Ireland Stirs Homegrown Flavor Into Tech Scene

But Ireland last month became the first debt-ridden European country to exit an international rescue package, and now, through a combination of both longstanding and new grants and tax breaks, government officials are pushing to invigorate smaller, homegrown Irish companies. The hope is that a more robust tech sector can cement the country’s economic recovery.

It won’t be easy.

Ireland’s start-up scene is still relatively small compared with other European hubs like London and Stockholm. In the first nine months of 2013, the latest figures available, the country’s fledgling companies received around a combined $65 million of venture capital investment, a 28 percent drop compared with the same period a year earlier. The figure also is less than a tenth of what rivals in Britain secured in the first three quarters of 2013, according to the data provider DJX VentureSource.

And in the race to attract top engineering talent, the lifeblood of a start-up, it is hard to compete with the likes of Google and other global companies, which can offer tantalizing salaries and perks, as well as prestige.

Still, there are signs of hope. The domestic tech industry generates around 70 billion euros, or 40 percent, of Ireland’s annual exports and employs more than 100,000 people, according to government statistics.

This activity can be seen in the Grand Canal Docks, where young multilingual programmers and developers swap office gossip over expensive coffees in fashionable riverside bistros, while construction workers scramble to build high-rise office blocks to house international and local companies that have flocked to the area.

“This place has an interesting combination of young people and inventive scrappiness,” said Stefan Weitz, a senior director of search at Microsoft who has regularly visited the company’s operations in Ireland over the last 15 years.

For many of Ireland’s fledging companies, the key is to look for growth beyond their home market, which has a population smaller than that of Massachusetts. To succeed, many rely on government grants and tax breaks, like a 25 percent tax credit on research and development conducted in the country. The support is available to big and small tech companies alike.

The tactic, which also has been successfully used by Israel to help its domestic tech industry, allows companies to hire more engineers and developers as they can write off some of the cost against their corporate taxes.

To maximize the benefits, many Irish tech companies retain their development centers in the country, but move senior managers overseas, often to the United States, to be closer to their clients and investors.

For example, Movidius, an Irish semiconductor firm that has raised almost $50 million in venture funds, has a 12-person team in Dublin although its chief executive is in California. Datahug, an online business networking start-up, also has a sales office in New York, though it expects to keep its engineers and developers in Ireland.

“It’s cheaper here, but we need to be close to our customers,” said Ray Smith, 33, a co-founder of Datahug, who spends half of his time in the United States. “To succeed, you have to be in America.”

One aspect of Silicon Valley culture can certainly be found here: the struggle to hire and retain top talent.

Local entrepreneurs often complain that it remains difficult to hire well-qualified Irish engineers and developers, despite the country’s youth unemployment rate of almost 30 percent.

“There’s not enough local talent,” said Petter Made, a Swedish co-founder of the payments start-up SumUp, who oversees a 35-person team in Dublin that includes few Irish developers.

Economic Scene: Google Project May Spur Broadband Competition

“At that time the United States was a leader in broadband,” Mr. Medin recalled. Today, he lamented, “I don’t see anybody arguing that the U.S. is anything but mediocre.”

These days, Mr. Medin leads Google’s effort to deploy superspeedy 1 gigabit-per-second networks — 100 times faster than the 10 Mbps plans @Home introduced long ago — in several cities around the country, starting in Kansas City last fall.

Most of the nation’s innovation today relies on a broadband connection. Yet broadband seems to be the one area of the information economy that has not followed Moore’s law, named after the proposition by Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore that the power of digital devices would roughly double every couple of years, radically expanding their capability and driving down their cost.

“Internet access is constraining what people can do,” Mr. Medin said. “This puts American companies at a disadvantage. It puts Google in a place where we can’t innovate as well as we could.”

President Obama has made much of this deficit. In 2010 his administration introduced a National Broadband Plan that promised a path of rapid deployment of high-speed networks, offering 100 million households affordable access to connections of 100 Mbps or more.

