Keith Shirley

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Wireless USB seems to be taking a step closer every day to being a useful tool for those of us in Europe. It’s already for sale in the states but we have to wait for various permits etc.  I love the simplicity of regular USB and except for the risks of data loss with USB storage devices- it’s pretty foolproof. The hubs for USB do a lot to reduce the number of cables but my desk is still a spaghetti junction.

Wireless USB is supposed to get rid of the standard USB interface. The standard is supposed to have quite a high transfer rate – somewhere between Bluetooth and WLAN. It uses near-field radio technology as the basis for transmission. You don’t really need to know what radio system it uses – just that it’s not designed for long distances. If you can do it now with a cable – you’ll get a little more with wireless.

The official transfer rate is 480 Mbit per second but in the real world you’ll probably get about one quarter of that. Which is fine. It’s more than enough to do most of the things I’m personally hoping for.

The extra functionality that a proper working wireless USB system would allow should be quite fun. We can get rid of a lot of cables for a start. We should be able to transmit from video players (eg Phones) direct to the TV. We’ll be able to have digital photo frames that pick up the pictures from your PC. We’ll be able to share devices much more easily. We’ll probably have some innovative new hacking techniques.

Wireless USB is supposed to have some intelligent power handling. The devices will talk to each other and form a kind of network. One member of the group will “stay awake” while the others go into sleep mode. The perfect example of this would be the digital picture frame. It can wake up – pick up a photo and then go back into sleep mode. As the other devices will remember who it is – it won’t waste energy reconnecting and setting up a link every time it needs a new photo. Like most things however – I doubt the initial devices will do it properly.

As usual – Sony are coming out with a competing technology. It’s too early for me to make any comments on it.

If you’re looking for detailed information then check out http://www.usb.org/developers/wusb

If you’re a manufacturer and you need someone to test cool gadgets – I’m willing to be a lab rat.

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I always get asked which broadband connection is the best – and I always answer I don’t know. I don’t use them all. The only thing I can do is offer some advise on what to look out for. I keep meaning to write them down but now Maeve Kneafsey has written a post Don’t get broadsided by broadband – quick guide which means I don’t have to.

A couple of points I would add

- If you are planning to play games online – the time delays when sending & receiving commands via a satellite Internet link could cause you trouble.

- If you are getting ADSL installed there is a limit on how far away from the telephone exchange that you can be. Even if you are within range the line has to pass a quality test. Multiples connections (eg the extra phone in the bedroom) as well as devices such as fax machines or your sky box can disturb the line. Sometimes it’s worth cleaning things up before they run the test.

- The speed that you can send things to the Internet is much slower than the receive (download) speed with ADSL. If you are going to be sending lots of big mails or videos then you may be better off with the wireless options which often have the same speed in both directions. Most “normal” people are perfectly happy with the slower upload speed as normal web surfing involves data coming in the other direction.

- If you are having stability problems with a fast link – try slowing it down. It often ends up consistently faster.

I’m sure I’ll thing of more.

In the middle of May I received a mail from the Carlow Chamber of Commerce.

The South East continues to lag behind other regions in terms of economic growth. There is a lack of hard data that measures business confidence and performance in the region making it difficult to make a case for South East businesses.

In response, Market Dynamics has devised its South East Business Confidence Study.  Updated every six months with business leaders, it will address issues such as business environment, changes in employment levels and the key challenges facing organisations in the region.

Being a good business citizen I decided to complete the survey (of course – the fact that there was a potential prize of a navigation system has nothing to do with it). I’m pleased to say the survey was short and to the point – I hate long surveys.

I was especially happy to see 2 issues covered that are important to me – the issue of a regional university and broadband.

I spoke to Fiona Macrae of Market Dynamics for permission to quote some of the results. The executive summary is not yet available on their website so please call them if you want more info.

I personally like the idea of having a university in the South East and find it hard to believe that we still don’t have one. At the 2008 Annual Business Forum I had the opportunity to ask Brendan Maher, the MD of Unum Ireland, what his opinion was on the subject. The question was very innocent as I have sometimes wondered if it’s just posturing by those involved and possibly not important to big business. I didn’t realise that I was close to putting my foot in it – Brendan was kind enough to make clear that he is on the board of IT Waterford and therefore also a little biased (my words not his). He confirmed that it is a big issue  – and personally causes difficulty explaining it to his head office.

