techno-culture

No, no connection between the Irish dotcom multimillionaire and the Silicon Valley VC multimillionaire (yet!?) outside the tenuous one of sharing some newsprint space today in the Irish TImes. I interviewed both for this Friday’s Business This Week section. You can read Ray Nolan on the inside story of the $340m sale last week of WRI (Web Reservations International), parent company of Hostelworld.com and reborn Boo.com, and Tim Draper (who speaks at TCD this evening) on growing up the third in a family line of Valley VCs, and what makes for a good investment.

On a more sombre note, my column is on the endemic level of text-driving (driving while texting), an activity that has been shown to be more dangerous than driving drunk.

Tags: hostelworld, ray nolan, tim draper, VCs, WRI

Last month was the 50th anniversary of the launch of one of the most iconic old mainframes, the IBM 1401, in Oct 1959. Not only did one get a cameo role in the film Dr Strangelove, but this was the computer that brought real computing down to the level of small to medium sized businesses. The monthly lease costs were affordable to smaller businesses but also, many used bureau services from IBM or its partners to get processing jobs like invoices or inventory work done by computers rather than by hand.

I love writing about and talking to people who were involved with such aspects of computing history. I had a fantastic time talking for about 90 minutes to former programmer Denis Mullen, a retired Irish IBM career veteran, for my piece in today’s Irish Times.

As a companion story, I also relished finally having a good excuse to ring up the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, whose lovely album, IBM 1401: A User’s Manual has long been one of my favourites. That interview into why this album has this name and on how to get an old mainframe to sing — is here.

Tags: IBM 1401, IBM 1401: A User's Manual, Jóhann Jóhannsson, mainframe

Just picked this up off the Guardian site and it is devastating news — the Thursday tech section is not only the main reason I still get the Guardian delivered every day and one of my favourite bits in print, but also gave me an early start on my own career in writing on technology, publishing my first story for them in December 1996 (wow, 13 years ago now!). I still remember getting that commission at a time when I was just doing a tiny amount of work for the Irish Times and subbing for the Sunday Business Post, in precarious financial doldrums, and it was such a ratification of a writing life. It also opened many doors for me to other publications. Over the years, I learned so much from generous and supportive editors and writers like Jack Schofield, Tim Radford, Bill O’Neill, Vic Keegan, Charles Arthur. Back in 96 and 97, I would also fill in as a subeditor for the section, with the money for two days’ subbing covering my travel and B&B costs in London. What a great experience it was to work in the office now and then, sitting in the corner near Polly Toynbee’s desk and seeing so many of the byline faces queuing at the afternoon tea trolley. I remember a crazy few days in London having set up a meeting for then San Jose Mercury columnist Dan Gillmor to visit the Guardian tech folks (after which I filed a story and we headed off to drink with the original Register crowd in some dark pub in Soho ).

In short, the Thursday tech section has been a central influence on why I write about this sector and how I write about it, with the Guardian very much a writer and editor’s paper, with great support for writing up for a general audience rather than writing down to them. I loved doing the long features they took at that time, and the challenge of making technology interesting and exciting to any reader, rather than the pure techie audience (though I envied the trade publications not having to explain and simplify basic computing concepts as we had to do all the time). It was never easy to write for the Guardian, and rightly so. I remember many exhausting times writing stories into the wee hours after some event in California in order to make the morning deadline in London, running eight hours ahead.

One challenge always was getting a response from and access to US technology firms — this was pre 9/11 (after which many Americans knew of the Guardian) and few Americans followed the Guardian online or in print. In Silicon Valley if I said ‘Guardian’ people inevitably assumed I worked for the free sheet the Bay Guardian and weren’t much interested in doing interviews! Curiously — and this says a lot about American sentiments — while I had almost no visibility or interest back then if I said I worked for the Guardian on trips to the US, and usually had to actually explain what the paper was — almost everybody, including up to very high level executives, was willing to talk to me when I said I was with the Irish Times! Meanwhile back in Europe, the Irish Times was seen as a respected but very small paper, while doors constantly opened when I was wearing my Guardian hat.

I wrote a few pieces each month for the Thursday tech section of the Guardian for about two years, at a time when everything was so new and exciting and seemed unheard of in technology, especially consumer tech — jeez, in 1996 most people still lacked home internet access. Then I did work on and off for several more, but very little in recent times as I always had my plate full with work here. Plus it became much harder to write for a UK audience without living there — at the start, simply everything was new in tech and it was easy to write more general pieces from developments coming out of the US, but the tech scene has changed very much since then.

