The world of technology is a fantastically weird place and its reputation was well maintained this week with Richard Branson porn sites and a Kerry space mission.
Kerry begins rival NASA outfit
Kerrymen may think a lot of themselves, but then why wouldn’t you if your county is brazen enough to launch its own space mission.
A group of university students from the county put together a craft which rose about 30km and stayed in the air for three quarters of an hour. The craft was kitted out with a camera and managed to capture some impressive shots, like the one below.
The homemade craft may have set off in Kerry, but while in flight it defected and landed 10km from Wexford town.
Intelligent Adverts
It may only have been a future tech idea in Minority Report several years back, but now it’s a reality. A charity in London have begun using adverts which scans a passerby’s face and judges what to show them based on their age and sex.
The advert was placed at a bus stop on one of the city’s busiest shopping areas on Oxford Street. We can only hope there will be countless instances of people being misidentified by the advert.
The creepy intelligent hoardings are already in place in Japan and the US.
Irishman leads Twitter forward
It would take an Irishman to figure out how to make twitter even more profitable. And that’s exactly what’s happening. Stephen McIntyre is going to drive forward the social network’s advertising drive.
The former Google executive will oversee the new advertising from the international HQ here in Dublin. He’s a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, Harvard University and Cornell University and has previously worked for Nokia and Ericsson.
Twitter managed to pass the 500 million user mark just this week and we can only assume there will be an advertising bonanza once the company properly taps into it.
Richard Branson porn? Ewh!
Richard Branson was in the courts this week in relation to porn. He was suing a man who registered the domain name richardbranson.xxx.
Obviously the Virgin boss wasn’t best pleased with the site, or its content and decided to get control of it. The Australian man, Sean Truman, said he had only taken the domain as a souvenir because of his respect for the tycoon.
The judge wasn’t buying it though and ordered the transfer of the domain to Branson. But, before we all sympathise with Richard, he was given the chance last year to block registration of trademarked names, but he obviously didn’t foresee his name being a porn magnet.
Every Microsoft cloud has a silver lining
The good technology and jobs business just keeps coming. This week the tech giant announced it was extending its Dublin Data Centre and will create 400 temporary construction jobs.
The company is going to pump another €98 million into the country. That’s on top of the already impressive €376 million investment into the Data Centre.
The 112,000 square foot extension is being built for Microsoft’s development of their cloud computing services. Another positive sign that Ireland is quickly becoming the tech capital of Europe.
It’s still not been announced just how many permanent jobs will actually be created, but any job creation is welcome.
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