Conor’s Bandon Blog

We’re really excited over on LouderVoice by this latest feature. You can now SMS your reviews directly to the web-site. So if you walk out of a terrible movie or wonderful restaurant or just want to get your opinion on any product or service off your chest, now you can. Those reviews will appear within seconds on the LouderVoice site.

The format is simplicity itself:

Review Rating1-5 ItemName: Opinion

It should look like this on your phone:

Then a few moments later, it will look like this on LouderVoice:

We have two numbers you can use: +353-87-9409325 and due to lots of demand +44-778-6205133

Each SMS costs your standard network rate if you are texting your local country number.

And if you are feeling strongly opinionated, we do accept multi-message SMSes up to slightly more than 400 characters.

Just add your mobile number to your LouderVoice account (or sign-up, it only takes a moment), try it out and let us know what you think.

How many people are going to plump for the jesusphone in their posts? If Steve Jobs is responsible,it must be magic. Except it’s not, it’s a very nice UI on a phone design that was out of date in 2006 in Europe. So if not a fashion accessory then what? I think the Science Week people really mean “new product” when they say “invention”, otherwise I’m going to have to go a read some science journals to find the latest cure for cancer.

2007 hasn’t been a great year for ground-breaking innovation since most things I’m familiar with have just really been refined. I haven’t heard about one thing that make me stop and go “wow that’s incredible”. I might do so when CUH stop sending out hand-written appointments and use a fancy thing called a computer and Microsoft Outlook to schedule x-rays.

I mentioned BiancaMed in a previous post and I’m going to nominate one of their developments as the Invention of 2007. In fact their whole product line should get the gong. I don’t just say this because I was in college with Conor Hanley and Conor Heneghan, their developments are the first step in an entirely new approach to medicine. Expect these guys to exit for a huge amount of money in the coming years (or buy GE Healthcare!).

The BiancaMed Overnight Sleep Monitor sits on your bed-side locker and measures your breathing patterns with no contact whatsoever. It can provide critical data to diagnose sleep apnea and other sleep disorders and medical conditions. It will be able to send that information via mobile phone to a back-end system that your medical practitioner can log on to and analyse. It is genuinely revolutionary and there will be a multitude of spin-off products from this including baby monitors and fitness equipment.

As someone who has slept badly since he was 6 years old I’d love to get access to this and maybe finally get to the bottom of it. As a parent, I know many people will pay a LOT of money for a baby monitor which may help avoid SIDS.

A bit more impressive than a poxy phone, isn’t it?

We went on our summer holidays to Barley Cove for 11 years in a row as kids. On several of those years we went to Garnish Island via Glengarrif. That was as far as I ever got on the Beara peninsula until last week when I visited Adrigole. I honestly can’t put into words how beautiful it is down there. If I was American I’d call it God’s country. Perfect views on a perfect day made me want to immediately retire and move there.

I also discovered that there is a blog been written down there by Gail and the West Cork Sailing team. Now I’ve never been into sailing or boats but this could get me interested. Lots of reports from the vessels themselves along with lovely photos. I’m now subscribed.

Today’s Science Week Question is an easy one “Which invention has helped you most with your working life?“. Of course it is the internet. The highlights of my history with it are as follows:

• 1990: Learned it existed when I started Masters in UCD
• 1991: Figured out email, Usenet news, Gopher. Discovered ftp.funet.fi and the world of shareware
• 1992: First job in S3. Email only. Figured out ftpmail to download programs overnight on 14.4k modem
• 1994: Found out about the web. Used Mosaic for the first time
• 1995: Discovered Free software, FSF, GPL, Open Source OS called RTEMS and GCC.Yahoo, Excite, Altavista, Lycos
• 1996-2000: Web developed and so did I. Online purchasing, Google, Yahoo mail, IOL, indigo, eircom.net, ISDN, Netscape, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Geocities, homepages, animated gifs
• 2001-2003: Startup with ISDN only. Discovered SEO, dmoz, blogging, RSS
• 2003-now: Live it and breath it 16 hours a day. DSL, mobile, ATOM, Reviews, Semantic Web, Web 2.0, Social Networking, IM, Skype, Firefox, Widgets, Flash

The greatest invention in my lifetime and my job would not exist without it.

