Thought Provoking

Peer to peer lending in ireland

Ireland, Thought Provoking

Doing some thinking over the Christmas break, I wondered why the concept of peer to peer lending had not been introduced in Ireland in which it exists in the UK through companies like Zopa. Ireland seems like the perfect market as the banks have failed their societal duty to keep businesses going through lending. There are people with money to invest who did well during the Celtic tiger. Perhaps there is a regulatory issue that makes lending unsafe in Ireland. It certainly seems that there is a business opportunity fhere.

An interesting take on cottage software development trends

Tech, Thought Provoking

The Guardian features a fascinating article on where developers should focus their freetime development over the next year and half or so. It goes on about the options between building for iOS, Android and Windows 8. 

And then Windows 8. If you learn how to build apps for Windows 8 you’ll emerge with skills that are bang up-to-date and are readily transferable into your day job. But again, you might make some small amount of money shifting applications. But things get more interesting after next Christmas…

Tracking down your stolen camera

Photography, Thought Provoking, Web

PopPhoto reports about a new site GadgetTrack that tracks if your stolen camera has uploaded images to flickr or 500px

John Heller was on assignment for Getty Images at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, when his Nikon D3 and lenses were stolen, but it wasn’t until a substantial amount of time later that he searched for the camera’s serial number on GadgetTrak’s service, which has indexed all the serials embedded on images from 500px and Flickr from 2006 onwards. With a positive hit on a couple of photos on Flickr, the police were able to track the camera down to a photographer, who bought it not knowing its origins — and even had a receipt for the transaction.

Google Plus

Tech, Thought Provoking, Web

I just joined Google Plus. The main thing I have been getting my head around is how it works. Since I didn’t really use Google Wave or Buzz that much, I was intrigued to find out if lessons had been learned. It seems that they have and are taking the best bits from Facebook and Twitter. I found this article that includes the following paragraph that illustrates its purpose very well: 

That is the big difference between Google Plus and most other networks. Twitter is an all or nothing model. You can share with everyone or you can only share with all the people that follow you. But you can’t share with only a sub set of the people that follow you (such as a specific Twitter List.) Facebook is a little more flexible than that. But you must be friends with people or you must reduce your privacy. You can limit who sees individual things you share, but it is difficult to do and not intuitive to get set up.

It seems that Google learned something from its former employee Paul Adams. His presentation of the real life social network illustrates the problem of using facebook and shows how personal networks are more complicated than the facebook philosophy of everything about you should be public. Look at the whole presentation to see understand his point.


iphone app for skin cancer

Tech, Thought Provoking

Wow, this does look cool. Skin scan is an app on the iPhone or iPod touch that analyses a spot on your skin to examine if the spot looks like melanoma.  Techcrunch has more of the details.

The app takes a picture of a mole on the skin, then uses a proprietary algorithm to look at the fractal-like shapes which exist in human skin (have a look up close, you can see little triangles in normal skin, honest). It then calculates if the shape of the mole means it is is developing normally, or abnormally thus in a into a potential cancerous melanoma.