(Yes, I chose the date and time on purpose for +2 all the way.)
Monthly Archive for September, 2007
Meant to quote this interview with Marie Boran that was published last week about our forthcoming social.ie site…
Online networking for the Social.ie challenged
27.08.2007 - Social networking fans in Ireland can look forward to a site catering especially for them, as John Breslin, creator of the popular Boards.ie portal is currently working on a platform that will combine all the spin-off functions including blogs, ‘friends’ lists, events and photo albums.
“There are a huge amount of social networks, maybe even an overabundance of them, but at the same time there isn’t any dedicated one where you know you will find things of an Irish interest,” said Breslin.
Breslin, who is also a researcher with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in NUI Galway, talked about how his team is developing social.ie while looking at how online communities connect – namely, through shared objects, not people.
“If you look at sites like Flickr and del.icio.us and so on, people are connected through photos and bookmarks and events,” he said.
In parallel with that Breslin started working at DERI three and a half years ago and was introduced to various elements of social networking by his boss Stefan Decker and began thinking about how he could apply this functionality to boards.ie.
He introduced a ‘friends’ function to the boards site three years ago which has led to over 15,000 links between users. With this success his team is now working on bringing this to social.ie, planning to plug the social networking site it into the existing boards user base.
A part of the design which is unique to social.ie is an interactive graph visualisation model, with the user shown at the centre and a graphical display of the offshoots of friends they are linked to.
Boards.ie, said Breslin, has been a part-time project for the five main directors of the company, himself included, but this year for the first time due to its growth and revenue the team is now actively looking for full-time staff.
There is no exact timeframe, however, for the launch of social.ie, although it is in development right now.
By Marie Boran
I had an e-mail from Gerard Butler at EI telling me about the forthcoming Informatics Showcase event in Dublin on Wednesday, October 3rd. The event features presentations by researchers on commercial opportunities from their informatics research: typically technology license or campus company investment opportunities.
I’d be interested in attending but will be on leave that week, as the Zimbie and Millifeed projects are both quite interesting to me. Here’s the blurb from the site:
This event is designed to bring people together from the venture capital, business and research community to create mutually-profitable partnerships.
Since the informatics team started bringing researchers and industry together in 2005, Enterprise Ireland has worked closely with the commercialisation specialists in the research community. This has resulted in 12 technologies licensed to Irish companies with an additional 8 deals on track in 2007.
We have also supported the start up of three companies in the last two years, with another four due in 2007. 160 research projects in the informatics area have been funded to date and this event provides the opportunity to hear from 8 researchers who are currently bringing their technologies to market.
Potential investors or licensors of the technologies on show can also schedule a one-to-one meeting on the day with the researchers in advance. To arrange this you need to register. Click here to register
We had a very interesting invited talk last week from Jan Blanchard of TouristRepublic / TouristR, giving an overview of TouristR and a forthcoming project called TripPlanr.
I first met Jan when he visited us here in March, and since then at various events such as the Galway OpenCoffee meetups, but we had about 25-30 people from DERI at the presentation on Wednesday and also had some good questions / answers and discussions with Jan and TouristR developer Conor after the talk…
(Thanks to Uldis for the photos.)
Ina is organising the next Galway OpenCoffee Club.
As usual, it will be held in the Forster Court Hotel, near Ceannt Station, at 11 AM. The idea is to have it on the first Friday of every month.
As mentioned previously, I will be taking part in the “Talk Digital” panel discussion on “Social Networking in Games” on Monday at 1 PM, which is part of the GAME :ON Cyber Games Festival in the Digital Hub, Dublin next week. The panelists are:
- Me - DERI, NUI Galway, “founder of boards.ie” (no, I’m only a co-founder!)
- Mark Taylor - head of content, Eircom
- Jamie McCormick - operations manager, Xbox Live Gaming Centre
- Peter Lynch - CEO, Eirplay Games
- Joe Drumgoole - CEO, PutPlace
- TBC, someone from MOLI
The event will be chaired by John Collins from the The Irish Times, and the where and when details are:
- Date: Monday, 10 September 2007
- Time: 13:00
- Venue: Presentation Room in the Digital Depot, Roe Lane, The Digital Hub, Dublin 8 (map)
I’ve been updating myself on recent developments in the Investnet.ie social networking platform, which hosts a number of Irish social networks including communities for innovation and creativity, the healthcare industry, Wireless Ireland, First Tuesday, Invent DCU and the Ryan Academy.
It looks like Marc and David at Investnet and Derek and Barry at Jeebers have been very busy since I met them last in May, with some nice new features on Investnet.ie like integrated blog feeds in your profile, user endorsements, single sign-on to all the aforementioned network sites, and enhanced connection / event / group browsing functionality.
(Disclosure: I am an advisor to Investnet Ltd.)
Does anyone have a good resource for listing the top Irish websites? All I have to go on at the moment are Alexa’s Ireland listings (which has boards.ie at #9) and the Top 100 Irish Sites (boards.ie is at #6).
Recent Comments