Well. I will savour memories of that first Guardian tech section commission and subsequent years of writing for them. Nothing has ever been quite as exciting as getting that first email back from Jack Schofield to my story pitch (on Drivesavers.com!) and the subsequent commission for it off of then-editor of the section Bill O’Neill. A few things in my journalistic life have come close — getting my Irish Times column around the same period; filling in as a columnist a few times for Danny O’Brien for the (London) Sunday Times back when it also had a tech section; being asked to do a long feature for New Scientist. But that initial Guardian tech commission — boy, that was really, really cool.

Sometimes I love the serendipity of discovery when doing research for a story: you just never know what is going to pop up. Last week, I was looking for some more detail on Condé Nast’s plans to close down venerable cookery magazine Gourmet (and keep Bon Appétit going). I found a foodie discussion board that had some more detail and stumbled upon this wonderful exchange follwoing a small spat betwen one who dissed Bon Appétit and one who was annoyed with what he saw as the poster’s “Manhattan style snobbery”:

“What the hell is Manhattan-style snobbery?”
“It’s tomato-based. New England-style snobbery has cream.”

I really enjoyed writing the piece which — as often happens when writing — pulled together some loosely connected ideas and thoughts that had been fermenting in my head for a while and for me, connected in and gave perspective to a recent event. You can read the full column here.

It’s been a loooong time coming, but 50 nations reached agreement last week on basic draft guidelines for ensuring some degree of data protection and data privacy. The Spanish Data Protection Commissioner organised the conference which seems to have had significant buy-in — the US was there as was Google and Facebook (the latter being two of the biggest de facto online controllers of personal data). At the moment the agreement has no legal standing but is an important start. Even just to get such a wide spread of nations and some big private sector players into a room and talking, for starts, is an accomplishment.

I was reading the long post this morning on the RTE Symphony website, where they have announced they will be continuing with the wonderful Meet the Players programme (where audience members can meet and mingle with some symphony players and other audience goers at the interval, all with a discount glass of wine). I went along to two of these events and each time the room was chatty and packed and I not only met some players but also some old and new friends.

I really enjoyed these two stories from the website, related to upcoming bills where audience members will again be able to meet some players (hopefully some of the horns so we can see if they turn blue!):

So onwards and upwards and to the next ‘meet & greets’ on Friday 6 November and Thursday 3 December. The programme on 6 November will have the French horn players out in force, with Mozart’s 4th Horn Concerto – with soloist John Ryan – and Richard Strauss’ Don Juan. Strauss wrote and conducted this piece when he was only 24 years old. It’s a testing piece for the horns in the orchestra – and was so even when Strauss rehearsed it. As Steven Ledbetter wrote in a Boston Symphony Orchestra programme note: The orchestra took the piece well after the initial shock of the first rehearsals. One of the horn players remarked, “Good God, in what way have we sinned that you should have sent us this scourge!” But Strauss was in good humor throughout the difficult rehearsals, and he wrote after the premiere, “We laughed till we cried! Certainly the horns blew without fear of death…I was really quite sorry for the wretched horns and trumpets. They were quite blue in the face, the whole affair was so strenuous.”‘

But before that, Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, where John Ryan is joined by tenor Robin Tritschler. This brings back many happy memories of my Dad (Principal Horn with the RTÉ NSO from 1954 to 1980) performing that work in his heyday and one funny story about a poor unsuspecting horn soloist! The Britten Serenade ends with an ethereal epilogue in which the horn player usually plays from offstage. So, in a certain performance, the horn soloist leaves the stage and steps into an elevator at the side thinking it wouldn’t be in use during a concert.Er, not so – in mid-phrase the doors close, leaving the poor soloist struggling to play as loud as he can as he descends into the basement. The audience exclaimed it was the most spectacular diminuendo they’d ever heard!!

That won’t happen on Friday 6 November, I’m sure…

Observer columnist John Naughton has a superb blog post today on Cyberspace and its Discontents which nails exactly the Janus face of the internet: why the net is wonderful/the net is hideous. An adept picking apart of the Stephen Fry/Jan Moir/Trafigura twitter situations.

His quotes from Stephen Fry’s blog also leave me deeply impressed by Fry, whose blog I had not followed before but will definitely follow now.

