored, 0.23, 0.28 and 0.36 respectively.

The findings suggest there may be a link between online behaviour and real-world economic indicators. “The internet is becoming ever more deeply interwoven into the fabric of global society," said Helen Susannah Moat, research associate and co-author of the study.

The level of future-oriented internet searches amongst Irish citizens grew from 1.05 in 2008 to 1.17 in 2009, however, this dropped to 0.95 in 2010, when we began, it seems, to look more towards the past.

“We see two leading explanations for this relationship between search activity and GDP,” says Preis. It may be that a focus on the future supports economic success or it could reflect economic influences on available internet infrastructure in these economies.

At the beginning of last year we ran a number of articles highlighting some of the fundamental challenges that face a tech startup and some ideas on how to approach and handle them. Two of these posts were based on interviews with Fergus Hurley, a Galway native who now resides in California. Fergus discussed the importance of design in the Role of Design in Getting a Product to Market and project construction in Developers and Product Development.

Fergus is now Director of Products at Radium One and on March 1st, this year, he and his team launched Via.Me. For the last couple of weeks at NTP we have been exploring the Via.Me platform as it offers us the potential to use upload different types of media just using one service.

We have experimented with services such as Audioboo, Instagram and SoundCloud and they are all great. (I, for one, will continue using them as I have already established my own little mini-communities on each of them.)

It is almost a paradox in the world of social media that as the services and choices become bigger and more numerous, activities and communities become more fragmented and more narrowly defined.

However, for a multi-media platform such as ours, and for other users who would like to post pictures, video or sound according to which medium best suits what is intended to be communicated, keeping track of what has been published where has become a job in itself.

Via.Me is a number of different services in one platform. According to Fergus, it is a way to, “Upload all your different types of media. Photos, videos, voice-notes and text/stories in one application across all the social networks. In this first incarnation it supports all those media types and it has the web presence and mobile presence that very few other applications have.”

Fergus says that there are four different target audiences:

“One, is consumers. People who are coming to the site and they can use it themselves and start interacting with it.

“Two, is celebrities. That means celebrities posting their content and building up their audiences on our platform and allowing people to subscribe to celebrities while getting real-time updates from those celebrities.

“Three, is publishers. Brotips, Notebook of Love and Men’s Humor are posting content all over the networks and then people are coming back to view that content on Via.Me. They create one central hub for all their content and they have the view count showing so they can get a metric.

“Four, is the brands. In general, as a company, Radium One’s biggest focus is on brands. We work with a lot of the top 100 advertisers in the US helping them with their online advertising.”

Although Via.Me is comprehensive in its capabilities. Fergus believes that it is important to, “Keep things really, really simple. You have to keep the application as intuitive and as simple as possible. If you build something that is really difficult and is hard to explain to other people then it’s going to be really hard to get adoption. We definitely kept the product a simple, sharable concept with instant gratification.

“It’s about getting the users onboard. We have already had over a quarter of a million downloads of the application and we’ve had millions of people come to the website. It is about growing the audience from there.

“A lot of people are using it as a publishing platform. They see the links and comeback and comment on our platform and then they start engaging with our platform on a daily basis.”

A number of individuals from different businesses around Galway who specialize in marketing both traditional and online will gather at The Harbour Hotel on Tuesday, April 24, at 7pm, for the first meetup of Online Marketing in Galway (OMiG.) The purpose of the meeting is to create structure for enabling participants and supporters of OMiG to provide seminars in which knowledge and expertise can be shared.

Maricka Burke Keogh, Founder of OMiG, says, “We hope to come out of this with an agreement to create seminars that we arrange for people around Galway — free of charge.”

For this initial event Maricka is hoping that people with expertise in various aspects of marketing will come to see how they could share their knowledge. Ideally, this would be by means of writing articles and conducting seminars for the benefit of business owners and operators who would not normally have either the budget for or know-how take advantage of the skills of a marketing professional such as small retailers, hoteliers, restaurateurs and so on

“It will not be too formal,” Maricka says, “But we will have an agenda and at the end of the hour my plan is to have agreed who is doing what seminar and when. At the beginning I will describe what Online Marketing in Galway is all about and why I started it off. Then I will talk about why I would like them to be involved and why they should be involved. Then we can agree upon who is taking ownership of different areas.

“I know there are a lot of networks out there but this is quite a niche network. It is also a very, very relevant network.

