Shamrock 2.0

My friend Liam, an Irish expat, sent me an email Wednesday in which he said I should write about some Irish Web 2.0 outfits. Well, actually what he said was "Ye know, there ARE companies to write about that AREN'T from Israel, Jimmy, so get feck on with it."

OK, so I found a nice list of them at this site. I'll be shilling several that I like over the next week, and the first I want to highlight is Dial2Do, based in Dublin.

Dial2Do is pretty effin neat. It's a phone service that makes it easier to do communications stuff. First you join and input a list of contacts. From there, what you do is mostly voice based. You call a number and it asks you three (or should I say t'ree) questions:

1. What do you want to do? Email, text, etc.
2. Who would you like to contact? Say names form your contact list.
3. What would you like to say? Dictate after the beep.

Their online hub keeps track of what you send so there's a nice paper trail -- err -- electron trail.

It's more than just email and text, though. You can Twitter, Jaiku, send yourself a sticky reminder, set up an immediate conference call, and more.

And it works in a lot of places besides Temple Bar:

AUSTRALIA: +61280147531
BELGIUM: +3228080756
BULGARIA: +35924917160
CANADA: +16044841955
CANADA: +15149073174
CANADA: +14168002218
CANADA: +17806281814
CANADA: +14037751217
CROATIA: +38517776250
CZECH REPUBLIC: +420246019187
FINLAND: +358942419273
FRANCE: +33170617829
GREECE: +302111768254
IRELAND: +35315262713
ISRAEL: +97237219379
ITALY: +390699268239
MEXICO: +525527895439
NETHERLANDS: +31208903824
NEW ZEALAND: +6499849443
SPAIN: +34911878144
SWEDEN: +46852500653
UK: +442088193991
USA: +12133252615

More places are being added pretty fast as well.

It should come as no surprise to Hibernophiles like me that Dial2Do and many of the other Irish 2.0 outfits are phone-based. Ireland is celly crazy -- or perhaps I should say mobile mad.

You should watch the vid now, if only because there is nothing more pleasant than an Irish accent and because the spokeswoman looks a scosh like a gorgeously youthful Assumpta Fitzgerald from Ballykissangel (Dervla Kirwan.)



And now here's the part of the post where I put a twee photo of storybook Ireland because that prize feck Liam hates how Americans think Ireland is all sheep, red headed Mary Margarets and affably drunk old men named...well...Liam.



And he particularly hates how people think being Irish relates primarily to The Guinness. So I thought I would find the most stereotypical pic to reinforce the stereotype and set him off a bit.



Seriously, all kidding aside, check out Dial2Do. It's cool, no shite.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.