“We will not succeed by standing still, or even moving at our current pace,” Julius Genachowski, Mr. Obama’s first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, told Congress at the time. Yet most Americans are still stuck in the Internet slow lane, far from the frontier of our possibilities. And the main roadblock remains much the same as it has been for years: a lack of competition.

Last week, President Obama nominated Tom Wheeler, a veteran lobbyist for the telecommunications industry, to succeed Mr. Genachowski. He has his job cut out for him: achieving fast universal broadband requires figuring out how to shake up the oligopolies that run the nation’s high-speed Internet.

There has been progress lately. The F.C.C. points out that more fiber-optic cable has been laid in the United States than in Europe in the last two years. According to Akamai, the nation’s average broadband download speed is about 7.4 Mbps per second, about twice as fast as it was two years ago. This puts the nation in eighth place in the world, up from 22nd in 2009.

Still, speeds in the United States remain behind those in the world’s most connected countries, like South Korea, Japan and Switzerland. Equally importantly, American broadband, at an average price of $6.14 per Mbps, is more expensive than in most other developed nations.

This has little to do with the actual cost of moving bits. The price of transporting data wholesale across the Internet has fallen to about $1.57 per Mbps, down from $1,200 when Mr. Medin was helping start @Home. And high prices discourage Americans from opting for higher speeds. Though 10 Mbps broadband is available in 90 percent of homes around the country, and four out of five homes have access to 100 Mbps service, last year only 28 percent of homes that had access to broadband at a speed above 6 Mbps actually bought it.

What’s most worrying is that the handful of companies offering high-speed broadband to American consumers may have little incentive to expand their networks, increase their speeds and lower their prices.

According to the F.C.C.’s latest calculation, under one-third of American homes are in areas where at least two wireline companies offer broadband speeds of 10 Mbps or higher. Even including the spottier service offered by wireless providers, which tends to come with strict data caps limiting use, the share is less than half.

That means that in most American neighborhoods, consumers are stuck with a broadband monopoly. And monopolies don’t strive to offer the best, cheapest service. Rather, they use speed as a tool to discriminate by price — coaxing consumers who are willing to pay for high-speed broadband into more costly and profitable tiers.

Blair Levin, who headed the F.C.C.’s broadband initiative until three years ago and is now at the Aspen Institute, traces the roots of broadband’s limits to telephone companies’ decision, back in the 1990s, not to match cable’s costly investments in fiber, trusting that their DSL service would be an adequate competitor.

But DSL couldn’t follow cable past 3 Mbps. Verizon did eventually get on the ball — investing in its FiOS fiber network, which is expected to reach 17 million homes when it is completed. But that’s the exception.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 9, 2013

Because of an editing error, the Economic Scene column on Wednesday, about the United States’ lag in high-speed broadband, misstated the number of homes served by AT&T, which is expanding its U-verse high-speed network. It plans to make the network available to 33 million homes, an increase of 8.5 million; it does not currently serve 100 million homes.

Crime Scene: Chasing Down a GPS Blip to a Stolen iPhone

Devices like hers were stolen 16,000 times last year in New York City. But what happened on this afternoon was anything but commonplace. The closest comparison that leaps to mind is a classic chase scene from a 1971 thriller.

The teenager, soon out of sight, had every reason to believe his getaway was whistle clean. The woman, with just as many reasons to believe that was the last she would see of her phone, flagged a police officer, who put a call over the radio with a description of the young man wearing a yellow hooded sweatshirt. Another officer pulled out his own iPhone, and together with the victim, logged into the Find My iPhone feature, which should work if the thief had not turned the victim’s phone off.

He had not. A telltale dot appeared on the screen of the officer’s phone. The victim’s phone was nearby, at 126th Street and Roosevelt Avenue.

“That’s a block away,” Police Officer Haaris M. Hamid, 28, said. He got behind the wheel of an unmarked car, his sergeant beside him. “I can get there and get the guy,” the officer said.

They arrived at the corner where the phone should have been, under an elevated stop on the No. 7 train. The officer and the sergeant looked around and then ran upstairs. Nothing. A train had just pulled away.