“I’m not in the business of selling courses. To me, it is about exercising our own online media knowledge, swapping that knowledge with others and get that out to small groups of businesses.”

However, the seminars and courses are not the point of the OMiG project. Maricka says she is a firm believer in, “Learning by doing.” She intends to have OMiG as a continuous presence on the Galway business landscape. “People will make mistakes. It is trial and error. But they can come back again for refresher courses and their experience will grow.”

Then, perhaps, in the spirit of creating a virtuous circle, those who benefit now or in the near future can in turn help others that come after them.

People who have already confirmed that they will be attending:

Gary Mullin NUIG
Eric Hennelly Flanagan Six Degrees
Inga Turcan OnePage CRM
Bernie Browne Market IT
Salvatore McDonagh webmarketingireland.com
Sean Rowland Harbour Hotel
Tara Dalrymple Busy Lizzie
David McGinley MSC Strategic Marketing at NUI Galway
Phil Stubbs PR Social Media Services
Geoff Kinsella EzSales.ie

We are proud and pleased to announce the release of the New Tech Post iPad App which is available through the iTunes store. It is free to download and a breeze to get started with.

The app is built upon the StreamGlider publishing platform (which we shall be covering in depth very shortly,) and takes full advantages of its features and capabilites.

It is possible to read each of our channels; Business, Mobile, Social Media, Technology, Videos, Columnists plus the @newtechpost Twitter channel in separate news ticker rows. They can be viewed either in a constantly-updated real-time mode or paused for convenience and for later consideration.

Alternatively, the content can be viewed in magazine mode.

In addition to the channels we supply you can add streams of your own.

A graphic tutorial is available to help you explore further and shows different way of interacting with the interface.

We haven't gone into too much detail here as the real joy of the app is in downloading it and using it — enjoy.

The New Tech Post app can be downloaded via iTunes.

On March 23rd this year Sean O’ Sullivan an Irish/American entrepreneur, was asked to give a keynote speech at a technology leaders conference. He gave a talk entitled “Re-inventing Ireland: Making Ireland the Silicon Valley of Europe” which was inspired by his need to address the biggest challenge to the growth of his own business — the lack of properly qualified, engineering talent presently available in Ireland.

This is a problem that faces the entire Irish tech sector. Many companies are being held back by the inability to find and hire enough people with the requisite technical skillset.

As a result of that speech the Open Ireland initiative was born. New Tech Post spoke with Sean recently to find out why Open Ireland isn’t just another earnest, well-meaning, flag-waving, talking shop.

“We have to recognize that Ireland with a population of 4.2 million can’t produce enough engineers to produce the products required by the [7 billion] people on the planet.” Says Sean, "We have to acknowledge that there is a short-term problem with economy here that was caused by an errant banking sector and an errant property development sector. This has nothing to do with the success that we have had in technology.

“Quarter after quarter* there is a widening trade surplus. Ireland has a two-track economy. There is the high tech sector where we are continuing to grow jobs and continuing to drive the rest of the economy and the over-heated sector which had a bubble and burst.”

The question that naturally arises from this evidence of Irish strengths is, “Why don’t we trade on our advantages in our world-leading position in that market to help us get out of trouble?”

The answer, Sean suggests, comes in three parts:

“The first goal is to create Ireland as a vibrant economy where people are coming to rather than leaving. To double the population over the next 20 years and to have people accept that the goal is to have Ireland become more cosmopolitan and for Ireland to become more open to immigration rather than emigration.

“The second goal is to really blow open the doors for all tech talent across the world to come to Ireland and allow them to fill the vacancies we currently have in our vibrant tech sector and to enable startup companies to startup more readily.”

That would involve enabling over 70,000 work visas to become available for suitably qualified people.

The third proposed goal would be to, “Become a gateway for China to Europe in the same that we were a gateway for US companies to Europe.”

Unlike a lot of government initiatives these suggestions require little or no money to make happen. “These are things that can be done without spending any tax-payer dollars yet these are things that will increase the flow of funds to the exchequer and help us to recover our economic vibrancy.

“There are about 20,000 jobs available in the IT sector alone. And these are positions that cannot be filled. There is not enough oxygen in the room right now. We can’t grow all the talent that is needed by long-term educational planning alone.”

There is also an enormous opportunity for Ireland to take the legislative lead in rewriting in some its laws around the issuing of work permits.

