I couldnt let this go without writting about it. Tony Fadell, the man who oversaw 18 generations of the iPod, announced the first product of his stealth startup Nest Labs  on Tuesday: a  thermostat

I read this story on my iPhone yesterday morning and was thinking “a flippin thermostat” . then I did a little research and found out there are 250 million of them and every one more useless than the other.

How many of you have woke up freezing in that American hotel room?

Nest solves this and there’s an Irish angle, hello to my friend Johnny Gilmore.

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I wrote a blog last Christmas “SMS is dead, long live IM” where I lamented the death of SMS, I really believed over the next few years that SMS would come under intense pressure from a number of sources like KIK, Ping Chat and many others. All of these have now been completly overtaken by Apple’s iMessage.

Not even one week after the release of IOS 5 I have received iMessage’s from both my sons iPod’s,they love this as it costs them nothing, plenty of messages backwards and forwards between friends Ipad’s and hundreds of iMessage’s from local and global friends, on my tests so far using MAXROAM I think you can have 250 messages for 1 MB of data and with carriers like Meteor charging 2c per MB for local usage in Ireland, well, thats a lot of messages.

The real key difference on the iPhone  that has been upgraded to IOS 5 is the user doesn’t even have to think about it, the operating system does all the hard work, it knows that my contact is a fellow IOS5 user and sends the SMS using iMessage, this is huge, no thinking just transfer my message using the best method possible.

Just as a final tip, all iMessage’s will show up in blue in your iPhone.

Happy texting or not

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I am a judge on the upcoming Vodafone Clicks awards, Vodafone Mobile Clicks is open to seven markets. Any start-up in Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Republic of Ireland, Spain, Turkey or the United Kingdom that has a mobile site, service or application can compete for the €225,000 prize fund
Today is the last day for entries, I hope you have your entry in.
Get you entry in here now

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Today’s the day
A guy called Jody Scheckter with Wolf-Ford won a race on my birthday 22nd of May in 1977 and thus begun a 34 year love affair with Formula 1. It was Scheckter in the 70′s, Prost “The Professor” in the 80′s, Mansell and Damon Hill in the 90′s with a dry patch for a long time for me due to Schumacher style procession racing and now for the last few years Hamilton, there have also been the villains, Schumacher and Lauda for me.
I have never been to Monaco nor any other F1 GP, I decided in the 80′s that I would never attend a race until I could afford to spend a week in Monaco and watch the race there. Its been a long time coming and I still don’t know when it will happen.
Anyways as I settle down I think of Hunt and Senna (RIP) two of the originals, hope you’re watching guys.

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I am putting my head on the block by picking this in May but having spent a day with the Samsung Galaxy S II I think its the safest blog I will ever write. This machine is absolutely incredible, the flow and speed of movement between applications is faster than anything I have seen and with its predecessor being the biggest selling Android device ever I think its future is assured. The screen with its 4.3″ super AMOLED is far beyond anything I have seen (comes with gorilla glass, see demo below), the clarity is that of hi def TV to be honest and the dual core processor makes a visible change in opening and switching apps, I have the Nexus One and Nexus S here and both of these aren’t a patch on this device.

And the best part?

Batteries, I can now carry around a spare battery, my days travelling aren’t solely about finding power sockets.

Anyways, I really like the device, its fast, powerful and ultralight, it will be stocked by all the Irish carriers including Meteor from June 1st.

Now to figure out how to get my hands on one.

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Its been quite a while since the last blog and much as I love writting, its difficult to get one finished.

Anyways I am beginning a health kick and since you guys helped me kick the filthy weed I thought I might try the same with weight. Strange as it may seem to all of you I have always been fairly skinny but put on a lot in my first few years sober, lost in all in my late thirties/early forties where I was down around 162lbs or 73KG, I threw in a few pictures from 2005 in case you dont believe me

For the last four years I have been constantly travelling and shoveling whatever kind of crap I can down my throat especially in the last 18 months since the last cigarette, its now got to a stage where its embarrassing, I have become a human vacuum, its not good for the soul or the spirit and I have wanted to do something about it for over a year.

