Francis Higgins Screenplays

 Francis Higgins is a published poet and screenplay writer from Belfast. His screenplay STOLEN has been optioned by DeuceFilms of London. He has also written short stories, and futurist sci fi novella The Sleep Button.

Francis Higgins was born in Belfast in August 1958. The family then moved to Luton, Bedfordshire where Francis attended Cardinal Newman secondary and Bedford college. In the early 70,S Francis won the Cadbury young writers prize for his essay ‘The shape of things to come’.

Trained as a software developer and Microsoft credited tutor Francis started Ireland’s first internet Search index in 1997. Gasta( faster in Irish) then became one of the first search marketing companies in Ireland. Francis was always written and developing new ideas and produced videos and websites as a multimedia producer for AMI. With an established background in copywriting and marketing Francis began to develop his screenwriting in 2010. He has now written several developed projects and helps other writers with formatting and script polishing.

Francis Higgins Screenplay Optioned

When your peeling potatoes with your ma

Always pick the small ones

Sitting on the floor 

You don’t know who will come in through the door

Starts as usual ‘anybody seen my potato knife?

yes, Ned had it fixing his bike.

That was last week

Get that bike out of the hall...

Her uniform striped overall and little booted slippers

A yellow basin of water

newspaper spread to catch the skins

A potato as big as your hand 

No put that back get a smaller one

Sore little fingers use a blunt knife. 

While the coveted potato knife speeds

With ferocious dexterity 

one long peel after another.

Get the eyes, the eyes need weeded out.

it’s never going to end

Then at last, pots and pots of potato ready to boil 

Remember her amazing fingers with the broken nail 

Her telling how the bobbin in the mill caught the child’s hand.

Then the burning

listening to the hissing sizzle and steaming whistle as the skins crackle and spark

piled high in the open fire. 

It’s over 

But it will be spuds again tomorrow.

Francis Higgins Irish Screenwriter

https://www.linkedin.com/in/francishiggins

 Francis Higgins is an Irish born writer from Belfast. His Screenplay Stolen is currently in pre production. His other works include The Sleep Button a sci fi short story. Girlx2 a screenplay set in Belfast.Two Sisters a screenplay set in NYC. He has written short stories and published poems. 

Noel Alexander Harkness

Noel Alexander Harkness  was born 6th. December 1930. Noel died 14 January 2000.

He attended  Inchmarlow and Brackenber House Prep. School, and on to Campbell College. He was evacuated to The Northern Counties Hotel, Portrush during the second world war. Where he loved to sketch and draw. His father was an architect and Noel had studied his work and began sketching from an early age. 

He graduated from Trinity College Dublin where he was the artist in residence. He travelled widely after graduation and joined the Lyons Tea Company where he became a manager in London. He began exhibition of his art work in Soho and Whitehall galleries while in London. 

In the late sixties he returned to Belfast and joined a local Estate Agency and moved on to set up his own Estate Agency firm on the Lisburn Road, Belfast. 

The influences of Picasso and   Paul Gauguin are apparent in his early work and these are enhanced by his own modernist innovations. He left an extensive body of work, a huge amount of which has recently been discovered in the attic of his Wife’s home after her death. The works are currently being catalogued and recorded for future exhibition.

Noel Harkness Belfast Artist 1930-2000. I 

Noel Alexander Harkness  was born 6th. December 1930. Noel died 14 January 2000.

He attended  Inchmarlow and Brackenber House Prep. School, and on to Campbell College. He was evacuated to The Northern Counties Hotel, Portrush during the second world war. Where he loved to sketch and draw. His father was an architect and Noel had studied his work and began sketching from an early age. 

He graduated from Trinity College Dublin where he was the artist in residence. He travelled widely after graduation and joined the Lyons Tea Company where he became a manager in London. He began exhibition of his art work in Soho and Whitehall galleries while in London. 

In the late sixties he returned to Belfast and joined a local Estate Agency and moved on to set up his own Estate Agency firm on the Lisburn Road, Belfast. 

The influences of Picasso and   Paul Gauguin are apparent in his early work and these are enhanced by his own modernist innovations. He left an extensive body of work, a huge amount of which has recently been discovered in the attic of his Wife’s home after her death. The works are currently being catalogued and recorded for future exhibition.