Silicon Valley has exactly the same problem as the US government is not providing enough visas for IT professionals with highly desired skillsets. But due to this being an election year, taking place at the end of a long and deep recession, it is extremely unlikely that have immigration quotas and restrictions will be eased.

Sean is very aware of this opportunity for Ireland, “If Ireland is going to become the first country in the English speaking world to open its borders to high-tech talent then we’ll have huge inward investment by any company that is facing this type of shortage.

“I think it would be a huge relief to Silicon Valley if they could come and open new plants and operations in Ireland— if they could get access to the workers in Ireland.

“Why don’t we trade on our advantages in our world-leading position in that market to help us get out of trouble?

“It is only stating the blindingly obvious that if we take advantages of our strengths our weaknesses can go away and it wouldn’t cost the taxpayer anything.”

You can pledge your support for this initiative by visiting the Open Ireland site.




*A full breakdown of export categories can be downloaded from the CSO website.

Kieran Logan founded Cork-based RoleConnect as a result of personal experience. He had been working as an IT contractor for almost 10 years doing software development and systems design. He obtained most of his work through recruitment agencies. However, 2004 he became the CTO of a small company and was in a position where he was required to hire contractors from time to time.

It struck him that his conversations with recruitment agencies were a complete reverse of those he had when he was a contractor: “As a contractor, whenever I was looking for a certain rate of pay, I was always argued down. As an employer I was always been argued to raise the pay up. It didn’t take me long to figure out where the difference was going.”

This is a process that involves two different negotiations and lacks any kind of transparency.

Kieran reasoned that, “That from an employer’s perspective, if they could negotiate directly they could potentially save money that would allow them employ another number of people. But also allow the contractor to increase their daily rate.”

There was a substantial amount of space in the middle where they could both meet.

“It’s a win-win situation where employers would save a lot of money and contractors could dramatically increase their take-home pay.”

Although from the user point of view RoleConnect may look like an application built on a database it actually uses search engine technology to access profile information.

A potential employer uses search to locate skills but in addition, semantic web technology is deployed to help find additional terms that may be implied by the original search term. The software is able to, “Understand the wider implication of the search terms. It not only understands the search terms but also the connectivity between skills.”

Kieran explains further, “If someone starts putting in skills like PHP then you can anticipate stuff like MySQL might be involved. Skills can be uncovered that are not in the search terms.”

For some time now there has been a global shift from full-time, permanent employment, to people working freelance and on ad hoc short-term contracts. To check out the validity of some of the assumptions underlying this trend Kieran did his own research:

“In 2009 we did a study over the summer months. [The summer was picked so they could see recruitment amongst recent graduates.] Over a three month period we captured every single job advertised in Ireland and analyzed them. In that period of time, approximately 8.5% of the jobs advertised were contract jobs. The rest being permanent.

“We repeated that exercise last summer in 2011 and there was a dramatic change in circumstances. In the exact same period of time, the number of contracting jobs had gone up to 28%.”

This seismic change or as Kieran puts it, “Strongly emerging trend,” is not about to reverse itself anytime soon.

RoleConnect has just two full-time employees, Kieran himself and Catherine Wall formerly of it@cork. Kieran says, “We needed to be true to what we believe in and the rest of the workers are contractors.

“From the company side we are concentrating on Ireland and the UK at this point. But our ambition would be to be global and not just nationwide and across the water.

“We see the emerging demands for skills and we see a lot more remote workers and contract-based workers. The successful companies of the future will be more agile and will have skilled people to call on for specific projects.”

Last year we covered the Propeller Accelerator Programme, Propeller Venture Accelerator Fund: Hands on Program for Startups and Early Stage Companies. Similarly, this year, The Propeller 2.0 Venture Accelerator Investor will culminate in a Demo Day which will be hosted by the DCU Ryan Academy for Entrepreneurship and will place this Friday April 27.

The Demo Day comes at the end of months of hard work creating, innovating and developing a product and structuring a viable business proposition. The culmination of all this focused effort takes place at an event where the companies get to pitch their projects and ideas to potential investors.

The companies are supported by the DCU Ryan Academy team and have the constant availability of guidance and advice of over 60 mentors.

We spoke to the Venture Manager at DCU Ryan Academy Propeller Venture Accelerator, Terence Bowden about this year's programme.

