Archive for June, 2008

Microsoft currently have Live Mesh in testing. Put simply Live Mesh allows you to manage your Microsoft Office Files online. I guess it’s going to really put it up to Zoho and Google Apps when it’s released since there is such a high comfort level with organisations and the Microsoft Suite of products. Unfortunately the number of test logons is limited at the moment. If you do want to check if out drop me an email and I can give you a test logon. 

 You can find out more about it at https://www.mesh.com. You can also apply for a test logon and Microsoft should get back to you in a few weeks.

The Italian Consumer agency has introduced a system for comparing the prices of food items when shopping. By texting a number containing the name of the product in the text the consumer wants a price for the consumer receives the wholesale price, northern, southern and central average prices for that item.

The service tracks about 80 products from over 2,200 different stores. This is definately one for the National Consumer Agancy.

If your Italian is up to it the agancy is located at www.smsconsumatori.it .

The Workplace Innovation Fund is managed by Enterprise Ireland and the National Centre for Partnership Performance (NCPP). It has been running since 2007. Recently there have been more advertisements on the Radio and National Media for the scheme to increase awareness.

At the moment I am going through their 2nd progress report from last year. I’ll be updating with a summary of the document. Alot the companies on the website seem to be rather large, I hope that there is scope for smaller organisations to join in. An interesting paper from the site of particular interest is entitled “The future of Manufacturing in Ireland”
http://www.ncpp.ie/dynamic/docs/ConferenceReport2007Final.pdf

I wonder how much Joe Harford and the High Level Manufacturing Group are working with NCPP?

It’s long been my belief that there is no need for Manufacturing jobs to go to low cost locations  (look at Toyota reopening automotive plants in the US). Employing Lean Techniques and responding to the pull of the customer are key, sounds very simple dosen’t it!

If you have been thinking of looking into this further then feel free to contact me. In the meantime I’ll be providing further updates.?

I’m more and more impressed with the Zoho products by the day. Using Zoho project instead of OpenProj.