At this year’s web summit in Dublin, Mr James Whelton was asked to speak about his feat. The event organiser, Mr Paddy Cosgrove, said during James’ introduction: “Tonight, after much pressure on teachers in a Christian Brothers school in Cork City, I’m glad to have James Whelton with us this evening, in the middle of his mocks. He has agreed to sneak up here this evening and tell us his story...”
The young cork man described himself as an entrepreneur, a social media connoisseur and, in his spare time, a Leaving Certificate student.
He explained that after becoming the first person to hack the sixth generation iPod Nano, he had gained massive publicity both in Ireland and across the world.
The story, according to James, began on December 17th 2010, when he won an iPod Nano at an awards event he was attending. He proceeded to hack it on the flight home, more out of boredom than anything else.
He started to experiment with the device to see what he could and couldn’t do with it. It didn’t take James long to discover that the operating system was not similar to the iTouch or iPod - it was, according to him, “a re-hash of a previous Nano’s firmware … it was just made to look and feel like a new iPod,” said James.
He set himself the challenge of trying to do something that one is normally unable to with the iPod Nano.
“To cut a long, technical story short, I basically figured out with some bash scripting that I could force the Nano to boot up a modified file,” explained James.
After his discoveries and other experiments, James had to delay posting his findings due to school Christmas exams. On December 27th however, he finally got round to putting his story on the web, letting the world know about his discovery by creating a site called http://nanohack.me
He then created a blog called “Hello Nano” that documented what he had achieved.
James said that he used Twitter and YouTube to help to get his message out there. He recommended posting on YouTube like he did because it gave him access to analytics as to how many people were following him and from where.
Within one hour of his initial tweet the message had gotten a life of its own. “I sat back and watched in amazement - that something that I had done purely out of boredom was now becoming so popular on the web ... I started gaining twitter followers at a rapid rate.
“The next day I woke up and saw my name on some of the biggest online blogs … it felt awesome.”
What next?
The new stardom enabled James to get a computer club set up in his school, where he now teaches 15 fellow students web design on a weekly basis.
James hopes to start his first business in June after finishing school, and he also plans on studying computer science in University College Cork (UCC). He wants to set up computer clubs in various schools around Cork and, eventually, nationwide. “I believe it is something that is required, and in this day and age the fact that we don’t have (it as) even an extra-curricular activity in secondary schools is absolutely ridiculous,” said James.