Terence explains, “We have got six companies presenting to both national and international investors. They will each make a ten minute pitch to the investors in the hope, looking forward, that they will be able to raise the next round of funding.”

For this, the second Propellor programme there were 137 applicants this year, double the previous amount.

Terence says that in addition, “The quality of the applicants that have applied to us has jumped significantly compared to last year.

“Applicants were coming from Rwanda, South Africa, China, New Zealand, India, Israel, Brazil, Canada and three from America. Plus a host of other European countries. People are noticing that we have a very good programme and people want to apply to Propeller."

Last year the companies involved in the demo-day raised $1.73 million and as a result 28 jobs were created.

Terence says this year, like last year, the companies are of a very high quality and he has high expectations for their success.

The event is invitation only as Terence reckons, “We’d have everybody lined up outside wanting to get in. Whose going to be at the event? Basically, it is going to be investors.

“The mentors are going to be there as well. These are 65 people who really helped the companies to grow and accelerate up to the level they are at now."

The six start-ups who will present at the 2012 Demo Day are:

• Picturk, a platform for hosting digital photograph competitions.
• Seoige Technology, a software development company.specialising in virtual games including savvybear.com, a computer game for children under 12. (See New Tech Post artlce Savvy Bears: Secure Online Gaming For Children).
• Style Cloud, a virtual wardrobe and style-sharing social network.
• SwiftQueue, provider of self-service appointments for healthcare facilities, anytime, anywhere.
• VideoElephant, an online B2B video marketplace for buying and selling video content.
• Zeto Technology Solutions, designers of technology solutions for the refrigeration industry.

Social discovery is an online space that has been emerging over the last couple of years. It is a throwback to some of the original ideas that the first social networks were built around. Friendster was about meeting new people through mutual friendships. Likewise, MySpace was a very social way of discovering new music.

In contrast, Facebook, with its multiple levels of privacy settings is very much about keeping in touch with people you already know. Social discovery is, in essence, a network that enables you to meet people.

For the moment, with Facebook’s star still in the ascendency, launching a competing social network is a task set aside for the brave and the foolhardy. A smarter way to address the need people have for meeting new people would be to integrate a social discovery application with the Facebook platform.

This is what Barry Cassidy has done with his company Speeksy — a social discovery platform that uses Facebook information to create connections through shared interests and mutual friends.

Barry says that, “We looked at how people met new people in the real world. What was it that makes a connection between you and someone new that you are meeting? Essentially, mutual friends is a big thing and so is common interests.

"The Facebook API is pretty easy to engage with but for us it was more about thinking through the features that we could use. What features in the Facebook Open Graph could we leverage to make it easier for people to meet new people?"

Speeksy has just one single sign-on process. Information needed to create an account is pulled from Facebook's Open Graph. A match is then made between you and people who share your interests and are connected to you through mutual friendships.

Connections are created based on things that you have already indicated that you liked on Facebook such as movies, TV shows, bands, books and so forth. Barry says, "It is a seamless entry from Facebook into our product where you don’t have to create a profile of fill in a questionnaire or personality test.

"We are trying to create a social experience where you can meet new people in a very natural way. We are creating an enjoyable social experience that people will want to go to and engage with regardless of whether they meet new people or not.

"When you log into our site we create connections through interests. You can find interests that you already have or you can explore new interests such as running and other things you might do in the real world. You can create music playlists and see what other types of music people are listening to. You can also browse people and see their interest graphs"

Just like in the real world the online world has its share of unsavoury characters. However, Barry has a strategy for dealing with egregious behaviour: "We filter people out on the reputation [they acquire] based on their behaviour and engagement with other people."

Meeting new people (providing they are not nut-jobs) is a necessary component for maintaining our health as we move through life. We are social animals who revel in novelty. New social encounters can sometimes challenge some of our fixed, but maybe false, notions. They can provide new sources of stimulation and through shared interests we can feel a sense of belonging that is essential to our tribal natures.

Most of social media is human nature taking advantage of the technologies of the World Wide Web to broaden one's horizon from the village and the local area to the global. Social discovery and applications like Speeksy offer us a new opportunities for fresh engagement based on shared interests.

Having common ground to begin with makes it all the easier for new relationships to flourish.

One of the ironies of our high tech age is that developers and designers seem to know very little about the value of software as a product. There are all kinds of encouragements and advice on how to be a lean startup, to utilise Agile for development, to ship early and often and so on. But these are just methods to attaining a given goal in, hopefully, a faster and better way.

