#“JibJab Re-Creates The Original Star Wars Trilogy, Now Starring Your Friends”
honor of the 30th anniversary of the release of The Empire Strikes Back, the site has gotten the rights to re-create the original Star Wars Trilogy. Except instead of the familiar faces of Han, Luke, and Leia, youll be watching your friends take on the Empire.
Best idea ever. They'll make millions on this.
#“The Condom Train Returns”
After some more reading on the lack of Paid Apps in Ireland, it appears that all the blame may not be on Google after all. From what I can see, Mobile Operators in each country have to sign up to the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) to get “access” to the Android Market.
How much do you bet that none of the Irish operators have done so?
We know that Three UK SIMs work in Vodafone Ireland HTC Desires. I’m pretty confident that they’ll work in all other Irish Android handsets since the operators are just box-shifting rather than getting custom versions done.
Those Three SIMs are free.
In the 1970s, there were a series of famous train journeys to the North where motivated modern people went to buy tons of condoms and distribute them down South where they were banned by the local yokels.
So let’s organise a follow-up.
Swarms of desperate Android owners and their friends grabbing fistfuls of free 3UK SIMs in Belfast and Newry, bringing them back over the border and distributing them to the hungry-for-apps hordes?
You know it makes sense.
“What do we want?” “Paid Apps” “When do we want them?” “Now!”
The revolution is upon us.
#“Nokia - So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, Hyv\u00e4sti”
I was a mobile phone late adopter for a very long time.After a couple of crappy feature phones from the likes of Panasonic in the 1990s, I got my first decent Nokia in 2000, the legendary 6210.
I hung on to that for ages and then finally upgraded to the equally beloved 6230i in 2004.
I only joined the ranks of smartphone owners in 2006 when I got the N70. Not Nokia’s greatest phone but good enough to make me want more.
Then finally in 2007, I got Nokia’s (still) best ever phone, the N95-8GB.
On Friday, I powered down the N95-8GB and probably won’t power it back up again unless I need its camera for some Qik streaming.On Friday I also powered up my new HTC Desire.
Nothing that Nokia sells now or has announced for the rest of 2010⁄2011 holds any interest for me. And the shafting of N95 owners over the free Ovi Maps says that Nokia has no interest in me as a customer either.I think they are a bit like the Catholic church who have realised there is more money/souls to be had in the developing world than trying to compete for attention at the high end in the developed world.
End of an era for me.
#“Dear Vodafone/Meteor/O2, please give Google a hard slap from Irish Android Owners”
The first Google Android phone went on sale in Ireland at the start of November 2009. It is now May 2010. And we still don’t have Paid Apps in Ireland. All of the networks are losing Android phone sales because of this and all of those people who have Android phone are pissed off and wishing they’d bought bloody iPhones.
What the hell is the hold up Google?
As I have posted here many times, I can stick a PAYG Three UK SIM in my phone when in Ireland and see all of the paid apps. I can then buy them in Google Checkout using my Irish Credit Card.
There is even an app out there to trick the phones into thinking there are not in Ireland to achieve the same thing.
So the problem is not technical.
Where is the problem? Taxation? Surely you have that sorted, given the billions you run through the Irish operations here?
Not setup to get your 30% cut? 30% of SFA is still SFA. The rev-share you’ll get in Ireland on App sales would barely cover petty cash for paper-clips in Mountain View.
I would guess that minimal revenue is the reason until you look at the list of enabled countries. It’s tiny.
And I don’t think I have seen that change in more than 6 months. Wait a second. New Zealand? Are you kidding me? Sort this. Now.
#“TechCrunch TV \u0096 Making me tingle”
TechCrunch TV will go live next month. Broadcasting online (and soon possibly elsewhere) 24 hours a day, the channels focus will be on the people behind the stories you read on TC every day: the entrepreneurs, developers, venture capitalists, angels and assorted geniuses who are building companies from Silicon Valley to Serbia and beyond.
Is Paul Carr trying to make sure I never do a tap of work? With the right presenters, this could be fabulous.
