Steve Flinter’s blog

As Fat Tony says, “it’s funny ‘cos it’s true“

Having spent millions building and then upgrading the M50, Dun Laoghaire Rathdown council are considering proposals to limit the speed of the M50 that crosses their fiefdom to 100km/h (as opposed to the usual motorway limit of 120km/h).
This is reported in today’s Irish Times Motoring supplement. The ubiquitous Conor Faughnan is quoted as saying that
there [...]

This has been very well reported elsewhere, but I’ll post about it for the sake of completeness.  On Monday, Dublin was chosen as the European City of Science for 2012.  The main rival to Dublin’s bid in the end was Vienna.
From the SFI press release:
Monday 24th November 2008 Dublin has been chosen as the City [...]

Came across this interesting snippet in ENN (reporting on articles in the Indo):
The paper [The Irish Independent] also reports that Irish venture capital funds have raised EUR500 million in a recent round of fundraising for SMEs. A UCD study found that R&D expenditure in small and medium-size enterprises grew 25 percent in 2007, compared to [...]

Via Brad Feld’s blog, here are a bunch of wonderful cartograms of the voting patterns of the US election.
I was first exposed to this interesting visualisation tool through Stewart Fotheringham’s group in the National Centre for Geocomputation (NCG), where they have used it extensively on Irish census results.

I’m a bit late on this one, but it’s well worth a post anyway. RTE is currently broadcasting its second series of “The Investigators“. SFI is one of the sponsors of the programme, and a number of our investigators (aka researchers) are featured on it.
The first show was broadcast last Thursday (Nov 6), and the [...]

One of Ireland’s leading SME’s in the mobile space, changingworlds, was acquired by Amdocs last week.
changingworlds was founded a few years ago by Professor Barry Smyth of University College Dublin (and changingworlds Chief Scientist), and was based on mobile personalisation technology that Barry and his former PhD student Paul Cotter developed as part of a [...]

A friend and former colleague of mine, Niall Smart, is looking for a co-founder for his new startup, CloudSync.fm.
Niall has been short-listed for the next Y Combinator winter round. He’s flying to California this week to present, and if selected, will move there for three months in early 2009. Pretty cool!
Those of you [...]