Admirable as some of this guidance maybe, software applications and software businesses are often created seemingly without very much understanding of the real, inherent value of Intellectual Property (IP).

Techies (and most other people it should be said) find that due to the lack of any absolute way of directly applying a useful metric they are reluctant to engage with the intangible. The value of IP, like the value of marketing doesn't lend itself easily to quantification — the lifeblood of the engineering process.

That means it is left to other people such as investors, lawyers, promoters and, of course, the tax authorities, to care about what a piece of software is worth.

There all kinds of intangibles but fortunately, software is one of the more tangible intangibles. An intangible is not valued on the cost of the production but on the cost of the future income it will bring. If you want to value software you have to assess the future income stream.

A piece of Intellectual Property (IP) is not the same kind of commodity as say, a brick.

Like nearly all commodities, bricks only have a value when they are in demand, usually at a time when a wall or a house is going to be built. Otherwise they are either inventory lying around incurring costs or are highly illiquid constituents of a construction.

As far as accounting systems go, money made from commodities such as bricks or professional services are classed as routine profits. Due to the unquantifiable nature of IP it is regarded as being non-routine. This is an important distinction because as you will see this is where the real money is.

There are also two other important factors concerning IP. It is extremely portable and it is highly recyclable.

The same IP can be used again and again. The core IP of most of the major pieces of software that we use, spreadsheets, word processing programmes and the like have changed little over the years. All we have had, for the most part, is the same basic function with new features, different user interfaces and other assorted bells and whistles.

The IP value of a given piece of software remains constant from one version to the next and is different in value from the what the customer perceives and will pay for in terms of updates and new features.

Also, that core IP can be stored anywhere in the world or even merely said to be stored anywhere, by means of filling in a few registration forms.

Gio Wiederhold, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, was at NUI Galway last summer to receive an Honorary Doctorate. While he was in town he gave a talk entitled “How to Value Software in a Business and Where might the Value Go?” and afterwards spoke to New Tech Post.

“Our attitude to software generation has not changed with the times. If software is misvalued, creators don’t get the value from it and the government doesn’t benefit from it in taxes. — This can result in a disincentive for investors to invest and a lack of future job creation.

“IP is poorly understood but is essential to generating profits. As a consequence it is easy to misvalue and in the United States you are not even allowed to put it on the books. As the typical tax official is unable to determine the value of IP.”

Just to muddy the waters further, companies and corporations can very easily take advantage of the extreme portability of IP.

“A company can live in many places.” Gio says, “When you have IP you can separate the rights of the IP from the location of the IP.”

This means that parent corporation can have a holding company in a tax haven somewhere like the Cayman Islands whose only purpose is to hold the registration for the IP. It is then able to receive fees from the licensing and pay no tax.

But try as they might, corporations still need people to work for them; developing new products, dealing with customers and so on. Also, large corporations need to keep going 24 hours a day so having to have operating bases in Europe becomes a consequence of doing business.

Choosing English speaking Ireland with its low rate of corporate taxation and highly qualified workforce was a no-brainer for many US corporations when it came to establishing an overseas location.

But that doesn’t mean that the Exchequer of Ireland gets anything like the money it would do if the IP was registered here. Taxes collected from multi-national is based on routine profits. According to Gio, “Routine profits are earned when a good job, well done, has been rewarded, and on average generate profits of 5 to 7%. Non-routine profits which are based on IP can earn up to 80% profits.”

So, a parent corporation can have a subsidiary in Ireland. It can then have that Irish subsidiary licence its IP from a holding company set up in the Cayman Islands or tax haven of choice and taxes from the non-routine IP profits are, quite legally, avoided.

“Because the IP is overseas, multinational companies and Ireland [unlike the UK and the US] only legislates for taxes on its own territory then these companies are only liable for taxation on their routine profits.

“Ireland’s corporate tax rate of 12.5% is only applied to the usual routine profits and not to the profits from the IP which are a cost on the books as they are often a licence fee to a shell company in a more favourable jurisdiction.

“Because of these practices the US loses about $180 billion a year.”

So what to do? According to Gio, “Companies are smarter than any government. This is not about closing loopholes. It’s not that simple. This is a whole system.”




Thanks to Professor Wiederhold for the use of Loss of Revenue to US Government image.

