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.

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.

Watch the video here. Maybe next year.

This is very good:

Here Comes Another Bubble by The Richter Scales

check it out.

The web is an exciting place, things move at breakneck speed and the competitive landscape shifts on a daily basis. Billions dollar companies are grown from multi million dollar investments, good ideas and reasonably good technologies.

By the way, I think most people realise that the equity stake taken by Mirosoft in Facebook was not a pure equity investment. It was a mixture of a pre-payment for an advertising deal and an equity stake and therefore it doesn't place a clear valuation on Facebook.

Microsoft's advertising on Facebook is atrocious. Who in their right mind clicks on those banner adds anyway? Less and less people according to Businessweek.

I've think that Facebook have to be careful not to become the new AOL. Social networking is a relatively new phenomenon and the market has yet to be played out in full.

What Facebook are doing is building a walled garden which holds the user community inside. I have my Linkedin page and I have my Facebook page, but what am I missing out on by not participating in myspace, bebo, ning, xing, friendster?

I would like my profile to be on the open web but I still want the functionality of privacy and friend finding and linking, sharing pictures, news and movies with my friends only. Registration with Facebook should not be required to connect with me.

Technically, this is a trivial challenge and is already being addressed see Slap in The Facebook for a discussion on this and the open friend project for more technical information. The crux of the matter is that there is no way to define social relationships on the open internet and social networking sites have stepped in to provide this and have been successful at it.

The Google OpenSocial initiative is not addressing this as far as I understand - it is just addressing the development of widgets for social networks and porting these applications to participating sites. Not really a big deal as sooner or later some smart developer would have created an interface library for this anyway.

What is more important is that as social technology matures, the internet will reassert its open and free principals and closed walled gardens will not be favoured.

This is fundamental to the basis of the internet: openness and freedom, not freedom from constraint but the more important one: freedom to participate.