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Opinions
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Web Summit, Far From Peaking
November 5, 2014
Four short years ago the Web Summit was just the brain-child of three very young Irish entrepreneurs. Paddy Cosgrave, Daire Hickey and David Kelly can now count their event among the few "must attend" tech conferences globally as well as among the many successful startups operating out of Ireland today. In fact, Global Entrepreneurship Monitor ranks Ireland as 9th among the 28 European Union countries for entrepreneurial activity. One in 11 people in Ireland, according to the report, is involved...
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Dublin Web Summit 2014 Adores Big Data
November 5, 2014
Web Summit 2014 is bustling with high-energy start-ups full of passion for their business, all of whom are enthusiastically telling investors, potential partners and anyone that will listen about why they have the next big idea. One area that particularly stood out was the number of start-ups in the Big Data space. Big data has big potential for brands and their communications strategies. At the moment the majority of businesses struggle to understand how they can use this...
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My Voyage To The Summit
November 5, 2014
My voyage into today's Web Summit was absorbing, enriching, revelatory and absolutely terrifying... The energy and enthusiasm from everyone was invigorating. So many people were utterly engaged in their new product, app, service, system, gadget or whatever it was that they were promoting. And that was also what made my visit to the Web Summit so terrifying...What exactly is the difference between all of these companies? What separates the has beens, the might be's and...
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Jailing of Italian Seismologists Has Repercussions for Communicating Science
October 26, 2012
The global scientific community was left reeling this week by an Italian court’s decision to sentence a group of six seismologists to six years in jail for providing false assurances to the public prior to the earthquake that hit the town of L'Aquila in 2009. Judge Marco Billi's ruling has provoked fear and suggests a dangerous precedent in Italy for scientists involved in hazard prediction. Good science has always involved itself in open rigorous debate. If scientists...
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Volunteering to Be The Spirit Of The Olympics
August 22, 2012
The most inspiring statistic that I have learned in relation to the Olympics is that of the 70,000 volunteers trained by the Olympic Organising Committee, only four per cent dropped out before the games began. The expectation was that there would be a 20-30 per cent attrition rate. Each volunteer was given one responsibility to perform and many jobs required staff to be outside the arenas for up to seven hours without the opportunity to...
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Big Data – Are You Ready?
February 13, 2012
Corporate success is measured in terms of growth. Our clients, no matter what sector they operate in, know that in this fragile economy, growth can edge them ahead of their competition. The question for CEOs is how to generate growth? Attractive mergers and acquisitions targets are scarce, the rapid globalisation of the last twenty years has reduced the number of untapped geographic opportunities and funding is hard to find. The answer may well be found...
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The Vonnegut Approach to PR
February 1, 2012
While watching a YouTube clip of a presentation given by the late American writer Kurt Vonnegut in 2005 I was struck by the simplicity of effective story telling. For his presentation Vonnegut presented his audience with a blank blackboard onto which he drew two lines; a G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune and a B-E axis: B for beginning, E for end. He also explained that the average human experience lay somewhere in the middle and...
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Crisis — the Power of Language
January 23, 2012
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. George Orwell (1903 - 1950), "Politics and the English Language", 1946 Words are powerful and can be very damaging when used carelessly. They have the power to evoke potent emotions and they can help inspire, encourage and...
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The Last Rugby World Cup?…
September 28, 2011
Interesting perspective from Sports Business Newslines regarding sponsorship and the Rugby World Cup currently taking place in New Zealand. Could this be the last World Cup? Most unlikely you would have to say but something will have to be done to address the issues raised by the New Zealand Rugby Union Chief Executive, Steve Tew. New Zealand Rugby Union (NZRU) chief executive Steve Tew has warned that the country’s participation in future editions of the...
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The Aging Opportunity
September 8, 2011
I’m just back from the 7th World Aging and Generations Congress at Sankt Gallen University, Switzerland. Listening to the various presentations I was particularly struck by the statement that two-thirds of all the people who ever reached the age of 65 are alive today. In fact by the year 2050 the number of people over the age of 60 will grow from 500 million today to 2 billion...