More material on this subject is available from the infolab website.

Agencies in the US Government have adopted a set of web tools and standards developed in Ireland by researchers at NUI Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI).

DERI’s technologies are being utilised by Data.gov, a portal developed to bring an unprecedented level of transparency to the US Government. DERI’s research, which is funded by Science Foundation Ireland, focuses on enabling networked knowledge, using the latest Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies. Its technologies allow related data that was not previously linked to be connected together, so that a person or computer can see the bigger picture through interlinked datasets. Data.gov allows the linking of open government data from agency publishers to contributions from other public and private organisations.

DERI’s Dr John Breslin, who also lectures in Electronic Engineering at NUI Galway, explains: “I recently saw a universal toy adaptor that allowed you to connect plastic building blocks to wooden construction sets. Linked Data is a bit like that – it’s based on a universal data format that allows you to bring datasets from different realms together, making them more useful as a whole. Your planning applications could be linked to your broadband penetration rates or your traffic congestion data to help identify issues and trends.”

Among the DERI outputs being used by Data.gov and the related Healthdata.gov site are Neologism and the GRefine RDF Extension. Neologism is a new tool which allows for the easy creation of ‘vocabularies’ needed to link data and is built on the powerful open source content management platform Drupal. One such vocabulary that is listed in vocab.data.gov is the Vocabulary of Interlinked Datasets (VOID), which was co-created by DERI researchers. The second technology in use, the RDF Extension for Google Refine, is a graphical user interface for exporting data from Google Refine (a tool for working with messy data) as interlinked Semantic Web data.

George Thomas, Enterprise Architect with the US Health and Human Services Administration, has said: “More behind the scenes work that routinely benefits from substantial DERI engagement includes an ongoing contribution to the creation and promulgation of open standards related to open government data catalogs and communities. But DERI doesn’t stop there, they put these new standards into practice through enhancements to Drupal 7 core, helping make it an even more powerful publishing and visualization tool for the emerging Web of Data.”

He added: “We hope to leverage all of these features and capabilities in our current and ongoing Healthdata.gov modernization efforts. They also create lots of other useful tools and pen helpful blog posts that promote the proper use and integration of standards. Furthermore, DERI folks are active in many other efforts to promote structured data using open standards and help to clarify best practices that will ultimately lead to better integration of international government statistics.”

Joint work between DERI and Mr. Thomas’ team on Patient Controlled Privacy (using Linked Health Data) will be presented at the Semantic Technologies Conference in San Francisco in June, that makes use of the Privacy Preference Ontology and related privacy management web applications from DERI’s Social Software Unit.

Data.gov is part of a global initiative referred to as the Open Data movement, with the goal to motivate governments to make public information freely available and easily accessible online. Others examples include data.gov.uk and data.london.gov.uk from the UK, and data.fingal.ie and dublinked.ie from Ireland.

Researchers at DERI in NUI Galway are in the vanguard of this new technology space. The largest research organisation of its kind in the world, DERI with its 140 researchers, it is collaborating with industry and governments to revolutionise the utilisation of data.

Today, more than 200 regions and countries are publishing their government data online. Three years ago, DERI announced the adoption of its SIOC data format by a website in the Obama administration. The SIOC format is one of the Open Data formats being produced by a number of US Government websites that use the latest Drupal platform, including energy.gov (the US Energy Department), policy.house.gov (the Republican Policy committee), lsc.gov (the civil legal aid program), and oag.ca.gov (the California Attorney General). The DCAT vocabulary from DERI is also used by various government sites for describing government datasets and data catalogs. DERI also collaborates with the European Commission on common semantic vocabularies, such as the Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS).

Professor Stefan Decker, Director of DERI at NUI Galway, says that while we are seeing Open Data being used to improve public services and promote more transparent and effective government - that is only part of the story. “Open Data has been described recently by the UK’s Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude as the raw material of a ‘new industrial revolution’. Making more data freely available is resulting in people using it to build new businesses and grow existing ones, creating jobs.

In Ireland, the Open Data movement is being pioneered by the likes of Fingal County Council, the Dublinked consortium and the National Cross-Industry Working Group on Open Data. DERI participates at a national and international level through the provision of best practices, standards and technologies. Open Data is key to supporting a truly transparent and participatory democratic system.”

