Author: Adam

Mendes & Cork City Council GoCar Car Sharing

This is an absolutely brilliant service. I realise it’s not new, but still, fair balls to Cork City Council for innovating at an Irish level.

Car-pool programme initiated in Cork city (Sunday Business Post)

Residents of Cork city can sign up to share a pool of cars under a new transport initiative.

Cork City Council has entered a partnership with Mendes GoCar, a company that will provide vehicles for car-sharing for periods of as little as one hour.

It is the first time the system has been used in Ireland, but it has been in operation in Switzerland and Germany for 20 years, and for more than ten years in other parts of Europe, Britain and the US.

Private users of the system sign up online and pay a once-off fee of €50, while business customers register for €100 and pay €25 for any additional drivers. All users must have a full licence with at least two years’ driving experience, and have to pay a refundable deposit of €200.

Once authorised, they get a smartcard which unlocks the cars at a particular time, and a customer identification number, which is entered into a handset to start the car. There are eight vehicles in the fleet – six Ford Fiestas, one Ford Focus and one Ford Transit.

(Thanks for the pointer Damien.)

Tweetrush Is Here

A project I would love to have been more involved with, hopefully I’ll be forgiven for opting out to get married…

Well done to AJ, Grzegorz, James, Slawomir and Walter for getting  their  Tweetrush proof of concept Techcrunched today. I was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours with the lads in their lair last week, and there’s been very little doubt in my mind since that this demo of their upcoming Rush Hour engine was going to get slashdotted today. (Although I notice that it is still up!) I only hope I’ll be allowed in the door again to work on future projects with them!

(Special mention to Damien and Pat for helping hands too, I reckon.)

Oyster Card Cracked

NXP sues to silence Oyster researchers

Chipmaker NXP, formerly Philips Semiconductors, is taking Dutch Radboud University to court on Thursday to prevent researchers publishing their controversial report on the Mifare Classic chip.

Recently researchers from Radboud University in Nijmegen revealed they had cracked and cloned Londons Oyster travel card. Earlier this year the researchers did the same to the Dutch MIFARE travel card. This card is to replace paper tickets on all trams, buses, and trains and is already undergoing trials in Rotterdam.

Christian the Lion

This is the sweetest thing you’ll see for a while. Detailed backstory here. Sorry about the cheesy crap on the end, obviously it wasn’t quite cheesy enough for the friendless endless-forwarding dummies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adYbFQFXG0U