You can watch the live video here on youtube

You can donate here with Googles help.

Admob have released their monthly figures on Android and iPhone/ iPod touch handsets.
Have a look to see where in the world has the biggest market share for each handset. Something to be aware of when developing for each handset. (more…)

The very popular Today FM app has now been updated to feature background listening. When you open the app you can choose the background listening option which uses Safari to let Today FM play while you keep browsing.

Download the updated app for free here.

Layar is an interesting mobile platform available on iPhone and Android which acts as an “augmented reality browser”. In August I developed a “layer” listing all Irish Rail stations in Dublin.

Today Irish Rail introduced a new and improved realtime train data system and I’ve incorporated this into the layer, now you can just point your phone in the direction of the train station and you’ll see data on the next 2 departures. The new Irish Rail realtime data system doesn’t seem to work for every station yet, for example there is no data for Greystones departures, but it only went live today so I’d expect it to improve…

I wrote a PHP script to scrape the data from the Irishrail site and used the excellent Point-of-Interest server for Layar code as a starting point for the PHP implementation.

Some screen shots are below. Get Layar here (iTunes link).

2009: John Callaghan

Media Intern wanted for MercuryGirl Inc., Ireland’s leading website and mobile software development house.

Help us to help you: As an unpaid intern you’ll work with our production team in MercuryGirl Inc H.Q. Projects include high level websites and mobile applications.

You’ll ideally have some experience or knowledge of graphic design and/or video editing skills. Must have knowledge of Adobe CS4 particularly Illustrator and Photoshop. Final Cut Pro for video editing or Sony Vegas will be an advantage.

You’ll be working roughly three days a week in our Rathmines office which we share with MercuryBoy Inc, our brother production company.

If you’re interested in becoming an intern with us send a CV and any portfolio work you have to mediainterns@gmail.com.

The Juniors from Mercuryboyinc on Vimeo.

Storyland, RTE’s competition to find a new online drama series, is entering its second year and Mercuryboy Inc have teamed up with writer Emma Cahill to create ‘The Junior’.

The submission is a satirical look at the ad industry through the eyes of a junior copywriter. Shane and Joel have been in the industry 11 months and are desperately trying to make a name for themselves before their first year review. Shane, the copywriter and main character, is neurotic and self-loathing and hates his team mate Joel. The show will monitor Shane’s consistent self-sabotage and crumbling personal life.

Storyland requests entries aimed at an 18+ audience will be broadcast as a web series between January and June 2010. Check out last year’s entries and winners, the Hardy Bucks, here

Our brother company Mercuryboy Inc has received two nominations at the inaugural Irish Music Television Awards which will be held in the Sugar Club on the 27th of November.

The first is in the category of Best Dance Video for ‘Here and There’, directed by Eoghan Kidney and produced by Tim Duggan. It was filmed at Wicklow’s Brittas Bay and is a surreal short film/extended music video featuring the sounds of Simon Cullen, formerly of Le Bien.

The second nomination is in the Best Video category. The video for Valerie Francis’s song ‘Punches’ was again produced by Tim Duggan and directed by Eoghan Kidney. It’s a delicate, gentle and stunning video to suit the vocals of Valerie and has been given kudos by Mr. Kanye West.

We’ll keep you posted following the announcements on the 27th. Congratulations to everyone involved.

Newspapers are searching for a way to monetise their digital content, Rupert Murdoch plans to charge for all his news websites by next summer, something that didn’t seem to work well for The Irish Times, who removed their “pay wall” in June 2008.

On-line advertising revenues just aren’t paying the bills, this Observer article covers an analysis suggesting that the average print newspaper reader is worth £155 a year (£90 from price, £65 from advertising), whilst the same on-line newspaper reader is worth just £5.

So how can newspapers make money from their digital assets? The answer may be through mobile applications, Apple’s recent decision to enable “in app purchases”, supplementary content purchased from within iPhone applications, has been adopted by the Spectator magazine, their application costs .79 cent and “expires” after a week, thereafter you must pay .79 cent for the current weekly edition.

This strategy could be a lucrative play for news titles with large amounts of multimedia content. For example, the forthcoming Guardian iPhone app could easily incorporate in app purchasing for their highly successful audio podcasts covering the premiership. Apple also recently decided to allow in app purchasing from within free applications, previously in app purchases were only available within paid apps.

Closer to home the new iPhone application released by the Irish Independent newspaper seems to be doing very well. The app sells for 2.39 and is top of the paid application chart in Ireland, which means it has certainly paid for itself already, and will be making profit from here on. It is a relatively simple RSS feed style application which doesn’t use in app purchasing, it displays 4 categorises of news: National, Sport, Entertainment and Top Stories.

There is no sign of an iPhone application yet from The Irish Times or the Examiner, but Maeve Donovan of the Times recently suggested that mobile is a big part of their strategy.

We are currently developing a number of iPhone applications which distribute large amounts of audio, photo and video content using the in app purchase model,  we are also developing a backend CMS to manage the sale of this content. Get in touch if you’d like to hear more.

John Callaghan, October 2009

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Yesterday Layar announced the global availability of it’s Reality Browser on Android devices.

The Layar Reality Browser displays real time digital information on top of reality in the camera screen of the mobile phone. While looking through the phone’s camera lens, a user can see houses for sale, popular bars and shops, tourist information of the area, play a live game, etc….

We were proud to be selected to develop a content layer for the launch. Our first layer is a list of train stations in the greater Dublin area, you can see screenshots below. Our layer was presented to the Layar conference in Amsterdam yesterday.

Interestingly layar also announced that they expect to have an iPhone application out soon, which would suggest that Apple are about to open up the APIs for augmented reality in the 3.1 update for the iPhone…

We are currently developing the “Dublin Train Stations” layer further so that real-time train arrival and departure information appears as you point the phone at a station.

The full layar content catalogue is here (PDF).

We are keen to hear from organizations or companies who would like to bring their data into the reality browser world. Get in touch!