Officer Hamid called his colleague with the Find My iPhone feature and asked him to refresh the search. This time, it came up at 111th Street and Roosevelt.

The thief had to be on the subway.

They ran back downstairs to the car. The chase was on. Officer Hamid, his car siren blaring, wove through traffic and blew through intersections while the sergeant called out on the radio, looking for a means of stopping the train.

They arrived at the 111th Street station, still lagging behind the subway, and lingered long enough to make sure the people exiting the station did not include the suspect. They raced on, to the 103rd Street stop. Same thing: train leaving, no yellow hoodies.

Onward the officer drove, around cars beneath the subway tracks, like Gene Hackman’s character, Detective Popeye Doyle, in “The French Connection.” Of course, Popeye was after a cop-killing henchman for a drug smuggler, while Officer Hamid was chasing a teenager who had stolen a woman’s iPhone. But, as they say, the city has changed.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy,’ ” Officer Hamid, a seven-year police veteran, recalled. “It was seriously like a movie.”

A police captain called the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and the subway’s conductor was ordered to stop the train short of the next station, at Junction Boulevard. Officer Hamid, his sergeant, and a captain and a lieutenant who had joined the chase ran upstairs.

The conductor opened the door. “I was pretty much at the end of the line,” Officer Hamid said. “You’ve got to let the bosses go first and everything.”

The bosses and officer went car to car, looking at faces. Around the fourth car, Officer Hamid saw a young man whom he recognized from Flushing. He was wearing a blue sweatshirt. But still. “I go, ‘Sarge, that’s him.’ ”

Asked where he was coming from, the young man replied, “Brooklyn.” The No. 7 train makes exactly as many stops in Brooklyn as it does on Uranus.

Other passengers were watching with interest. So were the bosses. Officer Hamid hoped he had the right guy. The victim was on the street below, with other officers. Officer Hamid called down and asked someone to dial the victim’s phone.

“It rang,” Officer Hamid said. “In his back pocket. I was like, ‘Thank God.’ ” Passengers broke out in chatter, and the suspect’s eyes opened wide. “Like, ‘Uh-oh,’ ” Officer Hamid said. The suspect, Jordan Osborne, 19, had a yellow hooded sweatshirt in his backpack. He later told officers, “I took the phone to sell it,” according to a criminal complaint. “I was short on cash.” The police and the suspect left the train, which resumed its journey to Manhattan.

The suspect remains at Rikers Island while the case is pending.

Simple arithmetic suggests there were 42 other phones or electronic devices stolen in New York that day.

E-mail: crimescene@nytimes.com

Twitter: @mwilsonnyt

Economic Scene: Economic Statistics Miss the Benefits of Technology

I traveled to Japan with a TRS-80 portable computer, which ran on AA batteries and had plastic cups to put over the phone receiver. It transmitted copy at the blistering speed of 300 bits per second. And I wrote about Mexico’s tequila crisis of 1994 without the benefit of a full set of Mexican financial statistics a few clicks away.

From my perspective, the evolution of the tools of journalism between then and now has been nothing less than breathtaking.

Articles are more thorough — informed by complementary data and analysis, enriched with links to things like interactive charts, videos and slide shows. They get to readers much more quickly. Most important, they reach many more of them.

For all its financial troubles, never has The New York Times been read by more people: 44 million unique viewers online in the United States every month. Yet if you were to rummage through American economic statistics you would find little evidence of journalism’s technological leaps. Measured by its contribution to gross domestic product, the most prominent indicator of the nation’s economic well-being, much of this new journalistic value enabled by information technology is not worth much.

This is true not only of journalism. The failure of I.T. to deliver measurable value has been a popular meme among economists for years. Back in 1987 Nobel laureate Robert Solow posed a now famous paradox: “We can see the computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”

The meme is back. The burst of productivity during the dot-com revolution of the 1990s gave skeptics pause. But as productivity has slowed substantially in recent years, doubts have re-emerged about whether information technology can power economic growth like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine did in the past.

