I am a web designer & developer based in Galway, Ireland. Information on my work is available from my company site: Ambient Age Web Design.
I am also completing a PhD in Information Systems. My research is on the Adoption of IT Standards for technologies to support Ambient Intelligence.
I’ve been posting quite a view videos recently, which is strange because I don’t spend that much time watching them online….but I thought this one was worth sharing. It’s a documentary about new forms of collaboration and social media technologies.
I came to it via a tweet by @marklittlenews last night. It seems to have been out for a while, but I hadn’t come across it before. The full version (~60 mins) of the film is available to watch on the Us Now website
Galway, New Years Day, 2010
Came across this great video – someone in Failte Ireland or Look West should be giving him money for it and using it to promote Galway.
Had to take an unexpected / unplanned trip to Singapore on Tuesday. Lovely place.
There’s a few other in a set over here.
Bumped into this last weekend on Patrick Street in Cork (some pretty shakey camera work…but you’ll get the idea).
The guy dancing up in the window was the best bit!
Twesival Galway is being run again tomorrow night. This time around it’s in support of the GSPCA, and there’s a nicely made video below to show you why.
Twestival Local is :
…a global series of events organized by volunteers around the world under short timescales, which bring people offline for a great cause. Twestival is run 100% by volunteers and independently from any not-for-profit; although the organizing teams do work closely to outline an achievable and measurable fundraising target.
Events are being run all over the world, and I know that a huge amount of work has been done to get Galway’s up-and-running; from sorting out a venue, to looking for sponsors & pushing ticket sales. This time around, you don’t even need to be from Galway to participate – you can contribute by buying one of the “Sorry I can’t make it tickets”, and even win prizes (like this nice iPod Touch that I want, sponsored by Gold Sponsor LookWest.ie).
I was at the last Twestival in Galway back in February, and it was great to meet so many nice people at it; including a few that weren’t using Twitter and didn’t know anything about it. So, you’re pretty much guaranteed a good night if you drop in for a beer or two.
So, if you want to find out more, check out the Twestival Galway site (or on Twitter). There are still some tickets left, so you can buy them now, or if you can’t make it, take a look at the small donation you can make instead.
I just had a week away from it all. It gave me some time to catch up on a bit of reading – the highlight of it was an impulse buy in the airport: “A Book About Innocent“. If you’re interested in starting a business, or seeing how a successful brand is built, I’d highly recommend it.
The book is the story of how innocent drinks started up, built their brand and expanded their markets & range (now selling about 500,000 bottles a day). If that sounds a bit dull, the book is really well written in a conversational tone (keeping in line with the innocent brand image), and is both funny and entertaining.
I’ve always admired innocent’s brand image – there is always some humour behind their packaging, and the company is socially responsible – they donate a percentage of profits to charity, and use sustainable methods throughout their supply chain. Seeing how they came to that point in the book was really interesting. They have a great attention to detail (ever look at the bottom of one of their bottles or read the labels?), an interesting approach to market research and a great appreciation of how to listen to their customers. Some of it also gave me some good ideas for my own work – for example – they discuss how they got around having no marketing budget to promote themselves starting out.
There’s a video below that gives an overview of the company (and covers some of the stuff that’s in the book):
Well worth a read (their drinks are pretty nice too!).
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Yesterday I made some design tweaks and added some new features to TwitEye, the little web app I launched a couple of months ago.
TwitEye streams ideas for new applications and services based on questions asked by Twitter users, so, for example, “is there a service that lets me translate news feeds into different languages?”. At the moment it is categorising requests related to applications, software, iPhone apps, plug-ins and different services. The idea behind it was that the “idea” isn’t the most difficult part in getting a new product or service together; it’s what happens with the idea that counts.
The latest update to the service is the addition of an ideas blog & RSS feed which will publish a selected idea each day from the stream. With a lot of applications that have limited functionality or aren’t doing something that I immediately “need”, I generally take a look at them once, think “oh, that’s nice”, and then forget about them. The addition of the RSS feed is a way to share some of the good ideas that are coming through the TwitEye stream, without people having to come to the site & watch the stream flow by (although there can be some good stuff in there if you do).
The app itself is at TwitEye.com, and you can find the ideas blog and the link to the daily idea RSS feed at twiteye.com/ideas/ (and if you’re not up for the full commitment of an RSS feed you’ll also get the updates through @twiteyeapp on Twitter!).
The best way to further improve it is through feedback & comments, so don’t be shy…
FineTuna is a web application for sharing and collaborating on images. It’s a nice idea (with an odd name), and another really nice & simple design by the folks in Spoilt Child (this is the second service they’ve had Tuesday Pushed – here’s the first one I did). It’s a good thing when an app can sell itself in 7 words, and FineTuna does just that: “Add comments to any image and share”.