Today’s Science Week Question is “What’s the next gadget that you want to buy?”

The next gadget I buy hasn’t been created yet. It’ll be when Nokia take the N95 and the N810 and merge them into one product.

This:

plus this:

It will have:

• Quad Band Phone
• 5MP Camera with xenon flash
• HSDPA 3G Data
• Wifi
• Bluetooth
• Stereo Bluetooth Audio
• GPS
• Touch Screen
• Slide Out Keyboard
• Run a variant of Linux
• TV Out
• Accelerometer
• Massive Battery
• Take massive memory cards
• Offer full PDA functionality and sync with both desktop apps like Outlook and online apps like Goog Calendar
• A music player designed for podcasts (remember last spot, bookmark, speedy seek within track)
• VOIP
• SIP
• the same dimensions as the N810
• A price tag of less than €400

I don’t ask for much really, do I? Actually, this device would make me the ultimate “mobile warrior”. The need for a laptop would almost disappear for a lot of my travel and I would have a swiss-army penknife of gadget functionality.

Today’s Science Week question is “What invention do you want to see most in the future“. This is an easy one to describe but it’ll be a long time coming. I want to see an inexpensive non-invasive home medical diagnostic machine that can detect and diagnose a wide range of problems on its own and via a data-feed to the relevant medical experts.

The benefits of such a machine could be enormous

• Massive reduction in GP queues
• Reduction in incorrect self-medication (e.g. anti-biotics for viral infections)
• Prompt addressing of potentially dangerous conditions
• Diagnosis by subject-area experts globally rather than by potentially incompetent local hospitals
• Blue Sky: Your own portable MRI with “lump” detection

We are starting to see this sort of thing appear here and there, from equipment for diabetics to portable defibrilators to the awesome sleep-apnea equipment by the BiancaMed guys. Some day we’ll get to the point where your health isn’t in the hands of a dysfunctional bureaucracy and you’ll control your own destiny.

Looks like the Science Week guys are hardcore! They’ve hired Edelman to help with PR. I like the idea they came up with. Basically Irish Bloggers have to answer some stuff about their favourite inventions as blog posts during the coming week and we might win a Wii.

Today’s question is “What was the favourite invention from your childhood”.

This is an easy one. The home computer, specifically the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

An entire generation of software developers and electronic engineers exist because of this awesome machine and competitors like the BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Dragon 32, Oric 1, Atari 400/800, TI 99/a etc

Until the arrival of the Spectrum (and slightly earlier ones like the ZX81, ZX80, TRS-80), the most advanced thing most people had seen was electronic tennis on the telly. I still remember heading up on a school tour to Dublin, going into Tomorrow’s World in the Grafton Arcade and touching a ZX81 for the first time. My parents then bought me a 16K Spectrum for Christmas 1982 and my world changed forever.

Forget all the games we used play and copy using a precursor of bittorrent called tape-to-tape-recording. For me, the Spectrum experience was about programming and building add-on cards. I learned Basic, then Forth and then Z80 Assembler.

I had my 15 seconds of fame by having three games published in Sinclair magazines. I was half way through my masterpiece when college intervened. I did Electronics in UCD because of the Spectrum (I didn’t like the look of Cobol and RPG on the Comp Sci syllabus) and here I am now, still working in tech and still getting excited every day by the incredible things people build.

I enjoy seeing kids using gaming consoles and playing flash games on the web but I wonder will they ever have the excitement we did back in the 80′s when we saw the output of this:

10 FOR n=0 TO 255
20 PLOT n,88+80*SIN(n/128*PI)
30 NEXT n

Who knows, maybe the OLPC aka XO will do the same for Africa. I still have my doubts.

I don’t normally mention posts that I write on blognation over here but I think this one is probably of great interest to many of my local readers and those in more rural locations in Ireland and the UK.

A company called 3G Doctor in Kerry provides a service whereby you can get a video consultantion with a qualified doctor using your 3G phone.

I’ve written all about it here. I’d be interested to hear what you think and whether the 3G coverage is good enough yet so that it is useful to the people who need it most.

For those who think 3G phones are outside their budget, the fabulous Sony Ericsson K800i is little more than €100 on pay monthly upgrade. That’s barely two visits to the doctor.