The report from Market Dynamics confirms that the issue is also important to businesses in the region:

• Four out of five organisations believes that a regional university would be either important or very important to the economy of the South East region.  Organisations in counties Waterford, Wexford and South Tipperary were most positive with those in Carlow and Kilkenny less so.
• When asked to what extent they felt a regional university would benefit the county they are based in, a total of 68%, or two-thirds, considered that it would be of great benefit while about one in four (26%) felt that it would be of moderate benefit.

Strangely “Carlow based businesses are the least positive about a South East University”. I hope it’s because they are happy with the work IT Carlow is doing. What really got me thinking was “Kilkenny businesses are most negative about the possibility of a South East University than any other county in the region with one in four businesses saying it would not make an important contribution to the South East regional economy.” That must be a bitter blow to the people in Kilkenny that have spent decades fighting for their own university. At the risk of really annoying people – I think all the IT’s should be given the opportunity of applying for University status.

The report also discussed broadband and tried to access the level of satisfaction among business owners. I’m generally unhappy as I’m trying to encourage people to install online backups. Bad Internet connections are a real problem for that business. In general I think the lack of good Internet connections across the country is holding back the development of dispersed small businesses and work at home ventures. More on that another day.

I realise that I’m in a small category – dealing with 100’s of Gigabytes per month means that I need faster links than most people. I was interested to see how much my biased opinion was in sync with other business owners. Pulling some quotes out of the report:

Almost 90% of respondents believe that broadband access is important to the South East economy.  However, 29% of those who have broadband say it is inadequate to meet their requirements.

One third of Carlow respondents consider that their broadband is insufficient to meet their requirements.

(In Wexford) – One in three businesses claim that their broadband access is insufficient to meet their requirement

I’ll take that as a general 30% vote for my opinion.   I guess I need to work harder to show businesses all the extra benefits they can have by getting more from their broadband connections.

Feel free to let me know your opinions on either the University issue or the broadband. I’m especially interested in hearing other points of view as to why we may not need a university in the South East.

A reminder to anyone thinking of applying for an Enterprise Ireland innovation voucher that the closing date for the current round is 30 June 2008. If you do miss it however the next round runs from 1 Sept to 30 Sept 2008.

The idea behind the innovation voucher is to help build links between the Institutes of Technology and business. It’s a great opportunity for a small business to get involved in some research activity which they otherwise might not be able to afford. The voucher is for 5000 Euro – which although is not a lot in the research world is certainly very helpful if you are trying to flesh out an idea.

If you have an idea for a new business or product – then make sure to avail of the advice your local Enterprise Board can give you.

Shercom was awarded a voucher last year to further develop backups solutions for businesses with large amounts of data. When I applied for it I was specifically thinking of smaller businesses like printers, graphics designers or photographers that are sometimes producing large amounts of files but are stuck with a small broadband connection.

We did actually issue a press release at the time and I’m embarrassed to say I forgot to put it on the blog. Better late than never, I’ll let you read it now.

Shercom Limited, Ireland has been awarded 5000 Euro through the Enterprise Ireland Innovation Program. This acknowledgement of Keith Shirley‘s vision for the company will further his commitment to developing the Irish market. Shercom Ltd. will work closely with the Carlow Institute of Technology to research additional offsite backup options for those companies hampered by slow or expensive broadband connections.

Quietly launched in 1999, Shercom Ltd. has been focusing on international clients in the IT and Telecoms sectors. Mr. Shirley, a Carlow native, recently saw this opportunity in the Irish technology market place to provide dedicated managed IT backup solutions and is currently concentrating on the Midlands and Southeast.

Broadband speed may mean nothing to the normal user checking their emails but it is vital when providing for modern secure and efficient backup services. For most companies, broadband is the safest, most effective and most efficient solution for backing up data. However, for the few companies with exceptionally large amounts of data daily, the currently available broadband is often too slow to deal with backups in a reasonable amount of time.

The seriousness of this issue for the Irish economy as a whole was emphasized in a report from Forfas recently (www.forfas.ie). Slower broadband connections in Ireland cost “four to five times more than considerably higher-speed broadband services in countries such as France, Germany and Hungary.”

