Tom Raftery’s Social Media

Pixenate on the iPhone, originally uploaded by pxn8.

Having recently successfully deployed their Pixenate FaceBook app (a photo editor for Facebook), it looks like Sxoop Technologies are now out to be the first company to deploy a photo editor for the iPhone!

How cool is that? There is a beautiful fit between the iPhone, which people will be using to take pictures, and photo editing software.

Go Walter – woo hoo!

Paul Boutin is reporting the finalists in the TechCrunch40.

This has been a closely guarded secret for several weeks now but Paul spotted the names on banners in the Palace hotel!

One of the names is Pat Phelan’s Cubic Telecom – the only Irish finalist out of over 700 entries – well done Pat.

There are some other great names in the list. Pat really has his work cut out for him but I have no fear he will do us proud.

Update: Robert Scoble is predicting Pat to win outright!

Pat Phelan’s Cubic Telecom have released details of €5m worth of investment they have received. Cubic Telecom is the parent company of the Roam4free and Yak4ever brands.

From the release Cubic has raised a

EUR3.5M investment from private backers in order to develop a suite of innovative global mobile and home phone products under the Cubic Telecom brand, together with its own international virtual carrier network. A further EUR1.5M has been raised to fund a series of international launches of products and services in the coming six months.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, Cubic Telecom are also the only Irish company to make it to the final 100 of the uber prestigious TechCrunch 20.

I spotted an article in the Financial Times last night which said Apple has succeeded in persuading 3 mobile operators to sell the iPhone in Europe using the same revenue share as AT&T in the US.

The three mobile operators mentioned are T-Mobile of Germany, Orange of France and O2 in the UK. According to the article:

The operators are set officially to announce the partnerships at the IFA trade fair in Berlin at the end of August

The article goes on to say that

[Apple] will continue the roll-out elsewhere in Europe next year, when it will also launch in Asia

Damn! I realise it is unlikely but is there any chance the UK O2 launch will include Ireland?

I did!

Skype are claiming that with their outage last week was due to massive numbers of people re-starting their computers after downloading Microsoft’s monthly software update!

I am sure they are correct, despite how implausible it sounds.

I am just curious about how Skype managed to keep the service running every other month that Microsoft has released patches.

UPDATE: – Skype have published a more detailed explanation of the outage.

In case you hadn’t noticed (or read about it elsewhere) Skype has been offline since around 11am this morning. It is now 5pm.

This is the first time I can remember Skype being unavailable since I started using it 3-4 years ago.

Is anyone using it as their only means of telephony? Up to now, that would have been quite tempting.