Other business news in brief
Are pubs losing trade to social networking?
Bar sales are down 11 per cent over the year to February and, if the Licensed Vintners Association’s (LVA) new ad campaign is to be believed, it’s because people who used to compete for pub bore status now prefer the entirely less spontaneous world of Facebook wall posts and Twitter conversations.
The LVA kindly suggests that Dublin pubs are the “original social network” and that people who maintain friendships over the internet “need to get out more”.
This friend-making campaign is supported by a website featuring television presenter Baz Ashmawy, who jokingly notes that “in a survey I just made up, 141 per cent of people prefer to meet face-to-face” (and he doesn’t mean a little Skype action). Getting a group of friends together is “like herding cats”, Baz continues, before imploring visitors to try the LVA’s absurd “Invite-O-Matic” and – in a spot of what must be deliberate irony – visit the campaign’s Facebook fan page.
Most pondering by the drinks industry on the decline in bar sales has, to date, centred on the sobering trinity of recession, drink-driving law enforcement and the (related) fact that there are fewer pubs around. Health consciousness and, somewhat paradoxically, the smoking ban are also cited by the industry when asked to speculate why pubs seem a little roomier.
Why the sudden negativity about social networking? The LVA, it seems, has never heard of a Tweet-up or Facebook Event and rather touchingly has based its campaign on the assumption that being online and being in a pub are mutually exclusive states. As anyone who has ever sat round a table of distracted mobile addicts can testify, this is all too untrue.
STATUS UPDATE
Broadway bomb:Enron, a British play based on the collapse of the Texan energy giant, has closed early in New York, as audiences shunned its "feel-bad history lesson".
Green wine:Marks Spencer has converted its entire mini wine range from glass to environmentally friendly plastic bottles, saving 525 tonnes in packaging a year.
Coastline protection:An under-fire BP has sent 4,000 volunteers to defend the beaches of the Louisiana coast from the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
NAMA-WATCH
“Anglo is dead. Sorry Alan,” Prof Brian Lucey apologised to Anglo chairman Alan Dukes at the Burren Law School, Co Clare, last weekend. On one point though, both men are united: the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) should fall under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI). On this, they are at one with Information Commissioner Emily O’Reilly, the National Union of Journalists and the manufacturers of black felt-tip pens, whose products are so liberally used on material released under the Act.
Can the “commercial sensitivity” excuse really have such blanket application? Given that some developers, according to Nama chairman Frank Daly, have not yet abandoned their “extravagant mindset”, it seems there is about as much commercial nous in their business plans as ever – plenty to be sensitive about, then, but not quite in the way the FOI Act intended.
DICTIONARY CORNER
Don’t fancy your chances with the smart economy, the knowledge economy or the “real” economy? How about an “i-conomy”? It’s not, sadly, an iPhone app that keeps track of Ireland’s embarrassingly Greek-like deficit (or any variation thereof), but the buzz word of European commissioner for research, innovation and science Máire Geoghegan-Quinn.
Speaking at the Innovation Summit of the Lisbon Council in Brussels, she described her job as transforming Europe into “a really vibrant innovation economy, which I call an i-conomy”. There aren’t many hard and fast details about how an i-conomy would function. It “depends on a strong science base”, Ms Geoghegan-Quinn said, before swiftly reminding us that “scientists are not the only innovators”.
Not content with such an ambitious project, the pension- depleted commissioner also noted the need to build “a cohesive and prosperous i-society”.
€12m– the cost to Irish airline passengers of the initial six days of flight disruptions due to volcanic ash, according to market researchers iReach.
"This is about no more and no less than the future of Europe"– Angela Merkel tells the German parliament that the monetary union's future is on the line in the Greek crisis.
