“If Enterprise Ireland was to make 200 or 300 grants available every year at €50,000 a pop for entrepreneurs to build an online product and go to market. For €50,000, you can get three or four guys in a room for three or four months and they will build a product and go to market. If we had 300 of these groups every year, you would create a digital ecosystem.
“In the US, groups like Y Combinator are funding businesses at low levels and, in Europe, The Founders Fund is doing this.
“There are venture capitalists in the US waiting to bet on young businesses. It’s remarkable this hasn’t happened in Ireland yet. We should be supporting our young right now, instead of scaring them to death.
“For €10m a year, you could have 200 companies a year and 5% of them could emerge as Ireland’s answer to Microsoft or Nokia,” says Collins.
I’d say ‘Microsoft or Nokia’ might be a bit optimistic, but I applaud the philosophy.
On an unrelated note, I’m not a fan of the way the Irish Independent uses links. Like a few other newspaper sites, they link certain keywords such as ‘TechCrunch’ or ‘Wall Street Journal’ not to the sites, but to ‘topic pages’ on the Independent’s site.
John recently wrote a post and made a video demonstrating a specialized power strip that can eliminate standby or ‘vampire power’. This refers to electricity consumed by appliances and electronics which are apparently off, but are actually in an energy-leeching sleep mode.
John is Irish, so bonus points for the (Waterford? Wexford? I can never remember) accent.
In 2006, John’s neighbours in the UK banned standby power, which allegedly accounts for 8% of all domestic usage. I went looking for similar news from Canada, but all I could dig up was this FAQ about toothless ’standards’.
Here’s a chart that shows the worst culprits–plasma TVs, computers and game consoles.
Ever since I lived in Ireland, I’ve hung up my clothes to dry. In Dublin we had this ridiculous combination washer-dryer in one machine. The washing part worked okay, but the drying cycle only seemed to warm up my wet clothes. I’d have had better luck trying to dry them in the microwave.
I brought the habit back to Canada. Since a pre-teen growth spurt, I’ve also had a pathological fear of trousers and sleeves that are too short. Not using the dryer also means my clothes rarely shrink. Clothes dryers use a lot of power, so I get some bonus eco-smugness out of the deal.
However, we’ve always had crappy drying racks. They’ve been spindly, fragile affairs that are prone to finger-squeezing collapses. They’ve been awkward to set up, and so dainty that they can blow over in a stiff wind. Our drying rack in Malta ended up in the pool on more than one occasion.
I want a robust drying rack that will last a decade. It should be collapsible and ideally made of wood (though I’ll take plastic or aluminum).
Do you own such a rack? Where’d you get it? This is a long shot, but maybe somebody out there among you, my dear readers, has a drying rack that they love and can recommend
My Irish friend Sarah recently wrote a post about a trip to the USA, and the stark difference between customer service in Ireland and stateside:
In Ireland, no matter what shop you go into, the main purpose of the assistants is to make clear that you needn’t think you are any better than them just because they are on the other side of the counter. Refusal to make eye contact, flinging change on the counter (or managing to put it in your hand without looking at you which takes considerable effort) grumpily announcing that all sizes are on display and consciously avoiding one’s attempt to attract attention.
The Irish folks in the comment thread unilaterally agree. All of my Irish friends would regularly complain about the service in Ireland. They sometimes found the service in North America a little ingenuine, but they preferred too much help to not enough.
There’s tangible evidence of this attitude implicit in the way Irish clerks greet you in many shops. They say “are you okay, there?” I never really knew what the correct answer to that question was. If I needed assistance, I think I was supposed to say “no”, as in “I’m not okay, I need your help finding hot pants”, or whatever.
The subtext of “are you okay, there?” is, of course, “do I actually have to deign to do my job and help you?”
I asked several Irish people why there’s such a lousy attitude in the service industry. Nobody gave me a satisfactory answer.
These are a bit old, but I just got around to uploading them. As I mentioned, Vancouver seaplane company Harbour Air has launched a new service, flying from Mgarr Harbour on Gozo to Valetta’s Grand Harbour on Malta.
When Julie and I were heading to Edinburgh and Vancouver respectively, we gave Harbour Air Malta a try. Julie took some great photos en route. This is my favourite:
This one is uninteresting, but I took it because I’d never seen fish farms on the Mediterranean before.
Lastly, Julie went with our Irish friends to a Irish-Scotland rugby game in Edinburgh. I quite like this photo of the game:
Our hotel is right next to the Royal Dublin Society, commonly known around these parts as the RDS. The RDS is pretty much like Vancouver’s PNE, or any large exhibition grounds. Yesterday we saw a sign advertising a Supreme Cat Show at the RDS, and had to pop by to watch the feline strangeness.
In truth, it was less strange than I hoped. I did manage to get a few photos (as always, click for larger versions).
These cats just shouldn’t be:
I like the alarmed look on this cat’s face (and the creepy-looking kid at right):
This isn’t a cat photo, but what do you suppose this woman has in her Coke bottle?
Dublin’s Landsdowne Road is the oldest rugby ground in the world that hosts international matches. They also have international soccer/football matches there–I saw Ireland beat Russia there in a friendly back in 2002. It’s currently undergoing a €365 million renovation, and due to be reopened in 2009.
In the meantime, the Irish Rugby Foorball Union is holding a massive auction of the stadium’s ‘assets’. It’s running online this weekend, and you can get yourself any number of bits of memorabilia: seats, coat hooks (?) and even sections of the turf. Highest priced item at the moment? A Scotland vs. Ireland ‘touch judge flag’ (is that the thing that sits in the corner of the field, like where they take corner kicks from?) from 1924, currently going for €1.626,00.
The city’s Department of the Environment said San Francisco uses 181 million plastic grocery bags annually. Plans dating back a decade to encourage recycling of the bags have largely failed, with shoppers returning just one percent of bags, said department spokesman Mark Westland.
Mirkarimi said the ban would save 450,000 gallons of oil a year and remove the need to send 1,400 tons of debris now sent annually to landfills. The new rules would, however, allow recyclable plastic bags, which are not widely used today.
This was of particular interest to me because Ireland implemented a plastic bag tax while I lived there, back in 2002. People grumbled about the 15 cents they had to pay for each bag, but it was a raging success. There’s been a 90% reduction in usage:
The tax of 15 cents per bag was introduced five months ago in an attempt to curb litter, and the improvement had been immediate and “plain to see”, said Environment Minister Martin Cullen. He said that the 3.5 million euros in extra revenue raised so far would be spent on environmental projects.
For Dubliners, it was as much a litter problem as an environmental issue. Frankly, it had the messiest downtown I’ve ever visited in the developed world, and plastic bags were a major culprit. When I go back, I certain notice far fewer witches’ knickers in the trees.
UPDATE: In related news, Metaefficient reports that IKEA is going to start charging for plastic bags. Strong work, you Swedes.
Lately I’ve been listening to Gemma Hayes’s debut album. I saw her a few months back at Whelans, and frankly was kind of underwhelmed. She was a stage-presence-free zone. That said, this album’s great…folksy and listenable in a Sarah Mclachlan kind of way. She’s Irish, though, so you may have some trouble finding her outside of the Republic.
Incidentally, her Web site sucks in so many ways. If you tried to build a site that was less usable, you’d be hard pressed to excede this blight on the virtual landscape. But don’t hold that against her.