Awareness of the value of data is also increasing. A survey by MJ Flood Technologies has found that 18% of enterprises have said that a loss of data could lead to the complete business going under (quote from the Irish Independent 8 February 2007). Just imagine, you are doing “all the right things.” Every day, you change your backup tape and even take copies out of the office in case of a fire. Then, just when disaster strikes, you try the tapes and they are useless – the backups have not recorded properly at all!

Other than lobbying for the increased speed of our broadband, Keith Shirley says “my mission is to take the fear out of backing up your valuable work. You don’t need special computer knowledge. The backups are personally managed for our clients. From day to day, the software allows the client to track changes and retrieve previous versions of documents. At any time, the information is available on line so it is instantly retrievable. And, with the successful conclusion of our research, we will be able to help the clients with even the biggest data volumes to concentrate on their business and not have to worry about tasks such as swapping tapes.”

For media related queries, please contact Megan McGrath at pr@shercom.com
For sales and support queries, please contact Keith Shirley at info@shercom.com
“

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Having spent 9 hours in traffic last week for what should have been just 4 I’m very glad that I don’t have to go to Dublin every day for work. My sympathy to those of you that have to go through this on a regular basis.

If you are commuting from the Carlow area to Dublin each day then I recommend you register on the Click for Carlow website. The idea is to create a list of job skills that people from the area have and then to either help match them to available jobs or even better – to convince companies to setup in Carlow because of the high quality of potential employees available.

Now that Unum are setting up a software centre in Carlow and Merck are setting up a pharmaceutical factory in Carlow the future is going to be very interesting. The recent forum held by The Carlow Chamber of Commerce was very informative on the future plans of both companies in the area .

So get cracking and Register your skills for a job in Carlow.

We had the first meeting of the IIA Social Media Working Group on Wednesday night. Even though I left at 16:00 I still managed to arrive late. Thankfully I received no dirty looks when I arrived. I’d much prefer to be able to take the train but with the increasing number of unannounced strikes I don’t fancy the risk. On a positive side however – it makes me very glad I don’t work in Dublin and have to drive there every day. Anyway – back to the meeting.

It was interesting to compare this meeting to working groups in the Telecoms sector. I know the remit of the group is not to formulate a new standard but the atmosphere was very positive. Why do I mention new standard? In the telecoms world it was often quite difficult to filter out which suggestions were being made to push a standard in the direction of one parties plans and which were genuinely meant as useful comments. For the IIA working group I got no impression if this, which is very refreshing.

The exact details of what the group will focus on is going to take a little time to solidify. The whole area of Social Media is so big that it could quickly become a quagmire. There is a good mix of people in the group from various backgrounds which should help keep it balanced. Possibly I would have liked there to be more “non-traditional” tech users there but there has to be a limit on the size. There is a very healthy attitide within the group to sharing information and trying to release drafts to the public for comment at an early stage.

One topic that keeps coming back to me were the comments about the fear factor sometimes associated with this area. It was only a tiny part of the meeting but it really stuck with me. The worrying part is that it’s a fear of “attack” (my words – not the group members) by members of the blogging community rather than a general PR issue with customers. The point being that if a business makes a mistake with the way they try to get invloved in Social Media it can turn into a mini disaster because some fanatic has taken exception to it.

This is something that really pisses me off. I’ve seen it so often in the tech area where some arrogant guru decides that everyone must follow a specific set of rules and God forbid that they step out of line. Yes – I get annoyed when someone sends me a spam mail BUT as long as it’s not with intentional bad manners I don’t get too worked up about it. If I end up receiving new product announcements and I didn’t ask for them – big deal. Oh – and I get 1000’s of spam messages a day to my domains so I could have a “right” to be annoyed. I also don’t get so upset if someone forgets to use BCC when sending out a mail to a group of people. I try to calmly take the time to educate them and help them improve. Damien Mulley has recently made an offer on his Blog to open source his training materials on how to do Business Blogging. I think this is a great idea – and unfortunately I was too late replying to be able to take part. I know at least one member of the Working Group will be there however so I have no doubt he will have a very positive influence of the output of the group.

At this stage I’d like to confirm that the group is really pushing to get everyone with an interest in Social Media involved at an early stage. The drafts will be made available for review an comment as soon as they are in a half decent state (again – my words) – we won’t be publishing a definitive guide and saying take it or leave it. It really is a great opportunity for bloggers etc to make some comments without the time commitment that actively taking part in the working group involves.

A blog report of the first meeting of the Social Media WG is available on the IIA website.