I really like this perceptive overview, which puts a shape on random thoughts I am sure many of us have had and not been able to articulate:

The pollution of the commons

It’s been fascinating to watch the growth of Twitter. In the early days, it was pure delight: a playground for geeks and early-adopters. In many ways, it still is — at least for me: it gives me a way of plugging into the thoughtstreams of people who interest me and whose ideas are worth knowing about. But once the mainstream media discovered it, the the usual things happened: companies and their PR agencies wondering how they can exploit it to ‘build’ their brands; self-publicists seeking ways of increasing their exposure; and of course spammers and malware artists seeking ways to phish and extort.

But then this is also an old story. We saw it, for example, in News Groups — the original open discussion spaces of the early Internet. Once they were places where like-minded people engaged in discussion that was usually vigorous — sometimes very vigorous — but where, by and large, the rules of civilised discourse were observed. Then the space was invaded by the redneck hordes unleased onto the Net by AOL, and then by pornographers and spammers — and suddenly it was a place where one no longer wished to be.

Blogging emerged partly as a response to the pollution of the Newsgroup space. In a blog one can have one’s say and not feel compromised or intimidated by hostility. You own your own words, as Dave Winer used to say. But then the laudable desire to use the blogosphere as a discussion space took hold, and people began to allow commenting on their blogs — and in no time at all found themselves up to their eyes in the old cesspit of vicious, anonymous, attack-dog commenting with the result that any serious blogger was faced with two options: either spend a lot of time moderating comments to weed out the crap; or devise methods of social control — like requiring that all commenters provide a valid email address and maybe other forms of identification. And then, on top of all that, came the comment spam — deluges of it.

So there is a natural history of online communications, and Twitter is now entering the middle stages of it. Of course it may be that it escapes the normal degenerative path of such virtual spaces, but if it does then it will be a first.

The New York Times flags Britain’s status as a leading surveillance state — bottom of the league in a Privacy International privacy survey. I don’t know if that situation has actually ‘rankled’ most Britons, as the article suggests. Many privacy invasions don’t seem to bother us much in Ireland, either. Still:

But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of three, were startling just the same. Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the neighborhood school, local officials here began a covert surveillance operation. They obtained her telephone billing records. And for more than three weeks in 2008, an officer from the Poole education department secretly followed her, noting on a log the movements of the “female and three children” and the “target vehicle” (that would be Ms. Paton, her daughters and their car).

And:

…under a law enacted in 2000 to regulate surveillance powers, it is legal for localities to follow residents secretly. Local governments regularly use these surveillance powers — which they “self-authorize,” without oversight from judges or law enforcement officers — to investigate malfeasance like illegally dumping industrial waste, loan-sharking and falsely claiming welfare benefits.

But they also use them to investigate reports of noise pollution and people who do not clean up their dogs’ waste. Local governments use them to catch people who fail to recycle, people who put their trash out too early, people who sell fireworks without licenses, people whose dogs bark too loudly and people who illegally operate taxicabs.

We aren’t quite that bad. Yet? And certainly not because the government in Ireland places any intrinsically greater value on citizen privacy and data protections.

I’m also blogging now over on Current Account, the Irish Times business blog. I’ve just posted this item from San Francisco, on the love ‘em/hate ‘em relationships between tech executives who have to share the same ecosystem, in which their customers want to use the products and services of both. That makes for ‘frenemies’ — a friend crossed with an enemy — and when a particularly public rivalry, such as that between Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, turns into a love-in (well, maybe more a like-in) a journalist has just gotta go listen and document the result.

TD Sean Sherlock released this press release earlier today following the first day of debate on the data retention bill. These are key issues: the cost burden, the length of retention, and lack of judicial oversight.

Speaking in the Dáil today on the Communications (Retention of Data) Bill 2009, Deputy Sean Sherlock said: “This is an important piece of legislation and while it seeks to transpose an EC Directive for which we have an obligation, the content of the legislation which has been published is extremely weak. It needs to be strengthened on the basis that it will place too high a cost burden on business and does not have adequate judicial oversight.

“I have serious reservations with this Bill, judicial oversight is too weak and the retention of data for a period of 2 years as proposed by this Bill could lead the process to be open to abuse.

“I am critical of the fact that the two year retention period for keeping data will present too high a cost for internet service providers (ISP) and telephone companies. The standard across Europe seems to be six months and this to my mind would be more a reasonable approach.

“The Judicial oversight is too weak and I believe the process has to be open to greater scrutiny by a Judge and this process must be more clearly defined. The present wording in Section 11 of the Bill should be strengthened and we hope to amend this wording at Committee stage.

“We are not against the principle of data retention but the concerns addressed by the Tech sector and telcos must be addressed in the legislation. The Bill as published does not address these concerns and I hope that there will be a further consultation between the Minister and the telecommunications sector before this Bill is passed.

