Dec 28 2008
I hope that everybody has a good Christmas :)
It certainly seems that Amazon did! It has announced that it had record Christmas sales this year! I am sure that there will be many people who are delighted with this ;)
For more details about this see Amazon.com up 4.9% after best-ever holiday sales.
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Dec 19 2008
All member states within the EU must implement the number 112 for emergency calls. The idea behind this is to standardise emergency calls. Furthermore, there is an enhanced version of this known as E112 that enables the emergency services to automatically obtain the caller’s location. For more details about this see 1-1-2.
I actually had a cause to use this service once when I witnessed an incident on a motorway. It seemed to work very well, because the emergency services dispatcher told me quite accuratly where I was, although she needed me to tell her which direction I was travelling.
Anyway, I read today that Bulgaria is now E112 compliant in Europe-wide emergency number is go.
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Dec 18 2008
I have a friend who is very sceptical of trademarks and patents, particularly in the context of the Internet. So I immediately thought about this friend when I read an article describing how a Russian businessman has successfully trademarked an emoticon in Russia :o
Luckily European users of emoticons do not need to panic (or start writing cheques) because this trademark will not be recognised here :D
More details about this can be read in Russian’s emoticon trade mark won’t wash with EU.
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Dec 17 2008
I read an interesting article earlier in the week describing how Virgin Media has launched its new broadband service. This service will be available throughout the UK in the next six months, and it providers users with a maximum download speed of 50Mbps. This will make Virgin Media the fastest ISP in the UK.
More details about this can be read in Virgin unveils next-gen broadband.
The same article describes how BT is beginning a fibre to the cabinet trial that will provide users with speeds up to 40Mbps.
This is very interesting, because in the middle of 2007 I attended an event hosted by T-Com in Berlin. One of the topics at this event was broadband, and T-Com told us that it would have fibre to the cabinet deployed in the 50 largest cities in Germany in 2008. This would be capable of supplying 17 million homes. At that time T-Com had already installed fibre to the cabinet in the 26 largest cities in Germany, and we were shown some of the new cabinets on the streets in Berlin. It was then easy to spot these new cabinets ourselves, because they are slightly larger than the standard cabinets, and if you listen carefully you can hear the cooling equipment running inside them! T-Com were offering a triple play service of phone, television, and Internet to customers using this infrastructure. There were some BT representatives at the meeting also, and I recall them being impressed :o
Independently, it appears that Virgin Media will start traffic shaping P2P traffic next year according to Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users. I wonder if the Net Neutrality war is being lost in Europe :|
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Dec 16 2008
News about the latest security issue in Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer has made it into mainstream media, such as Security alert over Internet Explorer and Serious security flaw found in IE. More details about the security issue can be read in MS issues brown alert over unpatched IE 7 flaw and Microsoft issues emergency patch warning for IE.
I think it is great that users are being encouraged to switch to other browsers! Internet Explorer has been far too dominant for too long. I think that this caused browser innovation to be stifled.
It is times like this that make me feel happy to use Firefox :) Of course, I am not naive enough to believe that it never suffers from security issues!
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Dec 15 2008
Congratulations to TeminalFour for securing a deal to supply it CMS solution to Specsavers. This will be used to power the Specsavers websites in 10 counties around the world.
More details about this can be read in Should have gone to TerminalFour – Specsavers in pan-European CMS deal.
I am mentioning this here, because I know somebody who is very involved in TerminalFour. I am not going to make a habit of reposting every new deal secured :o
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Dec 14 2008
Another Christmas shopping article…
I noticed these Firefly mobile phones for sale in many main-street shops while I was doing some off-line Christmas shopping yesterday.
Firefly Mobile Phones
These mobile phones are designed for young children. Typically, the user (a child) is allowed to call Mum (big button with woman) and Dad (big button with man). Additionally, the user is only allowed to receive calls from numbers that are in the address book.
In terms of technology there is nothing new in these mobile phones, because they are simply very restricted mobile phones. I think that the main novelty lies in the usage of the technology to satisfy a certain market. I think that it is a great idea!
I presume that there will soon be a GPS enabled Firefly that enables concerned parents to view their childrens’ locations!
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Dec 13 2008
I did all my online Christmas shopping this week. It went very well, and I must admit that I love the comfort of shopping in my own time from my own home. I am the sort of person that researches every purchase online, thinks about it some more, and eventually purchases. Visiting real shops with a list of things to buy is an experience that I try to avoid! Now I hope that all my presents arrive soon!
