We are very interested and excited about the new generation of hybrid online/offline web based technologies here at Marino Software. With Ireland still lagging behind the in the broadband stakes these technologies can help our customers with slow connections or who are on the road.

With the likes of Adobe's Apollo platform, Joyent's recently open-sourced Slingshot for Rails applications and now with the just announced Google Gears there is an increasing amount of options available to developers. We are looking forward to enhancing our mProperty offering with these technologies. More on that later...:D

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch has an interesting perspective on the current hype and madness in Silicon Valley surrounding web 2.0 etc ...

"Now, a year after the madness started, it’s even worse. Companies have to actively dodge venture capitalists to avoid raising a big round of financing."

"Times are good, money is flowing, and Silicon Valley sucks."

Full article over at Techcrunch...

Dan Cederholm (Designer) and Dan Benjamin (Developer) have sold their excellent web collaboration project Cork'd, which was made out of a passion and interest in wine. Cork’d is a free service for reviewing, sharing and discovering wine. It was made using Ruby on Rails and Dan Cederholm has pointed out a few times his positive experience using Rails as a web designer, comparing it to sculpting, which has been also my own experience working Ruby on Rails here.

Cork'd was made in the spare time of the designer and developer and has a community of over 20,000 users today. I don't have any idea how it scores on revenue but it is impressive all the same. Shows what can be done when a project is your own, has a very clearly defined audience, you have the tools and ability to make it, and you are passionate about it.

Dan Cederholms post on the sale...
Dan Benjamins post on the sale...

Google have a new blog covering their mapping products. Now, if they would only get some decent maps of Ireland into their products. I have never seen an explanation for why Google has terrible maps for Ireland. Does anybody know?
Both Yahoo maps and Microsoft's live maps have proper detailed maps for Ireland so is a mystery to me as to why Googles are so poor.

World Wind from Nasa, an open source project now available in Java looks to be a really interesting project. At the JavaOne conference in San Francisco Sun's CTO of software and Patrick Hogan of Nasa demonstrate their new open source geospatial browser in this video from CNet.

"With the dollar weak, Irish investors find that New York apartments cost less than in Dublin but rent for more." New York Times have an article about Irish investors buying apartments in Manhattan.

Story found via the entertaining Blogorrah...

If you are into David Allens Getting Things Done productivity system then you have a good few options on the Mac for software tools designed specifially for the task.

My favourite is iGTD by Bartek Bargiel. I use this all time and is my favourite by far. It syncs with iCal and also works with iSync, supports tags, links and address book integration.
Next thing I would love to see would be some team based features such as support for syncing with Basecamp and sharing tasks with other users.

Omnifocus from Omnigroup is looking good too, but is still in development as of this post.
They posted a video recently showing how it will work (Quicktime).

Other options I have used are:

Midnight Inbox
Actiontastic
Ghost Action

There is a useful Wikipedia entry here covering GTD software across all platforms.

With the Irish Elections getting closer, web coverage is getting better. RTE have launched their election site which has lots of useful info, including info on what candidates are running where. Some more sites with election info and coverage:

http://www.rockthevote.ie/ Irish Times Election Coverage

The Webby Awards winners have been announced. Great list of sites in there including all the nominees, if you have the time to go through them worth checking out for some gems you might have missed.

I like the idea of having an office with an area just to chill out, read, do some yoga or just laze about and discuss crazy ideas. Anything that helps creativity is good for the mind and business too. So with that in mind I am looking forward to the day when we can pimp out our office with some of these fine pieces of furniture from Bretz. :D

I got to check them out while living in Germany and they are great. Some of them are really huge. Some are scary. But they are certainly fun! The images and the website don't really do them justice. Check them out Bretz Wohntraeume...