I went into my friend Tony on the 30th for a weigh-in (dreading it and extremely embarassed at revealing it here) the news wasn’t good 224lbs or 102kg, I nearly fainted but decided to get stuck in, I stuck to an extremely rigid diet despite travelling, walked morning/night and worked out when in Cork.

Today was weigh in and 5.9KG (13lbs) is gone, its a good start and its going to be a tough year but its got to done, I am sick to my back teeth of being physically tired all the time and buying XXL in Penny’s. I am going to get the Withings scale fired up next week now the first bit is gone, it will post my weight to twitter and Facebook, so theres no hiding.

I will be trying some other bits of hi tech equipment too and hopefully the encuragement from Facebook, twitter and friends will get me back to where I want to be.

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Vodafone Sure Signal arrived last week but with travel and time issues I haven’t had time to test until tonight, before we begin Vodafone gave me this device which honestly is nether here nor there because if they took it back I would go straight out and buy one. Sure Signal uses your broadband line to give you strong mobile phone coverage throughout your building.

In my Dublin apartment I have appalling coverage practically the same as  most apartment buildings, I have spent a year running for the balcony the instant the phone rings, I took a screen shot above tonight before I switched Sure Signal on.

Then I switched on the Sure Signal (see image below), its bloody incredible, full five bars, calls made and recieved from everywhere in the apartment with clean crisp quality.

I cant really say anymore, well done Vodafone and well done John Quinn from Vodafone who gave them a hand with an install issue. 100% a winner here lads

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I have never been a huge Skype fan believing that people speak on phones rather than computers and that 5 billion is a much more interesting number than 28 million. I am though a fan of a new application called Viber which appears to be taking the world of telephony by storm. Friends who would be unsure of how to install an app are calling me on Viber and are calling me to discuss it, so whats Viber?

Its an application thats only available for iPhone but coming soon for Android, its always on so you dont have to go online, it integrates with your phone-book so there is no looking for peoples username, they are already in there plus when someone from your phone-book joins Viber you get a pop-up message informing your of their arrival. There is no registration and it uses your phone number as the unique identifier. Quality is a the high end with a slight dolby air about it.

This is one which has caught Skype on the hop in my opinion and the guys at Skype should be thinking about giving Talmon Marco a call and maybe getting out their chequebook, even the early Skype guys seem to think so.

Have you tried it?

you can add me on Viber for a chat +353872049121

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Will all the panic in the UK this week and Gordon Brown now wondering if his phone was “Hacked” I thought I would write a simple post on how to stop this “hacking”

Firstly none of this involves “hacking”, this is just a word concocted by journalists to make this story grow legs.

So how does it work, just like below

How do I access my voicemail from abroad?

Listening to your voicemail

In most countries, you can dial 171 to hear your Voicemail, just as you would at home. In some countries, you’ll need to dial into your mailbox. To do that, just follow these steps:

1. Key in your international mailbox number by dialling a 5 after the 87 prefix (e.g. 00 353 87 5 123 4567).
2. When you hear your greeting, press # to interrupt it.
3. Key in your password (which is 0000, unless you have personalised it).
4. Press # and then 1 to listen to your messages.

its simple, so simple (there is a little telephony trick which I wont write about here but), change your password from 0000 to something private now no one can evesdrop on your VM no matter what tricks they pull

Mobile telephony is safe, trust me

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Unless you have been hiding under a rock all week you will no doubt have heard of Quora, if not, what’s Quora? Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it.

Milo loves it and thinks “it will be the next twitter” and usually as my colleagues will tell you I say at this stage “oh its amazing, is it amazing? well its interesting but I am not sure what I get here that I don’t get on Linkedin answers or Yahoo answers

Quora though has a number of things going for it at the moment, two founders who came from Facebook, Scoble absolutely loves it (always a good thing) most importantly though the quality of the answers in there are incredible, You have AOL founder Steve Case answering questions on AOL, Facebook management responding to quesions about the company and Quora management answering questions about their own company.

Will it last?

I am not so sure, its been around a while without a whole ton of traction, we all have busy lives bu to say it has got off to a flying start would be an understandment, I cannot remeber any site that has created a buzz like this in its opening period, I really hope it does well though as it reminds me of Metafilter which for years was one of my favorite online hangouts.

Any thoughts?

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