Last year, Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern University proposed that the I.T. revolution has pretty much exhausted its promise. He asked, provocatively: “Is U.S. economic growth over?” And he forecast stagnating living standards for the vast majority of Americans for decades to come.

Government statistics lend support to his skepticism: Value added by the information technology and communications industries — mostly hardware and software — has remained stuck at around 4 percent of the nation’s economic output for the last quarter century.

But these statistics do not tell the whole story. Because they miss much of what technology does for people’s well-being.

News organizations that take advantage of computers to let go of journalists, secretaries and research assistants will show up in the economic statistics as more productive, making more with less. But statisticians have no way to value more thorough, useful, fact-dense articles.

What’s more, gross domestic product only values the goods and services people pay for. It does not capture the value to consumers of economic improvements that are given away free. And until recently this is what news media organizations like The New York Times were doing online.

The Commerce Department is in the process of revising the way it measures G.D.P. to take better account of the contributions of investment in research and development and artistic creation. But even though the revisions to be announced this summer are expected to make the economy look bigger, they are not devised to capture the value that Americans get from digital technologies.

“G.D.P. is not a measure of how much value is produced for consumers,” said Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Everybody should recognize that G.D.P. is not a welfare metric.”

G.D.P. misses what Americans gain from sharing information on Facebook or finding information on Google or Wikipedia. It misses how dating sites reduce the cost and increase the odds of finding a mate. It misses the time saved by drivers who use Google Maps and the time gained by consumers from shopping online. Measured in money — what it contributes to G.D.P. — the recording industry is shrinking. Yet never before have Americans had access to so much music.

Advertising: In San Francisco, a Thriving Advertising Agency Start-Up Scene

The San Francisco ad market is well-known, even notorious, for its continual ups and downs, rising and falling with both the economy and the state of the technology industry. The highs and lows have been particularly pronounced since the mid-1990s, as agencies benefited mightily from the dot-com boom, then tried to survive the debacle of the subsequent bust. If they made it through, they were left to figure out their place in a landscape increasingly dominated by digital powerhouses like Facebook and Google.

“It’s been the most interesting ad market in the country in the last 15 years, going through a lot of metamorphoses,” said Amy Hoover, president at Talent Zoo in Atlanta, which specializes in recruiting employees for agencies in advertising, public relations and social media.

After the dot-com bust, “we were overwhelmed with calls from people saying, ‘I came in on Monday and the office was closed,’ ” Ms. Hoover said. “As the tech sector rebuilt itself, you started to see shops popping up and, as digital exploded again, it’s been this Wild West recently.”

Almost all the start-ups have involved executives who were already working in the market. One, to be announced on Tuesday, also includes an agency holding company, Project WorldWide, based in the Detroit suburb of Auburn Hills, Mich., which is making a bet on the market’s viability by bankrolling the start-up of a San Francisco agency named Argonaut.

(The Argonaut name seems to be part of a pattern of offbeat nomenclature in the San Francisco market that also includes agencies like Cutwater, Dojo, Eleven, Mekanism, Odopod, Sequence, Signal to Noise and AKQA, for “all known questions answered.”)

“The Bay Area is quite vibrant these days,” said Robert G. Vallee Jr., chairman and chief executive at Project WorldWide. “There’s a lot of opportunity out there.”

Agencies in San Francisco are benefiting from a trend in which marketers that once used only agencies with which they had defined relationships on accounts — agencies of record, in industry parlance — are handing out creative assignments to other shops, Mr. Vallee said.

Ms. Hoover identified another trend: The San Francisco ad market is being influenced by the entrepreneurial spirit of nearby Silicon Valley as agency employees are inspired to go into business for themselves with “a lot of breakoffs, guys starting their own thing.”