Krishna De comments on her blog about the reticence of connecting with bloggers.

Bernie Goldbach calls us Social Media Plumbers, which I though was a very interesting term. Personally I’m certainly trying to figure out the best (or just good if there is no best) way of putting techniques and technologies together to get Social Media “flowing” within a business.

The Seedcorn competition is now in its 6th year and has a cash prize fund of €280,000 which is awarded to the best 9 start up companies on the island. The competition is trying to re-create the investment process so is targeted at companies with the best investment potential. The competition is ideally suited to high tech high growth potential companies.

From the Seedcorn website

Background to the Competition

Seedcorn is the island’s biggest business competition for early stage/high growth companies in any sector on any part of the island. The competition, aimed at companies who have a new equity funding requirement, has a record prize fund of €280,000 and also offers budding entrepreneurs the opportunity to:

• Develop your business idea
• Improve your business plan
• Make your concept investor ready
• Gain exposure to venture capitalists and other equity providers
• Increase the profile of your business

The judges are looking for the same elements as a potential investor including:

• High growth companies
• The optimum risk/reward profile
• A strong management team
• Ability to exit

To date, millions in new equity have been raised by previous finalists of the competition.

Closing Date

The closing date for receipt of business plans is Friday 26th September at 1pm. First you must register for the competition before submitting your business plan. When you register for the competition, you will receive an e-mail from us with a dedicated upload reference which you must click on to upload your business plan to us by the closing date.

Congratulations to Martin Delaney and Ann Egan on receiving their certificates for courses they did with the Laois County Enterprise Board. There were, of course, a lot more people at the event but those were two of the people who took part in the Internet Marketing course I presented. I would have had a picture with me in it but I’m afraid it was out of focus. You’ll have to wait a little longer to see how I’ve changed since my profile picture was taken.

Martin is a business and executive coach at Empowerment Coaching and Ann runs the Roll n Bowl Entertainment centre in Portlaoise. It was great to be able to catch up with both of them.

I know I’m biased because I run them but I currently recommend Internet Marketing courses to any business owner that is serious about their website. Even if you are only in the planning stages it can help you avoid the mistakes that end up meaning your website is not reaching full potential. It’s hard work getting a good website in place and it needs to provide a return on investment.

Internet Marketing / Search Engine Optimisation is one of those areas that can seem really daunting at first. If you start doing your own research on the Internet you are likely to find hundreds of sites with info – many of them confusing. There are a number of things that you can do as a business owner to make sure your site is not getting lost in the crowd. People spend a fortune on developing their website but then don’t test it or promote it. When I see websites that lock out the serach engines through bad design I tell people it’s like have a beautiful shop full of products and leaving the door locked.

If your local Enterprise Board or Skillnet program does not currently run a marketing course – then tell them you are interested. They need your feedback. If you can’t wait for a course and can afford professional assistance then there are numerous companies specialising in this area. One Carlow company, T2, is currently pushing their search engine optimisation services and have been offering coupons to the members of the Carlow Chamber of Commerce for an initial consulation. Tell them I sent you and you might be lucky and get the first one for free.

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I’ll be going to the first meeting of the IIA Social Media Working Group next week. To quote their website -The Social Media Working Group seeks to support businesses in the development of strategies for engaging with social media, including blogging, social networking, community sites, RSS, tagging, and podcasts.

I’ve always been facinated with how technology can best be applied to business – especially a small business. It’s often tricky to know which technologies are going to prove useful and which ones are a fad. I’m lucky in the sense that it’s “ok” for me to experiment with different tools and technologies as I get paid to pass on what I learn.

The small business owner generally can’t afford to spend much time experimenting. During the startup phase it can seem impossible for a new business owner to manage to get everything done. Social media can be really helpful at this stage – not only does it provide a mechanism for people to get their name publicised but it can provide a great support community during what is often a very lonely time.

Of course the other side of the coin are the costs to a business when people spend hours on social media sites.

The output from the working group will be available to the public and now is your chance to influence proceedings:

- Do you have any comments on how and why you use or don’t use social media?

- Do you have any success stories or failure stories? A wise man (or woman) can learn from the mistakes of others. I’m personally especially interested in comments from “non-techie” businesses.

- What kind of results would you like to see the group produce?

Feel free to leave comments on the blog directly or email me at K.Shirley@Shercom.com

Keith