But only as long as it has no involvement from the usual suspects.
I also know a few guys who would love to be the Irish correspondents for some shows. "Come in Silicon Valley, this is Silicon Bog calling".
TechCrunch TV could be Glee for Geeks, including the singing and dancing. But who will be Jane Lynch and can Paul Carr sing?
#“Irish Startups need to Sign the Petition to Stop This - Right Now!”
Under the proposed Directive, VCs will be required to disclose a lot more information, which is likely to cost as much as 100,000 annually per investee company. The Directive also imposes much greater capital requirements on venture firms, even as funds are shrinking to reflect the ease of creating startups now. VCs will also have to use outside depositaries (i.e. custodians) and independent valuation agents, again, adding cost and complexity.
Deadline is tonight.
To support a petition against it, send an mail to replies@evca.eu stating name, company name, HQ location. Use the subject line Entrepreneur Petition against AIFM Directive
Thanks to Mike Butcher for highlighting this. Read the full story at the link above.
#“Android is now perfectly complete”
You thought this post was going to be about turn-by-turn voice navigation on Google Maps for Ireland didn’t you? Hah! (That’s the next post).
No, this is far more important.
There is now a decent ZX Spectrum emulator for Android called Xpectroid and I’ve been running the games I wrote from 1984-1986 on it.
Here’s a few screenshots of it in action. Having a few usability and sound problems but dammit, I can run Z80 assembler programs I wrote 25 years ago on my phone. Aren’t computers great? As many Irish grannies would say.
My HTC G1 2ndHome screen
And finally The Cherry Run published in YourSinclairApril 1986. A mish mash of a few arcade games of the time. The most difficult coding of the lot due to falling rocks etc.
I then started my magnum opus which was to be a funny platform/puzzle game in the style of Everyone’s A Wally and Jet Set Willy. I wrote 10s of K of assembler on paper but never got it into a computer to try out. Many months spent writing edge detectionalgorithmsto sense items impacting each other.Then girls, college and drinkin got in the way.Some day I’ll pay someone to type it all in and see what it does!
#“Facebook Ads suddenly got a lot more powerful”
So when you click the new Like Facebook button, being very helpful and all, Facebook will update your permanent profile with your new like.
I’m still digesting all of the announcements from Facebook’s F8 conference yesterday. Lots of brilliant stuff in there which has me excited. Interesting contrast to the catastrophe that was Google Buzz.
There is some work for us to switch from Facebook Connect by the looks of things but no biggie.
This post from Ed Dale is incredibly important and I have to admit I missed the key news too. The new Facebook “Like” buttons, that you can expect to see everywhere very soon, do something which increases the value of Facebook as an Ad platform by several orders of magnitude. They update your profile.
Like everyone else, I thought it was a Wall thing (and question whether people want their Wall to be a long list of product/site pimpages). But the buttonsd actually update your permanent profile that you filled out initially (interests/likes etc).
So when those of us who do Ads on Facebook want to demographically target people, we now have up-to-date detailed information based on your explicit recent “Like” activity, not the few interests (“Music”, “Hummus”) you thought of two years ago when you joined Facebook or when you clicked “Skip” during that part of the sign-up process.
This is a very very very powerful change and if I was the Google AdWords team, I would now be officially soiling myself.
Read the rest of Ed’s post for more detail and thoughts.
#“Get a proper OS for your iPhone”
It should be pretty simple to port forward to the iPhone 3G. The 3GS will take more work. Hopefully with all this groundwork laid out, we can make Android a real alternative or supplement for iPhone users. Maybe we can finally get Flash. ;)
Android running on iPhone!
Why? Why? Because it's there.
How can you not love hackers?
#“Scorpios”
I’ve been sharing links to Scott Adams strips since the mid-1990s.
In fact, in Integral Design, my entire cubicle was covered in the best ones from his calendars. Yes, sad I know.
But then Matt, who worked with me, built a wall of coke cans in his cube.
Good times.