Irish Tech News
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Sometimes it is difficult to tell the press releases from the news on what passes for Irish technology news sites. Most of them seem to be just recycling press releases with an added byline. And then there is the gadget fests where the latest products have unquestioning puff pieces published as “reviews”. So is it worth starting a real Irish tech news site or is the Irish market so small that only mediocrity thrives?
Written by John McCormac on October 3rd, 2006 with 5 comments.
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Only 1000 Sunrise applications for .eu domains are checked each day by Eurid’s validation agent PwC BE. It seems that the “popularity” of .eu was completely underestimated. With hundreds of thousands of applications from Sunrise 1 and Sunrise 2 the mickey mouse validation process is swamped. Of the 1503 Irish companies who submitted their applications for their company identity as their .eu domain, they have a long wait ahead. Not even one Irish company name application has been validated. It could be next year before some of these applications are even dealt with.
The sheer incompetence of the Commission and Eurid in underestimating the attraction of .eu is quite staggering. Furthermore it calls into question the “expertise” of the panel that selected the Eurid bid for to run the .eu registry. The whole .eu fiasco has been such a disaster for Europe and if anything, it has caused an increased focus on some of the more credible ccTLDs in Europe.
Tags: IrishBlogs,.EU, EU Corruption, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics , Eurid, domainnames
, .EU fraud
Written by John McCormac on May 11th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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A review of 2005 Irish tech journalism scene on John Collin’s blog mulling over the events and the shift of some Irish tech journos to Public Relations raised an interesting possibility: Could tech publishing have a “long tail” effect? Piaras Kelly’s blog had a post that seemed to confirm the possibilty.
Prior to a mass market, the publishing market would be specialist. In an early mass market, basically anyone can jump in because the barriers to entry are low and the knowledge requirements are low as well. Everyone is looking for information and they are not actively filtering. The tech publishing scene followed that model precisely in the dot.bomb era. There was an influx of journalists all writing about the web and technology for a general audience who could not tell the difference between fact and press release. At this point you could almost see the rise of the personality tech journalism where journos considered themselves more important than the story. These were the main targets for the PR people. Remember the end of the movie “The Devil’s Advocate”?
As the market changes from an early market to a mature market, some of the early players will fall by the wayside and some of the journos will disappear too. But those who are left tend, generally, to get better and develop a following. The crunch time is when the market matures. A lot of the journos that the PR people spent years cultivating will have disappeared from the field or have gotten jobs elsewhere.
A mature publishing market has high barriers to entry and the readership is more sophisticated. The new/learner readership segment has reduced and readers now consider themselves more clueful. The market that a lot of the early journalists were writing for has disappeared. At this stage the tech publishing market tends to be dominated by a few key players in the mass market side and a few specialist publications on the niche market side.
Many tech publications in Ireland shifted their emphasis from news to being a PR conduit though that happened years ago for some of them. ENN has managed to leverage that so that it has in effect become a PR content provider. It is quite a clever commercial exploitation of a niche but I wonder if it has done so by compromising its credibility as a news source. Siliconrepublic’s ties to the print world are probably essential to its survival. If it loses any of them, then it could have problems.
The Irish tech publishing market has too small an audience to support good news coverage so there is a temptation for editors to rely on press releases. Any tech publication has a mix of news/press releases/events/features/advertising. Getting this right is one of the hardest things for any publisher.
Press releases are a neccessary part of tech publishing but becoming reliant on them has a corrosive effect for the publication. In 2002, John O’Sullivan of DCU published a paper (Microsoft Word format) on newspapers and the effects of the web. It is a very interesting paper because you can see the attitudes of journalists who were struggling to cope with the effect of the web on journalism.
Tags: IrishBlogs, Publishing, Technology Journalism, HackWatch
Written by John McCormac on December 20th, 2005 with 3 comments.
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The latest Computerscope magazine had an article, written by John Collins, on the Irish hosting scene. The article was interesting because it had a quote from the CIO of BT Ireland, Martin Wickham, about the Irish hosting market being a “fragmented and dysfunctional market with a lot of offerings around pure space rental.” This quote seems to demonstrate the lack of situational awareness common in ISP management.
The Irish hosting market is far from a dysfunctional market. Though without accurate data, the Irish market can seem to be fragmented and dysfunctional especially if you rely on dubious information sources such as webhosting.info etc. The real battle in the Irish hosting business is for the high value .ie clients. And it is a battle in which BT Ireland, like other ISPs continues to lose ground.
As with any market where the barrier to entry is low, the lower end of the market is always going to appear highly fragmented. But at the top of the market, it takes on a very structured form. The top Irish hosters account for over 54% of the Irish market. The ISPs are losing market share because these HSPs can provide a highly automated and very efficient service. And in a ruthlessly efficient market, only the fittest survive.
The Computerscope article showed a good understanding of the Irish hosting situation. I don’t think that the Irish web hosting service providers (HSPs) would like to be referred to as “indie hosters” especially when some of them have more clients hosted than many ISPs.
Just looking at BT Ireland’s domain counts from December 2000 to December 2005, (part of a report on the history of the Irish Hosting Business that will be published next week) it is easy to see why ISPs continue lose market share to HSPs. The HSPs are small and often very efficiently run operations where the business owner has everything on the line. The ISP management just don’t have that kind of dedication. And in a service driven industry, that can prove fatal.
