This week on Komplett.ie we’ve been running a huge TV sale, with models from Sony, Samsung and Philips on offer at huge discounts. On Tuesday, we gave you a rundown of the 32-ich models on offer and today we’ll have a quick look at three larger models in the Komplett sale, ranging in price from €689 to €799.

The ambient sensor will allow just enough brightness in the TV as the ambiance of the room demands.

Sony KDL-40EX600 – 40″ BRAVIA LCD-TV

For the size you’re getting and the picture quality included, this high-definition television really is great value at €799, down by a huge €140 in our sale. Sony uses ‘edge LED’ backlight technology in this series helping with both contrast levels and achieving “energy excellence” as the company puts it.

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This week over on Komplett.ie we have a mahooosive TV sale, yes you heard us, mahooosive. There are price drops of up to €140 on some models with the sale spreading across 32-, 40- and 42-inch LCD and LED offerings from Samsung, Philips and Sony. We decided to take a closer look at what’s available in the sale, starting with a variety of 32-inch models, and where better to start but with the lowest price on offer – the very nifty Samsung LE32B450 4 Series LCD-TV for only €349.

The Samsung LE32B450 4 Series LCD-TV: "great level of depth in the pictures with some subtle shading".

Samsung LE32B450 – 32″ 4 Series LCD-TV

Called a “perfect blend of style, performance and value” by one review, this 32-inch model is down from €399 to €349 for this week’s sale. This Samsung model has ports and connectivity both in the rear and the left side of the unit, while in terms of picture and sound the LCD-TV-Reviews rundown of its merits says: Continue Reading

As it’s Friday – and as it’s damn slow news day – I thought you might enjoy finding out what happens when a Sith Lord decides to call Apple on the issues with his iPhone 4.

“Are you seriously defending the new phone by saying that it almost performs as well as the old phone? Is that what the plan is?”

Yep, Darth Vader’s complaints echo those of millions of iPhone 4 users – while there are also a few digs at the Droid X, HTC Evo, AT&T as well as a porky rank and file Empire guard. Enjoy!

Microsoft’s decision to give every one of its 90,000-plus worldwide employees a Windows Phone 7 device is getting a mixed reaction today.

Clearly hoping that this might get a few employees to ditch the iPhone – there are plenty of them swimming around Microsoft’s Irish offices anyway – some feel the move looks a little desperate but overall, we think the (mostly) good press it creates will be worth it. Continue Reading

Another day, another ‘leaked’ document, and this time it’s a leaked set of slides from a Microsoft presentation on Windows 8 – mapping out the company’s design and feature goals for the upcoming OS – that is causing a stir on the interweb.

There seems to be widespread good vibes for the rumoured directions the company is said to be taking however, this is tempered with plenty of (in our opinion, knee-jerk) concern that Microsoft may have been paying a little too much notice of what Apple is doing.

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Like many of you, we’ve been pretty intrigued with what ‘West Wing’ creator Aaron Sorkin would do with his script for ‘The Social Network’, a black comedy based around the creation of Facebook. However, now that someone who’s seen the script describes the Mark Zuckerberg character in the movie as a “borderline-autistic conniver”, we’re really looking forward to its October release.

Zuckerberg driven ‘not just by money or fame but also sexual insecurity’.

A Times article on the impending movie – which is being directed by David Fincher and is adapted from ‘Accidental Billionaires’ by Ben Mezrich – says that 26 year-old Facebook co-founder Zuckerberg is portrayed as an “untrustworthy sex maniac” throughout.

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Considering Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) is one of the cornerstones of the smart economy which those in the halls of power have been banging on about for the last decade, and considering they are funded by public money, a recent statement from SFI piqued our interest.

Late last week, SFI, along with the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation, Batt O’Keeffe TD, announced more than €25 million in funding for a variety of projects that will run over the next five years. All told, SFI said that 139 researchers, working on 27 projects, will benefit from the research funds, which is handed to various researchers as part of the Principal Investigator Programme.

Batt O’Keeffe TD with Dr Evelyn Murphy, UCD, who received a Principal Investigator Award.

SFI already directly supports more than 3,200 researchers who are collaborating with almost 400 indigenous and multinational firms here. O’Keefe was beating the drums at the announcement of the funding, saying that the projects had “the capacity to create new jobs in the ‘smart’ economy because they targeted high-growth areas at the cutting-edge of innovation”.

“The wide range of projects on which the selected researchers are working capture the calibre of work under way in our higher education institutions,” he said.

So just where are the funds being funneled?

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“You know what Sex Panther is right?”

After a while talking to, Dr Theo Lynn – a lecturer in management in the DCU Business School – you get to learn that he often likes to answer a question with a question. To answer this one though, I tell him that I do know what Sex Panther is, and more importantly I know it’s illegal in nine countries.

Dr Theo Lynn (on the left): “It’s not that important that you understand the minutiae of how search algorithms work but rather the importance of what you need to maximise your impact on a search”.

He’s not interested in just rattling off Anchorman quotes though, rather he’s talking about a type of marketing called ‘defictionalisation’, a concept that is among the various methods of modern marketing that pepper his lectures at present. Other topics of note include deconstructing the idea of search engine optimisation, the possibilities of virtual worlds and how businesses approach social media, be they “marketing bereavement” or selling homes.