That describes some of the six founders of Argonaut, among them the co-chief creative officers, Rick Condos and Hunter Hindman, who worked as a creative team at perhaps the most prominent agency in San Francisco, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, part of the Omnicom Group; Max Heilbron, the head of strategy, who had been group brand strategy director at Goodby, Silverstein; and Robbie Whiting, the head of creative technology and production, who had been head of creative technology at another well-regarded local agency, Duncan/Channon.

“We’re taking a lot of inspiration from the San Francisco kind of start-up mentality,” Mr. Hindman said. “We want to be agile, act quick and be artful.”

Jordan Warren, the president of Argonaut, said he believed the San Francisco ad market has been “coming back, and coming back in the right way.”

“It’s not about chasing fads and buying the hype” this time around, said Mr. Warren, who has spent 20 years in leadership posts at local agencies like Eleven and Signal to Noise. “It’s about people getting their hands dirty and building sustainable things, delivering value.”

The sixth principal of Argonaut, Conal O’ Doherty, whose title is head of growth, has worked at agencies in San Francisco as well as markets like Barcelona, Spain.

The ad business in San Francisco “has a long history of iconoclastic personalities,” said Courtney Buechert, chief executive at Eleven, which opened in 1999. That has helped “make the market independent and inherently entrepreneurial,” he said.

He cited figures like Howard Gossage, who was an early proponent of Marshall McLuhan and green marketing, and Hal Riney, whose agency, Hal Riney & Partners, is now Publicis & Hal Riney, part of the Publicis Groupe.

“The dot-com boom was crazy; I don’t think anyone had seen anything like it since the Gold Rush,” Mr. Buechert said. “But since then, there have been different kinds of agencies growing, thriving here, agencies that have enjoyed the true benefit of the new technology, accountability, which has made them more metrics-centric, concerned about results, and media-agnostic, interested in new things like social media and not just advertising.”

There is even a new agency in the market that is wearing its heart on its sleeve by including the letters “SF” in its name.

“I’m not sure many people start agencies with the initials of the city,” said Jamie Barrett, a partner at BarrettSF. In May, he left Goodby, Silverstein, where he had been partner and executive creative director, to start the agency with Patrick Kelly, another former executive at Goodby, Silverstein.

“We are proud of the market and excited about the market,” said Mr. Barrett, whose fledgling shop has two clients, the California Redwood Association and the Pacific-12 Networks. He and Mr. Kelly are bringing in a third partner, Pete Harvey, who also joins from Goodby, Silverstein.

“There’s almost no better place to be” than the San Francisco market, because of the proximity to Silicon Valley, said Mr. Harvey, who has also worked in cities like Boston and Los Angeles.

“You get people knocking on the door with wild ideas,” he added, “which inspires you to make your own business a little more innovative and interesting.”

Brittany Kerr Returns to L.A. Bar Scene … without Jason Aldean

Brittany Kerr
Returns to L.A. Bar Scene
... without Jason Aldean
Brittany Kerr went back into the danger zone Tuesday night  ... the center of the Hollywood bar scene ... only this time, the former "American Idol" contestant was spotted with a man who WASN'T wearing a wedding ring.

No word on who the mystery dude is ... or how they know each other ... but as long as he's not a married country singer with two kids at home, shouldn't be a problem.

For College Students, Social Media Tops the Bar Scene

Heather Ainsworth for The New York TimesJordan Calabro, left, and Christopher Cheleuitte, Cornell veterinary students, let loose on the dance floor at Level B, a bar in Ithaca, N.Y.

Editors' Note Appended

IT’S hard to look cool slurping blue-hued vodka through neon-colored straws from a fishbowl, and four sorority sisters, all Cornell University seniors, have long since stopped trying.

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A line to enter Pixel Lounge in Ithaca, N.Y., for last call.

After all, cool is irrelevant when you have arrived at a bar at the insanely early hour of just after 9 p.m. on a Wednesday, in the company of a fraternity “most of us wouldn’t go to a mixer with,” said Michelle Guida, 21, fiddling with her orange Hermès bracelet and gathering three straws to drink from simultaneously. “But it’s their bar tab,” said Vanessa Gilen, also 21, who did not look up from her iPhone as she sipped and texted furiously.

