My Htc Hero arrived yesterday, we bought it to test with some new MAXroam stuff and I have to say the improvement in Android since the G1 has been amazing.
Menu layout and movement between applications is quick and intuitive and graphics are amazing.
There is only one slight issue, after an overnight charge and 5 hours of use its dead by 2pm.
Seriously, why is no one doing any serious work on batteries?
Anyways back to my Nokia E72 which does what it says on the tin and lasts all day no matter what I do.

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You wake up in the morning, whats your first thought?
“I GOTTA GET MORE FRIENDS”
Who lives like this?
Well @katelawson worries about getting to 100, @eatingLA begs to hit 1000, and @megalucklylady views @carrie as a hero because she has 10,000.
These people really completely miss the value in twitter.
“Popularity is not an indication of quality.” Vanna Bonta
Check out this search for “followers” on Summize, its seems to be everyone’s biggest worry and I just don’t get it.
We now have the usual Social Meeja whores advising us on programs to get to 10,000 followers in 30 days, can it be done? yes, absolutely but you will have built up a community of 10,0000 idiots just like you.
Your twitter stream is a community of friends, why would you infect it with this bullshit, would you do this in real life?
I am positive you wouldn’t.
Take for example the famous twitter purge of spammers this week, where people lost 100′s of followers or practically 10% of their friends, I lost slightly over .01% and I had to even check that using some numbers tool.
I never watch numbers, I watch content, I like what friends do and what they recommend to me.
Thats Twitter’s value to me.
Whats Twitter’s value to you? are you a number jockey?

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It appears that Irish mobile network Meteor are giving full 3G data free of charge.

Chris Kennedy drew my attention to this early today.
Meteor’s standard prepaid data costs €1 a day for 50 megabytes and 2c per kilobyte thereafter.
However its appears that there is a exploit on Meteor’s prepaid data billing system.
Chris has been running full 3G Meteor data for the last 3 days with only 1c credit on his account which is not reducing as you can see from the video below.

It appears that once you keep a positive on your account and keep it below €1 data is free.

A few people suggested that Meteor would retrospectively charge for usage once we added credit to the sim, we added credit and as you can see from below, credit remained as before.

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I was dismayed over the weekend at Ireland’s non Cead Mile Failte to But Colin Zwirko, 21, Gavin Sides, 19, and Ben Whitehurst, 21 after they were refused entry to Ireland at Dublin Airport customs.
I had heard the story brewing over the week and as (hopefully) an ambassador for all things Irish decided to do something about it.
I again heard Mathew Hagg on Newstalk yesterday morning and then the plan came together, I decided that I was going to use my connections in Ireland to extend a welcome to the three young fella’s and show them some real Irish hospitality.
So first port of call was my favorite hoteliers D4hotels.ie , in fairness to Anthony Kelly executive PA to Sean Dunne he insisted that he wouldn’t allow them to stay anywhere else in Ireland and that D4 would cover the lads flights and accommodation.
Cubic would cover them with Euro unlocked top of the range phones, data sim cards, would pre-install QIK and get them video blogging their experience hopefully showing how we really welcome people plus unlimited credit for their trip.
I had a long chat with Colin Zwirko yesterday morning and they were obviously nervous about landing in Ireland and being turned away but I made contact with Minister Micheal Martin last night and his office is helping and working with us closely.
Now it got a bit murky after that with PR companies involved and I woke up this morning to the D4hotels.ie press release
Anyways I am looking forward to welcoming Colin, Gavin and Ben to Ireland and I hope they really enjoy themselves.

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I think it was Samuel Johnson that said “The Irish are a fair people; they never speak well of one another”
A piece in the Irish Times was pointed out to me today

Now in fairness to the guy who pointed it out he has also wrote on the subject.
I think we need to move away from this knocking mentality, we need to celebrate our successes and commiserate our failures not jump on people’s backs.
I am starting to notice it quite a lot lately with practically a sense of celebration from the pack when someone/company goes down, is this what we have become?, are we going to continue with the sins of our forefathers and maintain this “island mentality” or are we going to look west to our closest friends on that side where the success married by some failure is the mantra.