In Ireland, DERI collaborates closely with local and the Local Government Computer Services Board, as well as the National Cross-Industry Working Group on Open Data to promote Open Data.

Professor Decker concluded: “These are exciting times and a true spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship is engulfing the IT world as networked knowledge begins to come into its own. Undoubtedly, ten years from now when we look back, we will wonder how we managed with the volumes of unconnected data we have now.”

DERI was founded in 2003 at NUI Galway with support from the Irish Government’s Science Foundation Ireland, as part of a strategic investment in Semantic Web research and business development.

There are many ways to launch a startup, and none of them are particularly easy. There’s a huge element of risk involved for all concerned. However, as the importance of startups finally becomes apparent to the powers-that-be, the tools and opportunities available to tech entrepreneurs in countries like Ireland is taking some of the fear out of it.

This is no doubt a good thing, but perhaps some of these startups are living in an artificial cocoon of funding, incubation, mentoring, games rooms, and lattes in the common area. The fear of losing everything isn’t always as strong a motivating factor as it once was.

The good folk behind Application Metrics-as-a-Service provider, MetricFire, have decided to do it the hard way.

Dave Concannon has worked with a number of successful startups over the years (including mobile security developers YouGetItBack ), while co-founder Charlie Von Metzradt had been working with Demonware in Dublin.

“I decided it was time for me to finally step out and do something for myself,” recalls Dave. Charlie, he says, was the obvious choice for a partner, “I’ve worked with him before, I can trust him - I know he’s very, very smart”. The two took what they both had in the bank, enough to last a year, and they’ve bootstrapped their way from idea to market.

The idea for Metricfire came from their past experiences as software engineers, such as Charlie’s time at Demonware, where he saw first-hand the need to be able to track huge amounts of metrics coming from systems. “There’s a lot of mission critical stuff,” says Dave, “so it’s absolutely critical that you know when things are slowing down and be able to eliminate all the bottlenecks”.

The pair felt that, while many companies offer solutions to one or more of the problems presented by application metrics, none was comprehensive enough to make outsourcing worthwhile.

“There are a lot of solutions that do individual parts; you can measure things, you can alert things; but connecting them all together is a real pain. We want to be the one-stop shop for measuring everything inside an application and then letting people know when something’s gone wrong. Basically, it’s a way to measure everything that’s out there,” says Dave.

“We allow people to quickly and easily measure anything that’s coming out of their application, be that how quickly things are responding or the number of times something happens, or maybe you just want to know how many users are using a particular area of your app.”

Charlie remains in Dublin, while Dave is out in California. An American presence is important, they felt. Even if they are not quite at the stage where it has begun to make a difference, it projects a message of intent.

“It’s not even just to have an American presence, but almost to have a presence in the Bay Area,” says Dave. He recalls an anecdote where an acquaintance could not secure funding from VCs until he moved from San Diego to San Francisco, whereupon the investors began to take him seriously, “It’s that odd perception of having to be at the hub, I suppose, around the Bay Area, which is a little bit strange”.

For a two-man operation, the eight-hour time difference between Dave and Charlie might have been an issue, but Dave notes that Charlie, “tends to keep odd hours so he’s more on my time zone”.

“It works out pretty well because our days overlap probably 80-85 per cent so we’re online at the same time, which works out very well. We get a lot done; it feels like he’s just down the road,” he says.

Metricfire was in a beta program for four months, “Gradually letting more and more people in, getting feedback on what they like, what they’d like changed, how the interface works, how it suits them”, and has just this month launched its first pricing plans.

They are hopeful that companies will see the benefit of purchasing this software as a service, rather than devoting programmers’ and engineers’ time and effort towards resolving these issues in-house.

“Would you rather have your developers writing code for you, or would you rather have them fixing a thing that lets you know when something else has gone wrong?

“The comparison we’d make is; you can take one of your developers, have him spend the day figuring out what the different options are - install one of those - then he has to find out the next part of the chain - install that - connect them all; that’s another couple of days’ work. And then eventually, maybe six months down the line, something goes wrong, and he has to fix it, or maybe he’s left the company or he’s too busy, so someone else has to do it, so you’re looking at all these days accumulated,” explains Dave with all the exasperation of someone who’s been in this situation before, and resolved not to repeat the experience.

“The way we’re doing it is, you have a hosted service, we take care of it all and make sure it can grow and scale. We have people here who can take care of it for you, so you’re not wasting your time when you could be doing something that’s more core to your business.”