The women, in the pre-fall evening-out uniform of tiny shorts and four-inch heels, had fortified themselves for the outing with tequila shots at home. They sat in Level B, a basement bar on the southwestern edge of the Cornell campus in Ithaca, N.Y., snapping photos of their two $18 fishbowls (each contains a half-bottle of vodka, or about 16 shots, and a plastic animal) and texting them to friends (no explanation necessary) to coax them to hurry over before the fishbowl special ended at 12:30. The bar was as dead as a strobe-lighted library until shortly after 11, when suddenly, as if the campus bell-tower chimed at a frequency only students could hear, the place was sweat-inducingly full.

To anyone who has ever been to college, it doesn’t seem like much of a problem: how to lure students to bars, the earlier in the evening the better.

But bar owners in the Collegetown neighborhood of Ithaca recently convened a worried summit about just this topic. Once upon a time, in the Pleistocene epoch before cellphones and social media, students used bars as meeting places, heading there after class to find friends and to plot evenings over beer.

These days text messaging, Facebook and Foursquare make it possible to see if a bar is worth the trip (translation: who is there) without leaving the dorm. Meanwhile, location-based mobile apps like Grindr, which point to the nearest available candidates looking for sex or not-quite-sex, are helping dethrone college bars from their place as meat markets.

Students have spent so many hours pregaming (as in, getting as cost-efficiently drunk as possible, usually on hard liquor at a private party) that there is little need to waste money even on cut-price drinks, and they often don’t arrive at the bars until midnight or so, before the bars in Ithaca close at 1 a.m.

“Students don’t need bars to create a community the way they used to,” said Stephani Robson, a senior lecturer in the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell who specializes in restaurant psychology.

And it’s not just at Ivy League Cornell, where the libraries are open later than the bars, but in college towns across America like Iowa City, where at least four bars have closed since 2011.

Bars near Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania are so peripheral to Lanie Parr’s social life that she doesn’t know what time they close. That is not because she doesn’t drink. “We sometimes pregame even the pregame,” she said.

Pregames often are single sex, with men playing beer pong or video games, and women drinking vodka sodas or a peach-flavored Champagne called André and refusing to head out until they have captured the perfect photo, which they promptly post to Instagram and Facebook.

“You could have this really amazing night, but if you didn’t get a picture, it’s like it didn’t happen,” said Ms. Parr, 22, a senior at Gettysburg, whose friends often order designer outfits from the Rent the Runway Web site because incessant documenting makes wearing anything more than twice taboo. “It’s crazy how much pictures consume our lives. Everyone knows how to pose and how to hold your arm and which way is most flattering, and everyone wants the picture taken with their phone.”

That preamble tends to delay arrival time at bars, another factor in their decline. At Cornell, three Collegetown bars have closed in the last year, including the 71-year-old Royal Palm Tavern, a storied dive where students convened at “Palms o’clock,” meaning in time for one last drink.

“These kids today won’t pay even $2 for a drink,” said the former owner, Lenny Leonardo, as he cruised down a highway in Florida, where he retired in August. “They buy a bottle of Southern Comfort and show up in time to try to get laid. But they just end up throwing up in my men’s room, and I get reprimanded because it looks like I’m the one who let them get this drunk.”

Editors' Note: September 28, 2012

An article on Thursday described the effect of social media use on the bar scene in several college towns, including the area around Cornell. After the article was published, questions were raised by the blog IvyGate about the identities of six Cornell students quoted in the article or shown in an accompanying photo.

None of the names provided by those students to a reporter and photographer for The Times — Michelle Guida, Vanessa Gilen, Tracy O’Hara, John Montana, David Lieberman and Ben Johnson — match listings in the Cornell student directory, and The Times has not subsequently been able to contact anyone by those names. The Times should have worked to verify the students’ identities independently before quoting or picturing them for the article.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 27, 2012

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misspelled the surname of Christopher Cheleuitte. It is Cheleuitte, not Chelewitte.