Noel Harkness Belfast Artist 1930-2000. I 

Disruption guru Clay Christensen says incumbent media players are making a classic mistake

By Mathew Ingram

1 day ago

Summary: Existing players in an industry almost always fail to appreciate how disruption will affect them or understand how to adapt to it, Harvard professor Clay Christensen says, and media companies are making all of those same mistakes.

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Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen, who has helped shape much of the thinking around technological disruption with his landmark book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” has been taking a close look at the media industry recently — one of the markets that he believes is undergoing a fundamental disruption. In a panel session at the Nieman Foundation on Wednesday, he warned that many existing media entities are still thinking about what they do in the wrong way, just as other industries such as the telegraph and auto industry have in the past.
A key part of Christensen’s theory is that the incumbent players in a particular industry routinely fail to make the necessary changes to the way they do things, even when they can see the disruption occurring all around them. In almost every case, they see the disruptors as not worthy of their attention because they are operating at the low end of the market, and either don’t see that as important or are too committed to their existing business models.

Low-end competitors open up new markets

Existing players are often good at what the Harvard scholar calls “sustaining” innovation, but they are rarely good at disruptive innovation. The latter is the kind that transforms something that used to be complicated and expensive — and therefore available only to the wealthy or those with special skills — and makes it available to a much broader group of users.
So in telecom, he said, existing companies didn’t see the potential disruption from cheap flip-phones and ubiquitous cellular networks because they were too focused on large corporate customers, not individual users, and their businesses weren’t set up to take advantage of this new market:

“The flip-phone and wireless made it so affordable and accessible that people around the world could now have access to telecommunications, and in almost every part of the world, the people who were the pioneers were not the existing wire-line players because it didn’t fit their business models… I think you see this playing out in journalism too.”

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Value is created in new places

Although Christensen didn’t mention them by name, the obvious low-end competitors in the media business are players like http://www.gasta.com  The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed — both of which started at the low end of the value chain but have been moving up steadily, a trend that Christensen’s theory also describes. The Harvard professor also made some positive comments about Forbes magazine, and what it has been able to do online compared with other traditional magazines such as Fortune and Newsweek.

“Compare, for example, Newsweek and Fortune on one side against Forbes on the next — the core business just got killed. McGraw-Hill sold Newsweek to Bloomberg for a dollar… but with Forbes, while the traditional magazine got commoditized, they’ve created different business models above and below that are really kind of interesting.”

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(Note: Professor Christensen appears to be confusing Newsweek and BusinessWeek here — Bloomberg bought BusinessWeek, while Newsweek was sold for a dollar to the financier behind The Daily Beast).
The Forbes example reinforces another key point in Christensen’s description of disruption: as one layer of what technologists call “the stack” of processes that make up a business becomes commoditized, it creates value in other layers that can be captured by new players. So in journalism, Christensen says, the job of accumulating and distributing information about the world — something newspapers like the New York Times used to have a monopoly on — has become commoditized:

“As disruption occurs, it commoditizes a layer in the stack, so what used to be a high value-added activity that was very profitable and others couldn’t replicate, now becomes cheap and easy and anyone can do it. It used to be that news and information was one of those layers in the stack — no one could play that game like the New York Times… but now everyone has access to more information than they could possibly use.”

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Find other jobs that news consumers want done

The key to managing that disruption, Christensen says, is to find those other value-added businesses or markets or functions — “jobs to be done,” as he calls them — that news or journalism consumers are looking for. One example, he suggests, might be taking in all of the information people are deluged by and telling them what is true and what isn’t (something mainstream media outlets often fail to do, as I tried to describe in a recent post):

“Are there jobs for which there have not yet emerged viable competitors? I’m awash in information, but I need someone who will tell me what is true, and it’s not clear that anyone has really done that job yet — the New York Times thinks they’ve nailed that, but it’s not clear to me that they have.”