When we catch up with Lynn he is sitting in his office where he explains that he is dividing his afternoon between answering calls to his door from undergraduates and post-grads, taking calls from colleagues and eating a lunch of a panini and vegetable soup. With the last bit of his lunch done away with, he sits back to talk about some of the work that is interesting both himself and his students at present.

That’s where we come back to that pesky panther.

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KomplettBlog meets DCU lecturer Dr Alistair Sutherland to discuss his work with gesture recognition and how, in partnership with video processor hardware and application software specialists Movidius, his research may have a major impact on how we use our phones in the not too distant future

In a meeting room in DCU’s School of Computing, Dr Alistair Sutherland is trying to explain the difficulties of producing a piece of software that can recognise hand gestures via video and translate them in real time. Before he gets into the full details he carries the expression of a man who has maybe had to give this explanation to perspective investors and interested colleagues on several occasions down through the years.

Some images from the hand tracking experiments that make up part of Sutherland's gesture recognition work.

“It’s a long road,” he says first off, indeed it’s a road that Sutherland has travelled down for over a decade, through work with both Hitachi and in his current position as a DCU lecturer. The essential idea is to create a video-based piece of software that can read sign language, translate it and produce the words on screen, or indeed using a voice synthesiser, producing the sentence in question out loud.

“The big thing,” says Sutherland, “is that most sign language is full of dynamic gestures where the shape changes within a word. We have to incorporate both shape and motion. Then there are common problems to be faced – perhaps the one hand moves in front of the other or the hand touches the face.” Continue Reading

Lecturer and researcher in the Department of Sociology at NUI Maynooth, Aphra Kerr is also founder of GameDevelopers.ie and over the course of the last decade has been one of the most reliable voices on the subject of the gaming industry in Ireland.

In 2002 she was behind the research document ‘Loading …Please Wait: Ireland and the Global Games Industry’ which included 15 face to face interviews with representatives of companies including Funcom, Havok, Kapooki, Eirplay and Vivendi alongside government agencies, retail and media commentators.

‘Operation Flashpoint’ – one of the games Havok has been involved in. Will they hire many more Irish employees in the near future though?

In that report, she estimated that there were just over 300 people employed in the games industry in Ireland. Kerr was co-author of another report from last year – simply entitled ‘The Games Industry in Ireland 2009’ – in which she estimates that the games industry here had expanded to 1,277 full time permanent employees plus 170 contractors and twenty-two freelancers.

Her book ‘The Business and Culture of Digital Games: Gamework/Gameplay’ was published in 2006 by Sage publications, while other recent publications include this year’s collaboration with Stefano De Paoli entitled ‘We Will Always be One Step Ahead of Them’ which is a case study on the ‘Economy of Cheating in MMORPGs’.

Komplett talked to her about the health, or lack thereof, of the Irish gaming industry, how to expand the industry and what she would do if she were put in charge of making things happen in this sector.

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Going on RTE’s version of Dragons Den was a bit of a snap decision for Rosemarie Meleady and Zara Stassin of RunawayBrideandGroom.com. Such a snap decision in fact, that they didn’t really have a functioning business to pitch to the Dragons when they first sent off the application form.

With only a few, snow interrupted, weeks to prepare for their appearance in front of the camera, it didn’t come as a huge surprise to them that they didn’t get investment for their wedding services site and its ‘Ultimate Job’ idea.

The ultimate job has gained newspaper coverage in China, Croatia, Brazil, USA, Australia, UK and Korea in the last week.

However, they are now fully up and running as a destination wedding and honeymoon service, and indeed only a day after their appearance on the Den was aired they announced that they had gained the required investment for their idea from First Ireland, one of Ireland’s largest Insurance and financial service providers.

The major stumbling block with the Dragons had been that, in order to promote the site, they would have to fund a competition to win the ‘Ultimate Job in Ireland’, which Runawaybrideandgroom.com is offering in conjunction with The Irish Times. The ‘job’ involves six months of travel, researching and writing about the most romantic wedding and honeymoon venues around the world – with your partner in tow. Meleady and Stassin have started a worldwide search to fill the position and have seen candidates flood in since.

We chatted to Meleady about the ‘big idea’ and how finding themselves on the show forced her and her business partner into action.

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Even a quick look at the prices for various motherboards can end up confusing the uninitiated, with prices jumping from under the €100 mark towards around €400 without that much seeming to change on the specs.

Before you know it you could be regretting the fateful moment when you fell victim to the new wave of DIY; getting mildly frustrated with the performance of your machine, opening up the PC case and thinking ‘you know what, I could upgrade myself…’

The Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 is pretty robust for under €100, suiting most casual users’ needs.

For high end users (and let’s face it a lot of Komplett customers tend to fit into this particular group) there is, without doubt, a difference that justifies the spend but do casual gamers or just Regular Joes really need some of the features that come in medium-price boards upwards?

Our RMA team downstairs at Komplett – while admitting that they certainly don’t fit into the ‘normal user’ bracket – commented that when it comes to comparing a €93 mobo to a €345 one: “to the normal, or even gaming user there is no difference performance wise”. With this in mind, we thought we’d give a rundown of what to look out for if you’re thinking of getting a motherboard and trying to make it suit your needs.

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