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I have been watching developments closely on this non issue around Nokia’s involvement in supplying Nokia Siemens switching for mobile communications equipment to Iran.
I think Nokia’s behavior in the whole sordid issue has been exemplary given that the so called monitoring equipment (intercept) is supplied by every Mobile switch manufacturer at every installation on the planet.
U.S. Government Has Same Wireless Monitoring Ability as Iran (businessWeek)
Now that we have the usual rent a mob who know zero about the technology starting a fucking dumb campaign with an anti Nokia twist I feel I have to comment.
“It’s hard to tell whether the problem is ignorance or hypocrisy, but Senators Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are making fools of themselves with their war on Nokia Siemens for supplying the Iranian government with equipment that lets authorities monitor wireless phone calls and data transmissions”
This monitoring (Calea) has been in existence since 1994 in the USA and if the equipment was supplied by USA firms it would have the exact same monitoring tools onboard.
An excellent release from Nokia hopefully will put paid to this rent a mob.

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Zero Mobile launched with a blast at CTIA Las Vegas and immediately won an award for its $69.95 unlimited Voice/data/sms package in the USA which hadn’t even launched at the time.
I have been hearing fishy stories regarding Zero ever since and decided to have a look around.

1. There appears to be no update or launch date on the Zero site.
2. A new player has now appeared on the horizon, Buzzirk Mobile is now an official partner of Zero and will resell it services, terrible website, cue customary celebrity pictures and a main site that has a Plesk control panel in place.
3. Sign-up to be a partner looks like a classic MLM offering
4. “$69.95 a month, with no roaming fees, contracts, credit checks or commitment. The prepaid service also includes unlimited wireless data connectivity at no extra cost” tells me how out of touch some voip writers are with market reality.
5. Lots of the usual MLM nutcases sniffing around.
6. It would be an idea to own your own domain.
7. Just plain weird.
8. Respected VoIP bloggers and industry experts who have attempted to learn more about Zero Mobile are either offered fluff interviews but no replies in writing.
9. 5G??? What happened to 4G

Someone is going to loose a packet here, trust me

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On March the 12th 2007 I wrote that Magic Jack would be a winner.
A couple of days later they sent me the device
Now we hear that Magic Jack will hit $100 million turnover this year.
“The company is selling about 9,000 to 10,000 MagicJacks a day, according to Borislow, and customers are using about 500 million minutes a month. The company will do more than $100 million in sales this year, Borislow says, and is cash-flow positive”
I had a chat a few years ago with the founder Dan Borislow and told him how I loved the product, Dan has had a very successful business career and is one of the most unassuming guys I have met.
Whats MagicJack?
its a USB stick that you plug into your PC/laptop and plug a normal household telephone into the other end, it gives you a USA number and you get to make and recieve calls to all USA numbers for zero cost in year one and $19.95 in year two
So how does MagicJack do this?
its really quite simple
As a CLEC MagicJack gets USA numbers for pretty much free, all telco’s that call this number must pay MagicJack a fee for “landing” on its network, so its pretty much telecoms arbitrage, if in evens with out the profit is 100% on the yearly fee, add on the profit from the device and you have a very successful business model.

So who are the MagicJack customers?
Travelers, people overseas with relatives in the USA is a huge portion of this business as you can imagine and people with no landline

The bad news
A huge amount of complaints in forums plus a certain amount of jealousy from telecoms quarters feeling that the sales model of MagicJack (late night infomercials) is cheap and tacky.

Me
I’m a huge fan, simple device, does what it says on the box
Sells millions.

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A few friends have added the new super trendy .tel domain to their already super trendy .mobi domains. I had a long twitter discussion with Michele Neylon of the Blacknight who host this blog and come highly recommended on the pros and cons.
Michele suggested that I give it a try and gifted me a .tel domain
Well here it is
What happens now?
This is the part I really don’t get, the people who already have my contact details now have them in a different place
What the .tel am I missing?
Any thoughts?

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I had a stroke of good fortune this week besides the obvious one.
I really dislike answering caller ID withheld and mostly ignore them, I had been pestered with them for the last few weeks and just wouldn’t bother.
Got a call last night from a number and finally picked it up.
It was someone from Canada Life saying I have a savings policy that had matured and where should they send the cheque.
I took it out when a friend was getting sober, he got a job with them and sold me his first policy and the pay day came yesterday.
It was a huge surprise and means The Phelan’s might get to Monaco for the F1 GP, I have wanted to go forever but couldn’t afford it.
No good turn is forgotten

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