I bought lots of presents on Expansys, PhotoBox, and Play (which has the bonus of being VAT free). I also bought some presents on Asos, which was my first time to buy clothes online! I really like all of these websites because they price in euro even though they are not based in the eurozone.
It really annoys me when online retailers expect Irish customers to use the UK versions of their websites. Yes – we speak the same language, but we use a different currency! I think it is just pure laziness on their behalf!
Amazon is a perfect example of such an online retailer. It has a French website in euro, a German website in euro, and an English wesite in pounds :(
Amazon Ireland
Indeed, Amazon’s approach to the EU market is very limited.
Nevertheless, I decided to give it a try this year since the pound is so weak compared to the euro. I wanted to buy a small electronics device, and the price was really good. It was only when I went to buy the item that I realised that Amazon do not ship it outside of the UK :( I understand that this might be due to the fact that Amazon does not want to be responsible for collecting old electronic devices as required by the WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) directive. So I abandoned shopping with Amazon :(
There seems to be plenty of other people who are unhappy with Amazon also according to Amazon behaving badly and Amazon UK withdraws John Duignan’s Scientology exposé “The Complex” from sale “for legal reasons”.
Finally, it appears that I am not the only person shopping online this week! According to “Busiest day” for online shopping last Monday was the busiest day in the year for online sales in the UK. The busiest hour was predicted to occur between 13:00 and 14:00 when £28 million worth of goods were to be sold. Some online retailers are predicting that this year will be their busiest year ever as more shoppers buy online. There is also an interesting video showing the inside of Amazon’s distribution centre.
Dec 12 2008
Google published the Zeitgeist 2008 earlier this week. This shows the most popular searches on Google during 2008.
The results are broken down into separate results for each country, which is probably more useful than the overall results. One of the interesting things that I noticed is that the term Google is in the top 10 in many countries! I do not know why people search for this using Google, but my guess is that these people are not searching directly on the Google webpage. For example, I have Firefox configured so that I can type my Google search terms directly into the address bar.
It is also very interesting to see that certain terms that are directly related to well known websites, such as YouTube, appear in all of the EU results. Yet nearly all of the EU results have terms that are specific to the country or language. I do not recognise a lot of these ones!
The most popular search terms in Ireland were:
Unfortunately, none of these search terms relate to Irish websites :(
The fastest rising search terms in Ireland were:
Perhaps the most interesting search term on this list is for the Polish social networking website Nasza-Klasa. (This is the most popular search term in Poland.)
There is also an interesting observation about the list of most popular politicians in Ireland in Politician Declan Ganley more popular than Bertie says Google.
More details about the popular search terms in Ireland can be read in “Sarah Palin” the most searched query on Google. Unfortunately, Ireland is not included in the Google Zeitgeist page, and I am unable to find the official source!
The results presented by Google have been filtered to remove terms related to adult searches. I recall hearing that pornography related searches are by far the most popular. However, it seems that Google did not get the filtering totally right this time for the UK results. The original list (see Palin beats Obama in Google’s ‘zeitgeist’ rankings or 2008 Year-End Zeitgeist Around the World until the mistake is noticed) contained the term cam4 under the Fastest Rising category. Let me say that cam4 is certainly not suitable for viewing in work :o For more about this see Ooops, Google Zeitgeist lists a porn site.
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Dec 11 2008
I spent some time playing with Google Trends today. This is a really intriguing website that lets you see how popular specific search terms are with Google. Additionally, it can be queried to show multiple search terms, and it can be restricted by specific geographic region. However, I am not convinced that the subregions within Ireland are accurate! I really like the way that Google matches the peaks to the related news articles from the same period. It certainly helps to explain the results!
I was playing with this because I read a very interesting article today that claims that the number of searches by Irish users for porn mirrors the number of searches by Irish users for property. Furthermore, one of these terms is increasing in search popularity, and the other is decreasing. Can you guess which?
The full article is Property pron an interesting trend, and the live graph is much easier to read. I really doubt that Kildare is the subregion that searches for the most porn! Also, it is fascinating that the number of searches for porn spikes every year at Christmas. I am not sure how to interpret how Christmas is spent in Kildare!
Last week there was a meat scare in Ireland due to high levels of dioxins (see Recall notice for Irish pork products for more details). It is already possible to see the increased number of searches for “dioxin” in Ireland!