The idea behind is is that you can upload an image directly, or by a web address, add your comments, and FineTuna sends a link to it off to someone else by email for review….easy. There’ s a screenshot of a quick one I did below when I was checking out the service (see the original here).
As a way of showing people design work as you go it’s a handy tool. I also installed the Firefox plugin which is really useful – it allows you to send screenshots from your browser into FineTuna for commenting; if I was going to use the service again, it would be because of this tie-in.
Having said that, I think there are a couple of areas that could be improved:
Now, off you go and check out FineTuna.
The Tuesday Push is a community-driven approach to promote innovative Irish tech companies & services. You can nominate your company or product (if it fits the guidelines) using this form linked on this page.
Have a look at some of the other Irish services that got a Push on this blog.
This time around, the Tuesday Push is the newly launched Decisions for Heroes . Their pitch is:
We’re helping emergency services save more lives by making better decisions. Decisions for Heroes is a collaborative rescue team management tool, that helps record and analyse rescue operations
When they say they’ve launched a web application “that saves lives”, it gets you thinking! It does look like they’ve got something that is useful, helpful & worthwhile. I haven’t played with the system itself, but based on the comprehensive system tour given on their site, it looks like a fantastic piece of work.
The service is the first product launched by Bytesurgery, a Dublin based digital media company, who’s founder Robin Blandford is a mountain rescue volunteer. Creating an application based on your own experience gives you a great insight into the needs of those you’re serving, and judging by the early uptakes of the service by rescue teams around the world, it seems to have worked well here.
I saw a very good 120 second pitch by Robin to a panel at Future of Web Apps in Dublin, where he said Decisions for Heroes “was like BaseCamp for Danger” (one of the panel was David Heinemeier Hansson, part of the company behind Basecamp). Based on how he described the market’s size and needs in that pitch, it looks like he’s got a great niche to target.
I particularly like that the application is targeted at a market outside the technology area – there aren’t many web applications that are so far removed from the office environment; it’s something that I think will start to happen more and more as the technologies & the SaaS approach to delivery continues to mature.
Generally when doing these Tuesday Pushes, I try to give some areas for improvement with the application or the interface design. As I haven’t played with the system itself, it’s difficult to do this. I will say that having looked at the screenshots, they’ve gone for a clean & simple design which will suit their users perfectly. It’s summed up in a line on their homepage that says “Nobody likes reading manuals, so we’ve made things really easy“; that’s the perfect way to approach how an application should look & function. Nice work Decisions for Heroes.
[Edit]
Forgot to mention – nice foresight by them too on buying the mis-spelling of their domain name decisionsforheros.com (which is what I linked to earlier on Twitter 
).
The Tuesday Push is a community-driven approach to promote innovative Irish tech companies & services. You can nominate your company or product (if it fits the guidelines) using this form linked on this page.
You can see a listing of other Tuesday Pushes done on this blog.
Yes, yes. It’s Wednesday. As that’s out of the way, this time around the Tuesday Push is RevaHealth. In their own words, RevaHealth is a:
…healthcare search engine. We gather the information you want about health clinics in the UK and Ireland, and further afield, and display it all comparably.
I’ve come across RevaHealth in the past when looking for a dentist in Galway. It is handy to have a listing of lots of them all in once place; the only problem with services like this, however, is that as not a lot of Galway dentists seem to have signed up, it’s difficult to compare prices. The same is same of reviews (in Galway) which is a shame. I suppose this is a difficulty of building this type of service, you need to bring in users to get clinics involved, and visa versa. Having said that, there are reviews of services in some of the other cities I took a look at.
The foreign services sections on the site is really useful (and they have a handy information pack on Dental Tourism (pdf)). This is something that I’ve investigated before (before I heard of RevaHealth), and I found getting useful information, such as others’ experiences, very difficult. (I got a frosty reception from my dentist when I asked for advice on going elsewhere for cheaper services!).
The site itself is fairly well laid out. I found some issues with the results pages, for example, I found myself using the browser’s back button to get back to the search listing after viewing individual clinic details. I also think that a useful addition would be to make the Google Map on the search results page (in the tab “Dentists in Ireland Info”) clickable. At the moment, you can see the clinic name, but can’t get to the clinic’s details by clicking on it.
Although I’ve concentrated on dentists, RevaHealth provide listings for a wide range of health care clinics throughout the world; a full listing is on their homepage. Given the scope of the services being offered by RevaHealth, I think they’re a useful addition to niche search.
The Tuesday Push is a community-driven approach to promote innovative Irish tech companies & services. You can nominate your company or product (if it fits the guidelines) using this form linked on this page.
I took a break from Tuesday Pushing activities for the last couple of pushes for a few reasons, but you can see a listing of other Tuesday Pushes done on this blog.
Social?