I read this very interesting review of Siri Assistant on Mashable, one of my favourite Social Media guides and review sites. Siri Assistant is a personal assistant on your iPhone and can help you find restaurants, movies, etc; book taxis; discover events in your area, and much more. It uses voice recognition technology to interpret your commands and turn them into intelligent web searches and services. It can find services based on your location and also uses the context of your current search to bring you other relevant information. If you have already subscribed to services that Siri partners with, it can use your credentials with those services to offer you tailored solutions. It looks very impressive indeed.
I really like my iPhone and was very anxious to download the application. However, I was disappointed to discover that the application is not yet available in the Irish App store.
It appears that it is not available in other App Stores either, including Australia and Canada, so at this stage it must only be available in the USA. I tried to open an account in the USA store but needed a credit card with a USA billing address. Since I didn’t have one, I was brought back to the Irish App Store – back to square one!
Siri Assistant works with over 30 partners in the USA and I expect that this is the reason that it has not been rolled out in other countries yet, while parter agreements are being put in place. With the Irish market being so small, I wonder when we will see applications like this available here.
The application looks very powerful and here is a short Youtube video that demonstrates its features.
If anyone knows how to get the App for an iPhone in Ireland, I’d appreciate your help. Or if you know of other similar applications, why not leave a comment and let me know.
.tel is a new top level domain (TLD), launched between December 2008 and March 2009. Operated by Telnic, a UK-based company, the TLD enables users (organisations and individuals) to publish contact information about themselves in a fairly simple, structured manner. While it is possible to access a .tel domain over the web, the suggested power of the system is that it can be accessed quickly and easily using mobile devices like phones, Blackberries and iPhones; it does not require a web site. Read more …
The recent loss by PA Consulting of data about criminals in Britain raises many questions about data security and highlights the difficult of guaranteeing privacy and security of data. With the proliferation of portable storage devices, coupled with their increasing capacity and low cost, the challenges of maintaining data privacy and security are considerable.
I expect that PA signed all the necessary confidentiality agreements, security policies, data management policies, etc, when agreeing the contract with the Home Office. I expect that they also provided the necessary assurances to the client when negotiating the work. And I expect that the client took assurance from all of this. And yet, despite that, a significant breach of confidentiality and data security occurred, exposing both the contractor and the Home Office to being sued. So, if policies and procedures, signed declaration and undertakings aren’t adequate protections, what can a client do when engaging third parties, or, indeed, protecting data from disclosure by staff? Continue reading ‘Data loss by PA Consulting’ »
I recently downloaded a free open source software system called Mindtouch Deki from California-based company, Mindtouch. More than just a wiki, Mindtouch Deki is a web-based collaboration tool that enables teams to work together and share files and information over the Internet.
John Lawlor at TCD
I am currently involved in a project involving four organisations in Ireland; one in Cork, one in Galway and two in Dublin. There are about 10 people in the team and we use Mindtouch Deki (pesonal PRO version – see below) to post documents and comments. I set up a private web site so that only subscribed users have access. Having worked with the same people on several collaborative projects in the past, our normal way of exchanging files and information was through email. Mindtouch Deki makes the collaboration effort simpler and more efficient. We even use it during meetings to upload files as we work on them.
The software provides a lot more functionality than we are using, and we are only “scratching the surface” at the moment but, nevertheless, it is doing what we want. Visit the Mindtouch site to see demos of its wider capability. The software is very easy to download, set up, administer and use and I certainly recommend it as a very straightforward collaboration tool.
A number of installation options are available, including:
Free hosted personal wiki with 100 Mb of storage
Personal “PRO” hosted version with 10 Gb of storage costing $99 per year
Enterprise solutions ranging in price from $2,500 to $20,000 per server per year, depending on the level of service required
Enterprise hosted solutions at additional costs over the enterprise solution ranging from $1,200 to $7,200, depending on the size of the hosted environment required.
