The Irish Internet in the 1980s
from Dr Mark Humphrys in DCU:
A collection of bits and pieces of Internet history. Focusing somewhat (but not exclusively) on: (a) the 1980s, when I first started using the Internet, and: (b) Ireland.
(tags: mark-humphrys dcu history tcd bitnet ireland internet web www 1980s)
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I need to get in touch about the early days of the Irish web!
an online home for stories from Ireland – stories about the country’s long and convoluted relationship with information technology. It aims to gather information on the most significant aspects of this relationship, to compile archives on the selected themes, and to store the assembled records for the benefit of future generations.
The History of the Irish Internet
This site is a companion effort to the techarchives website, except it is less well-researched, and is primarily a personal view of the development of the Internet in Ireland by your humble author, Niall Murphy.
(tags: niallm internet ireland history networking heanet ieunet)
What’s Actually Wrong with Yahoo’s Purchase of Summly
An old post about Y!’s acquisition of Summly, an iPhone app which uses NLP to summarise news stories. This is an excellent point about modern tech startups:
[Summly] licensed the core engine from another company. They are the quintessential bolt-on engineers, taking a Japanese bike engine, slapping together a badly constructed frame aligned solely by eyeballs, and laying down a marketing blitz. That’s why the story sells. “You, too, can do it.” But do you want to? […] it’s critical to keep tabs on the ratio known as “glue versus thought.” Sure, both imply progress and both are necessary. But the former is eminently mundane, replaceable, and outsource-able. The latter is typically what gives a company its edge, what is generally regarded as a competitive advantage. So, what is Yahoo signaling to the world? “We value glue more than thought.”
(tags: glue thought glue-vs-thought summly yahoo acquisitions licensing tech startups outsourcing open-source)