Irish company Jivo has unveiled its biodegradable iPhone case the Jivo Leaf which is both designed and manufactured in Ireland. The company says it has already secured 1m orders for the case which will retail for 20 in Irish shops.

The Jivo guys rock. Brilliant business.

Ryanair has claimed that the Government’s refusal to upset the DAA by considering an application from the budget airline led it to open a maintenance facility in Prestwick, Scotland with the creation of 200 jobs.

Of course a lot of this particular story is Ryanair spin but Mary Couglan is simply not competent as Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment and is an active impediment to the economic recovery of this country.

She is not in possession of the background, knowledge, skills or aptitude to have this portfolio.

She leaves a trail of embarrassments, gaffes and diplomatic near-incidents every time she speaks in front of foreign companies or dignitaries.

Brian Cowen is putting personal friendship and political alliances before the good of the country.

I thought the N810 was the final nail in the coffin of Maemo since there was no senior management support for it. So I was thrilled they released the N900.

Now everyone knows that high-end Nokia Smartphones will all eventually be Maemo even if Nokia can’t admit it yet.

Meego is a really smart move. A genuine fully-open competitor to Android that runs on a wide range of devices with two giants behind it.

Nokia is back baby.

I speak from a tiny bit of knowledge of Haiti, having spoken this weekend with a number of people who were out there on Havens last trip and having had a call with someone out there yesterday, they were roaming on the Haitian mobile network Digicel which appears to be almost fully operational.

I'm sure Evert means well but unless he is invited by one of the major charities on the ground, publicly, to come to Haiti and help, he should stop now.

Firefox 3.6 final is released and yet again, most Ubuntu users are not able to upgrade their resident Firefox 3.5 to this latest release. Let’s cut the chase. All you need to do is to get the latest version of Ubuntuzilla, a python script which pretty much gets the job done, and you will have you Firefox 3.6 installed and ready to rock.

Great wee tool. hate the huge wait we always have on Ubuntu for the latest and greatest Firefox. This downloads and installs the latest version with one script.

Interesting timing. My kids just went through a site like this with a critical eye and the opinions varied wildly between the 8 y/o and the 10 y/i. If you have kids under 12, they’d appreciate it if you could fill out a survey with the kids beside you.

I am now convinced no-one outside of Google ever tested this product before they went for global launch.

I am also convinced that no-one inside Google had the balls to tell the people who built it that it was riddled with problems and was about as ready for release as Duke Nukem Forever.

I don't think I've ever seen a webapp released with so many fundamental glaring flaws in all my life by a global company. This could easily be Google's own Bob.

Bernie Goldbach shares some of my misgivings regarding Mobhaile, the Local Government Computer Services Board’s new public information initiative . Most pertinently he asks -

"What's wrong with rolling out an Irish-wide blogging system? The model has been tested since 1999 by several Irish bloggers. The back-ends are simple modifications of Perl, PHP, and scripted environments. There's no need to replicate document libraries or to deal with anything more complex than a MySQL database. The rabid uptake of this model across the world proves anecdotally and systematically how well-oiled and carefully grown micropublishing systems build effective communities.

In the blogging world, affinity groups connect effortlessly. If the government provided the superstructure in the form of web hosting, occasional training, and cross-channel marketing, the results would work themselves. "

Approaching my 2 year blogging anniversary I have to agree with these astute observations. I too attended the Mobhaile stand at last month's ICT Expo and saw very little that I imagined could not be easily replicated with the standard tools and services of the blogosphere.

Holy cow. James wrote this nearly 6 years and 4m ago.

You _need_ to read Damien's post on the subject:

http://www.mulley.net/2010/02/12/the-e4-million-govt-website-that-you-never-h...

I pointed out yesterday that if you @ someone in Buzz, it posts their email address in the buzzinga, which is mind-boggingly stupid. Techcrunch has now run with a similar story.

But the important bit is the Google response. Read it and weep.

They actually think that people only have one email address! Hell even my technophobic Dad and Mother-in-law each have two, one from ISP and one from GMail.

And they have obviously never heard of their own product known as GoogleApps.

I now understand why there are so many fundamental implementation errors in Buzz.