“Unless their concerns are addressed within the Bill in terms of the increased cost burden, then it will be very difficult to support the Bill.”

Tags: data retention bill, labour party, sean sherlock

Hollywood and other acting metropoli are apparently packed full of aging humorless hags over 35. At least that is what one would be led to believe by this extraordinary comment by TV programme Hung co-creator Colette Burson in the Anne Heche profile in today’s Observer magazine. In Hung, Heche plays, shock!, a woman over 35:

We auditioned a lot of people,’ says (Burson). “It’s incredibly difficult to find beautiful, talented, funny women over 35.”

Really? In all of Los Angeles, New York, and other cities across the globe? REALLY? How can that possibly be, given the many beautiful, talented, funny actresses who are older, and all those I can think of who were under 35 a few years ago and must now fall into the ‘over 35′ camp? With all the complaints about there being no roles for actresses over 35, and the world being full of same? With no disrespect to Anne Heche, who is perfectly fine and talented in the role, most people faced with the requirement of finding someone with those qualities could have thought of many other actresses that would fit that bill for the shortlist before thinking, “and Anne Heche!”

The piece also dismisses her three-plus years with Ellen DeGeneres with the narrow observation, ‘in retrospect, given her experience with her duplicitous father and homophobic mother, it could seem that her attraction to DeGeneres [criticised at the time as a 'career move'] had less to do with acting than acting out.’ Three and a half years is longer than half the celebrity relationships in Hollywood — I think ‘acting out’ would occupy a bit less time. And how condescending is this: ‘DeGeneres has said little publicly about their relationship, perhaps because in Heche’s memoir, the love she expresses for DeGeneres comes across as genuine.’ Good grief — maybe DeGeneres just has the decency to keep her private relationships private and chooses not to satisfy the prurience of a certain section of the press and public. And goodness, I thought we were by now past the point of assuming sexual preference is just an ‘either/or/faking it’ choice.

All in all, a depressing piece to read. And why is it there anyway? — most people don’t buy the Observer to get Hello!.

So the Irish nation resoundingly voted yes on a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Lots of analysis that I think is very wide of the mark as to why. I think — and the results I also think bear this out — that a certain number of ‘yes’ people the first time around were sure the treaty would be resoundingly approved and found the topic and election a bit dull and assumed others would carry the day. They didn’t. The much larger turnout this time surely reflects that this time the yes people who didn’t vote realised they’d better get their behinds in gear and turn up at the polling stations. Also I think lots of people voted ‘no’ the first time simply because they felt that if they didn’t understand what they were voting on, they should just vote no. This was true of many, many people I spoke to in my Dublin Central district. And finally some voted no because of issues that were clarified as ‘guarantees’ this time around — and while the no side this morning tried to claim the No vote last time had substantially changed the treaty, as far as I can see only a single item actually changed, that of keeping a commissioner. The other ‘guarantees’ only seem to more clearly restate what is already stated in the treaty itself?

So it didn’t surprise me at all that the Yes vote prevailed this time. And because so many were clearly confused in part due to the woeful campaign staged by a complacent government last time around, I think it was absolutely right to restage a referendum. The utter nonsense about this not being ‘democratic’ is ridiculous — California has a far more ‘democratic’ referendum process because the people themselves place referanda issues on the ballot by garnering a certain number of signatures — and very, very often something that is voted in one year or voted out one year appears on the next ballot for a revote. I have no doubt that if Ireland had this ‘even more democratic’ process, the Irish people themselves would have placed the Lisbon issue back on the ballot, and it would have passed. I always had the sense that the Irish were quite shocked to find they’d voted no.

I’ll set aside the rich irony of certain ‘no’ individuals, organisations and parties making any argument at all about how ‘democratic’ and ‘transparent’ a process is and should be… and the reappearance of many of those are, I’m sure, also why many people voted ‘yes’, appalled at their return. I think a lot of yes people last time assumed the electorate would not come out and support these folks (who were, interestingly roundly NOT elected when they ran in the last election that came before the steep downturn. So to claim that yes supporters mostly voted yes only due to fear about the economy leaves one wondering why they didn’t then support two particular no champions more strongly in local elections, when the economy was less an issue?). Some others on the ‘no’ side raised important issues and encouraged intelligent debate but sadly most of these people were not the (self-appointed?) mouthpieces for the No side and hence the No discussion was again left to be driven by a ragtag fringe that ultimately I think helped cement the final yes outcome.