E-pire’s blog

Heres an interesting use of the data collected from GPS tracked taxies in San Francisco. At Cabspotting they are “trying to find and make social sense of patterns that emerge visually from the data”. The images and time lapse video look good. http://cabspotting.org/

The microsoft virtual earth team are doing some really interesting things combining street level images with maps. Its a bit slow at first but once the images are cashed it works well. Check it out here http://preview.local.live.com/

I initally thought online photo editing would be very slow - but for 80% of jobs pxn8 is actually faster than photoshop or paint shop. There’s no waiting for features to load, its very easy to use and you can upload to flickr straight away. Great work by Sxoop.

Theres a really interesting article on Techcrunch about what you should have in place before launching your web product. The part about Netvibes and their ‘near-complete service without registration at all’ is very true considering how many users (including me) they seem to have.

We have had some problems recently with our hosting provider - either our sites have been down or so slow as to be inaccessible - so we’ve decided to change to a popular Irish hosting provider. We didn’t expect 100% up time and considering how little we pay for such a important part of our business I shouldn’t really be complaining but when they advertise saying ‘Can’t afford Downtime’ and ‘your site will experience virtually no downtime’ its really annoying when you get the apposite levels of service.

We’ve moved our blog from mybloggie to WordPress 2.0 - It took a bit longer then the promised 5 mins install time due to ftp problems. Although it looks to have been worth the effort as there seems to be plenty of admin options available. Hopefully theres one to stop trackback spam that was plaguing our mybloggie setup.

Thanks to a good kick up the arse from James on his blog http://eirepreneur.blogs.com/
we have a rejuvenated interest in our MapEire project, we hope to be able to link up with him in the near future to get as much information as possible for the site. We are celebrating this as any Irish person would, with alcohol of course! You can now add update and view Drink prices from pubs up and down the country. Raise your glasses folks!…

MapEire got a mention yesterday on Google Maps Mania so i decided to add some fuel prices today. We had kinda stopped working on it as we couldn’t get station prices automatically from the fuel companies. Also Building a community of people willing to update prices seemed unlikly. Maybe if we get some people adding prices/stations we can do some more work with it in the future….

Get an office as soon as possible, working at home sounds like the best job ever but you will never get as much work done. Too many distractions around you and too easy to take longer breaks, sleep in a little longer or finish up a little earlier….

No.1 Dont put a - hyphen in your company’s name

Why? Cos it makes it more difficult to tell someone your email/website addresss over the phone (I wonder how many emails for us have gone to epire.com) and google doesn’t index it properly. Google seems to index ‘e’ and ‘pire’ separately compared to other search engines gahooyoogle search for e-pire
edit 9th Oct, our google page ranking for the search “e-pire” has jumped 30+ positions in the last 4 days!…