A new coffee shop called the Art of Coffee has opened up in the tall glass building on the corner of Grand Canal Quay and Pearse Street in Dublin 2.

The owner is an award winning Barista and needless to say, the coffee is excellent. The staff are always friendly and welcoming. It's well worth a visit if you are in the area.

In a strong vote of confidence for the Irish economy the World Bank has rated Ireland seventh out of 181 economies in terms of "ease of doing business".

One simple way to move Ireland even higher is to get rid of commercial stamp duty as we rank a woeful 82nd out of 181 for "registering a property".

Apparently industry is outraged at the falling maths and science results in today's leaving cert. Actually, it doesn't really matter.

Ireland is an open economy in a globalised world and is a member of the EU benefiting from the free movement of labour and capital.

Universities in Ireland can recruit students for their Maths, Science and Engineering courses from all over the world. Companies in Ireland can recruit talented staff without any limitations from 29 EU and EAA Member States. That's a labour market of more than 490 Million people. Ireland is only a small, small country.

Ireland has to strive to create a world class environment in which technology companies can thrive. This includes providing world class third level education and research organisations to provide skilled staff. If we can do this, we will have no shortage of excellent scientists and engineers in our country. The fact that they did not come through the Irish education system doesn't matter one bit.

According to the Big Bang theory, the universe is around 13.73 billion years old. That is, the whole Universe was generated from the Big Bank to what exists today in that time.

Think about this now for a minute: Anglo Irish Bank will hit the Irish tax payers with a bill of around half that number of Euro (up to 7.5 Billion Euro).

Truly a frightening number when you put in context of the Universe's existence.

Apple's market capitalisation matched Google's at around 160 BN dollars this week.

It is interesting to compare the performance of Apple, Microsoft, IBM and Google since Google's IPO on the 19th of August 2004.

Apple has by far outperformed the others and Microsoft has been particularly poor with a negative return. How long before Apple and Google both have a larger market capitalisation than Microsoft? If things continue as they are, I would say in around 3-5 years.

I use Gmail and I just accidentally clicked on one of their sponsored links. These are the links which are positioned on the right hand side of the page. As I clicked on the link - Google launched the sponsoring company's website on a new page.

So what? you ask. Well having clicked on their add - the company that sponsored that link will now have to pay Google for my click as if I actually was interested in their service.

I searched for a simple mechanism to inform Google that I the click I made was accidental - but I didn't find one. Do you know of a way of doing this?

Maybe I should just contact the company who has paid for the click and tell them?

We had Japanese clients visit us at work last week. The discussion moved on to broadband quality and price in Japan. They told me that they pay around 8 Euro per month for a 100MB fibre connection to their homes.

I was slightly embarrassed to tell them that we pay 40 Euro per month for a 3MB connection.





I took the above pictures in Tokyo in 2003.

I took them to see Newgrange in Co. Meath on Saturday and they were very impressed.

I wish they could be as impressed with our broadband infrastructure as they were with our ancestors work of 5,000 years ago.

This was taken on my Nokia N95 camera phone to show you the view from my office window on this sunny Friday afternoon.