Metricfire is, explains Dave, “Kind of language agnostic”, and can cater for almost any application out there, big or small. They also plan to offer free projects to open-source developers and students.

“We have libraries for Python and PHP, and we’re adding more, with Ruby, Java and Node JS on the way, but we have a HTTP API that lets anyone that wants to either build their own native client or just wants to connect quickly. But our plan is support as many languages as we can, and we’re gradually just building them up based on customer requests that we’ve seen.”

While they have bootstrapped so far, they are hopeful that the connections of David Smith and Enterprise Ireland will prove, “A pretty good resource for what we’re doing," and open some doors for Metricfire in Silicon Valley.

Angels and VCs constantly harp on about wanting more than just talented people with good ideas; they want to know that their money is in safe hands. Having eschewed all outside help and crafted a viable business across two continents, Dave and Charlie will hope to show investors that Metricfire is as safe a pair of hands as any in these uncertain times.

Farewell

All things must pass and by extension all good things, such as New Tech Post, must come to an end as well. Due to other commitments and lack of sufficient funding, neither John Breslin or myself are able to support the NTP project in its current configuration any longer.

It has been two fascinating years looking at cutting edge developments in the world of technology and it has been a privilege to meet and interview CEOs and innovators both abroad and here, in Ireland.

I don’t wish to fill the page with numeric stats but suffice to say that our knowledge-base of the Irish tech scene over-runneth with many good and splendid things.

We would like to thank all our interview subjects for giving up some of their precious time to talk to us. Especially, those who had to tolerate having questions shouted at them on dodgy Skype connections. (All this computer stuff will never catch on.)

We would like to thank all our contributors who helped to shape and form New Tech Post in to what it became and wish them well in all their future endeavours.

Most of all, we would like to thank our loyal readers. We were constantly surprised at who turned out to be a reader. We may be on the the leading edge of Europe here in Galway but tucked away in our office, (and even with the best metrics available,) it was hard to know how much of an effect we were having. So when we did get out, it was always both encouraging and uplifting to meet the people we were doing it for — yourselves, the readers.

New Tech Post, like many great things, started over a cup of coffee. John owned socialmedia.net and was looking to put it to good use and I had an upcoming trip on which I would have some chunks of down time so I agreed to write a few articles. Five months later we had an office and six months after that we had on any given day between one and four people working in that office.

For our social media data mining exercise we even had an additional office set up for a month to compile and enter data.

All very empire-like.

With 20-20 hindsight all projects have elements that could have been done better. I feel that we completely failed to give the extremely important, world-beating, cutting edge technological progress in Irish agriculture and Irish life sciences the coverage it is due. If we had our time again...

As for the future — There are no plans to take down the site any time soon. We are keenly aware that many of the companies that we have interviewed use our articles and links to our articles as part of their own marketing programmes.

It is too early to say that we have anything planned because, umm, we don’t have anything planned. We have learned a tremendous amount about the Irish tech scene and its place in the global market. We are acutely aware of certain challenges that nearly all the companies that we have talked to have to face on a daily basis.

We know that even the humblest startup is a global company first, and an Irish company second, and that it is extremely foolish to think otherwise.

But most of all we realise how talented and able Irish technologists and entrepreneurs are and how incredibly underrated they remain in their own homeland. Irish tech exports are growing quarter upon quarter and have been for some time. It is an astonishing success story that we have consistently waved the flag for at New Tech Post but it seems to be either weirdly ignored or taken for granted elsewhere in the national conversation.

In every democratic country national politics are essentially parochial. After all, only a certain, clearly defined subset of people can vote you into power. (Only the dimmest, most self-aggrandizing politicians ever forget that.) But for Ireland to recover from the economic shambles of the last few years the Government needs to get everything behind the areas of the economy that are clearly working.

Significant initiatives can be handled by simple changes in legislation and require little or no money or investment, although that would useful in certain cases. What is absolutely needed, is for everyone concerned with providing Ireland with a prosperous future to take a very different perspective and attitude to the one that currently prevails.

We need to adopt a different perspective that declares, quite simply, that we are front and centre in the global tech industry. To support that vision of ourselves we take the attitude that we are the best in the world and that we can beat anyone, anyplace, anytime at anything.

Go on, go on, you know it’s true in your hearts. Just admit it.