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Christensen also warned — as he has in the past, including in the report that he co-wrote last fall with Nieman Fellow David Skok, entitled “Breaking News” — that many existing players in the media business are trying to innovate within their traditional corporate structure, and that this almost always fails. In answer to a question about the Boston Globe, he said the approach of having a separate site called Boston.com run by a separate team was smart.
When an audience member said the site was now being run from within the Globe newsroom, however, Christensen changed his mind, saying: “Oh my gosh, really? Then put on your helmet, because it will force Boston.com to conform itself to the newsroom. That’s the way it always works, Sorry about that.” The full audio stream of the interview is available at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

The Survey says Gasta.co.uk popular destination for uk shoppers

 Gasta.co.uk has become one of the most  popular destination for uk shoppers looking for a really fast shop comparison site with daily deals and offers embedded into the search results.

The survey says 

Internet shopping is more popular in the UK than in any other major country, a survey from regulator Ofcom suggests.

Consumers in the UK spend an average of £1,083 a year on internet shopping, compared with Australia which spends the second highest at £842, it said.
The UK's fondness for net shopping is, in part, driven by mobile devices.
UK consumers are also downloading more data from their mobiles than any other nation, according to the survey.
The study also indicated that:

• In December 2011 the average UK mobile connection used 424MB (megabytes) of data, higher than Japanese users who averaged 392MBs.
• 16% of all web traffic in the UK was from mobiles, tablets or other connected devices - more than any other European country.
• Four in ten UK adults now access Facebook, Twitter and others social networks via their mobiles.
• For 18 to 24-year-olds the figures is even higher, at 62%. 
• http://www.gasta.co.uk for the best UK shopping deals

Your Christmas deals and bargains all in one place.

Your Christmas deals and bargains all in one place.
Your shopping and naturally your looking for bargains, You want the best deals and voucher savings. You want the latest electronics, the newest gadgets, and you want them listed by price and location for a fast delivery. Also and most importantly you want them from the most trusted and secure sales sites on the web, Amazon, Pixmania, bathshop 321, Lakeland, Ebay, Misco, PC World to name but a few.  One fast efficient UK site has been delivering these bargains for over 10 years now consistently bringing together customers and sellers. http://www.gasta.com try it today.

www.searchlive.co A Black Friday & Cyber Monday Shopper’s Guide To Comparison Shopping Search Engines

A Black Friday & Cyber Monday Shopper’s Guide To Comparison Shopping Search Engines

Nov 21, 2012 at 12:37am ET by Chris Sherman

• inShare80

The holiday shopping season is almost upon us. Black Friday comes at the end of the week, followed by the increasingly popular Cyber Monday. While there are plenty of deal sites, there also remain traditional shopping search engines that consumers may wish to use.
Shopping search engines, or perhaps more properly, product and price comparison services, were one of the first specialized “vertical” search types to emerge in the early days of the web. The first services, like Andersen Consulting’s BargainFinder, were “intelligent agents” designed to grab product info from specific retailer websites – and they were widely hated and resisted by many online retailers of the day for giving an “unfair advantage” to the lowest cost provider.
Today, the opposite is true: retailers now recognize the value of being found online, and comparison shopping search services often have direct access to real-time product inventory, both online and locally in brick and mortar stores. If you aren’t familiar with these services, you owe it to yourself to check them out to save both time and money, especially during a busy holiday season where competition is fierce and prices and availability change rapidly.
This guide is designed for shoppers, not sellers. If you are a retailer and want to know best practices, options and specific tactics for attracting searchers, take a look at the dozens of articles in Search Engine Land’s Search & Retail library.

Finding The Right Stuff: It’s Not Just About Search Anymore

I’ve been writing about shopping search since the late 90s, covering specialized comparison sites like Shopping.com, Pricegrabber, Nextag and others. These are true shopping search engines, with the familiar interface and results that are similar to web search engines like Google.
This year, however, new trends are in play, including social recommendations and the explosion of buyers accessing retail sites via mobile devices. Sites like Pinterest, while not “pure” shopping search, have become fertile hunting grounds for people looking to find cool products or the ideal gift. And comScore reports that 4 in every 5 smartphone users accessed retail content on their device. Some of that traffic to online retailers is undoubtedly being directed by comparison shopping or deal apps, and of course, many mobile apps have significant social components.
Nonetheless, search is still the predominant way people find their way to ecommerce sites, according to Hitwise, and Google undoubtedly makes up a large chunk of that traffic. This is both from product results appearing in web search results when Google detects “commercial intent,” and also from people using Google Shopping (more on that below). But there are other good options, thus, a look at the most popular “pure” web-based comparison shopping services.

