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The discussion was held at a First Tuesday event, entitled "Digital Media: What is it and can Ireland compete?" which was located at Dublin's Westbury Hotel. First Tuesday is a networking organisation, which meets each month to bring technologists, venture capitalists and industrialists together to develop business networks and exchange ideas. The high-profile panellists attending this month included entrepreneur and former Esat Telecom boss Denis O'Brien, Barry Morris chief executive officer of Iona, Dr. Rudolph Burger of Media Lab Europe and John Pierce, marketing director of Fujitsu Ireland and chairman of the Irish Internet Association.
The prominent industry leaders had varying opinions on the state of Ireland's fledging digital media industry, with Media Lab Europe's Burger asserting that the nation is well positioned to take part in the digital media industry. But he tempered those remarks by claiming that the sector would not be leveraged by top-down IDA initiatives, but rather by innovative entrepreneurial companies.
Meanwhile Morris pointed out that there was some disparity over what different people meant when the spoke about digital media, saying he often did not understand what people were referring to when they talked about the industry. He continued by saying, "As digital media has been explained to me, U2 are the most profitable digital media company in Ireland," referring to the fact that U2's music and videos are recorded on digital media such as CDs and DVDs and sold profitably to be played on digital devices.
Other topics that were part of the lively discussion included the future of Ireland's mobile digital media industry, namely GPRS and 3G. This avenue of dialogue led Denis O'Brien and John Pierce to propose that Ireland skip the implementation of 3G networks, moving directly to the as yet undefined 4G standard.
With regard to high-speed landline networks, such as DSL, Morris said that he could not see the point in spending million on Ireland's broadband infrastructure unless applications had been developed for it. "I have a broadband connection in my house and it's under-utilised," he said. "If you build a broadband network it will eventually be filled with traffic, but we need to look at whether this will actually benefits the economy. We've built huge networks to facilitate e-mail, but we need to ask whether it's economically productive to spend our working days reading and answering e-mails," he said in comments to ElectricNews.Net.
Making an analogy between the PC and broadband, Morris figuratively said that Ireland was at a stage where it owned a PC that had an operating system and a text editor, but lacked a word processor. "The telecoms are telling us that we need a faster PC. I say, we don't need a faster PC, we need a word processor so that the existing PC can save us time, money and hassle. I want applications that are going to my life better," he concluded.
July's first Tuesday is Denis O'Brien's first appearance at a First Tuesday meeting since February 2000, when he offered advice on everything from business plans to operational issues. On that occasion he also advised the audience not to fear failure, saying that for an e-commerce company seeking funding it was a badge of honour to have failed at least once.
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