Irish HosterStats Reports
Tags: IrishBlogs,IEDR, Domains, Internet Statistics , Webhosting,.EU
Written by John McCormac on December 17th, 2005 with 5 comments.
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For a non-profit organisation running .ie ccTLD, IEDR made a rather large profit from the high price of .ie domains. Arguably most of this profit went to pay off debts incurred during previous years. Now, a relatively debt-free IEDR has cut the trade price of .ie domains by 20%. Could it be that the impending free-for-all in .eu forced the change?
The Irish hosting industry has been complaining that the .ie price is too high. The launch of .eu gave IEDR the impetus for change. The .eu gTLD is still in the Sunrise phase 1 where registrations are limited to owners of trademarks and geographic rights. The real knife-fight will not happen until April 2006 when the .eu is a free for all.
If IEDR is to cope with the onslaught of .eu, it has to make changes. One of these, importantly, is the pricing of .ie domains. The second is a change in the board of IEDR. The board of IEDR does not have any members with operational expertise in the domain/hosting business. It is hardly a reservoir of domain expertise. The management of IEDR, as distinct from the board, is more in tune with the industry. The .eu launch may bring some of the changes that the industry would like to see with .ie ccTLD. With the price cuts, IEDR may consider that .ie is competing with .eu gTLD. However the real opponent is .com and IEDR is unlikely to cut prices that to make .ie a competitor for .com gTLD. And of course there is another question - will Irish hosters pass on the price cuts?
Irish HosterStats Reports
Tags: IrishBlogs,IEDR, Domains, Internet Statistics , Webhosting,.EU
Written by John McCormac on December 15th, 2005 with 3 comments.
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Novara.ie launched its budget hosting brand HOSTING247.IE and other Irish hosters do not seem pleased. Previously, Novara’s call for a reduction in the price of .ie registrations was greeted by some other Irish hosters as being somewhat hypocritical as they pointed out that Novara’s markup on .ie domains was high. However the launch of Novara’s budget hosting brand has changed things. It also has a sting in the tail - Novara is offering hosters who register .ie domains the .ie wholesale price.
Taken on its own, it could be just a move on the low end of the hosting market but the inclusion of the offer of .ie registrations at the IEDR wholesale cost price to hosters is significant. Most smaller hosters ignore .ie cctld completely and have very few .ie registrations. The wholesale price of the .ie domains does not make it viable for these hosters. This move could see some smaller hosters taking advantage of this offer.
Tags: IrishBlogs , Domains, Internet Statistics , Webhosting
Written by John McCormac on September 27th, 2005 with 1 comment.
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The European parliament voted to reject software patents. The vote was 648 to 14 with 18 abstentions to reject the legislation. The software industry in Europe has reason to celebrate. The European Commission drafted legislation ended up pleasing nobody. Apparently the European Commission will not submit new legislation on the subject. The legislation, would have made software patents legal in Europe and reduced the European patents system to the completely broken level of the US Patents Office.
The Irish software industry has been distinctively anti-software patents. The problem is that the big players were the ones with the budgets for PR and for planting stories in the Irish media that the Irish software industry was pro-software patents.
A bunch of self-appointed operations claiming to represent the Irish software industry were lobbying hard to portray the Irish software industry as being pro-software patents. The reality is that these organisations really were just shills for Microsoft and their friends. The average small programming business is not going to waste money on joining these organisations. Big companies however will. Thus what these organisations end up representing is the party line of large multinationals rather than the Irish software industry.
The Irish software industry has been anti-software patents with a few exceptions. This has been a victory for the European software industry and the people of Europe.
Tags: Irishblogs - Software Patents - EU - Open Source- Free Software
Written by John McCormac on July 6th, 2005 with comments disabled.
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Data Retention of mobile and fixed line phone records is now clearly part of Irish law. It made it into an amendment to a Criminal Justice bill that was passed in January and signed into law on March 5th by the president of Ireland. And nobody in the mainstream media noticed.
The best analysis of the matter is an article on the website of Privacy International. The amendment itself is also cited on the Privacy International website.
The news of this amendment becoming law belatedly made it into the Irish media with an article in the Irish Examiner detailing the new legislation on March 4th. An article by Karlin Lillington in Saturday’s Irish Times which she later quoted on her blog summarised the post legislation situation. A Sunday Tribune article by Fergus Cassidy provided more back ground and more interesting questions. Bernie Goldbach also picked up the growing storm in the Irish blogosphere over the matter.
The law now requires mobile and fixed line phone companies to retain call and location data records for three years. Thus it would be possible to identify a target’s social network from the call patterns and potentially map mobile phone usage. This is stuff that is being done already. Phone companies use this kind of analysis to suggest the best tariffs to subscribers. What the legislation did was to clear up the questions about whether the companies should retain the data for three years or six months. The amendment puts data retention on a firmer legal basis but it does exclude the content of the calls.
Tag: IrishBlogs , Electronic Privacy , Data Retention
Written by John McCormac on March 21st, 2005 with comments disabled.
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