Shopping Search: The Major Players

Shopping search results resemble web search results, but there’s a key difference: The results consist almost entirely of ads paid for by retailers. Payment models vary, but it’s important to keep in mind that what you’re looking at with comparison shopping results isn’t necessarily a summary the “best” or “most relevant” products but rather those that have been put forward by paid inclusion programs. So, while still quite helpful in tracking down what you’re looking for, you’ll need to look at other factors such as reviews, social recommendations, price and so on before making any buying decision. http://www.searchlive.co

Comparison engines also offer goodies like the ability to store lists of products you’re interested in, tailoring results so that your favorite brands appear above others, and many other shopping-specific perks.
Google Product Search. Google has been active in comparison shopping for many years now, both blending product/merchant information into web search results, and operating standalone comparison shopping verticals with names like Google Product Search, Google Products and Froogle. In May the company changed both the name to Google Shopping and its business model, shifting from a formerly free crawl/feed based system to one monetized service where merchants have to pay Google for product listings. Google Shopping is beset with problems, as covered in our The Mess That Is Google Shopping.
Despite growing pains, Google Shopping is a decent starting point for any product related search. In addition to seasonally-driven editorial picks and shortlists, Google Shopping has revived its print-based catalog search, letting you “go green” and ditch the annoying paper-based catalogs that require frequent recycling. You can also get access to Google Offers, its Groupon-like flash sale service.
Merchants interesting in listing on Google Shopping should check out the Information for Merchants page.
Shopzilla. Like Google, Shopzilla is both a longtime veteran and also offers a broad array of choices for searchers. Shopzilla began life as Bizrate in 1997 and morphed into Shopzilla in 2004. Today the company operates a number of comparison services, showcasing over 100 million products from tens of thousands of retailers from sites it operates including Bizrate, Beso, Shopzilla, Retrevo, TaDa, PrixMoinsCher and SparDeinGeld.
Merchants interesting in listing on Shopzilla should check out the Merchant Listings & Advertising page.
Nextag. Another longtime veteran of the comparison shopping space, Nextag goes beyond product search, helping you find deals on event tickets, travel, and Groupon-like flash deals. If you’re curious about what other people are finding interesting, check out Radar which provides an up-to-date snapshot of what others are searching for and buying.
Since Nextag Nextag offers multiple products and services in results check out the Advertise With Us page to learn more about how you can list products, events or travel services.
Pricegrabber likes to brand itself as “the” top-tier comparison service, stating “our site attracts computer literate, informed buyers, in search of the best deal they can find.” True – but as a searcher, be aware that the site is owned and operated by Experian, the credit reporting company that also owns Hitwise, an online traffic analysis group. Bottom-line: You’re likely to get really good search results from Pricegrabber, but you’ll also find a significant degree of targeting due to the sheer amount of data Experian has gathered, both in aggregate and potentially about your web use in general. If you’re concerned about privacy you may want to use the other services described here.
Merchants interesting in listing on Pricegrabber should check out the Experian Site Map page to view all of the varied products and solutions the company offers.
There are many other shopping comparison sites, including eBay’s Shopping.com, Bing shopping and others, but start with these – and happy holiday shopping!

go for gold this Christmas.on topbrandshop.tv

This Christmas make SEO Decisions Based on Trending Data and seasonal adjustments.   Every

website is under constant pressure to produce. Even well-established businesses have

monthly/quarterly/annual quotas they are supposed to meet in terms of visitor growth, qualified leads,

sales and so forth. And while I can understand the fear that grips the heart of every site owner and

marketer during a slow month, one of the worst mistakes you could make is to cut your SEO when

business is slow. Making quick SEO decisions based on one month's worth (or even worse, a few

days!) of data is not smart SEO. Remember-SEO is a long term process, there will be months that

aren't as great as others but in the lead up to Christmas it is now more imperative than others that

you get your product keywords on http://www.topbrandshop.tv the fastest growing shopping

destination in the UK. With http://www.topbrandshop.tv you get results from Amazon, eBay, with the

price comparison already done, you can place your product in the number one position and go for

gold this Christmas.