As anyone who has kicked off a BES scheme knows there are a few simple steps you have to do in order to qualify. The key one is a “New Company Cert” from Enterprise Ireland or a CEB. To qualify for the cert they generally give you a small employment grant (a Feasibility Study Grant [...]

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If you have a tech start-up and despair sometimes (as I do) over the lack of local press coverage of your efforts then help is at hand. Damien Mulley is offering to profile those who send him their company details. According to Technorati, he is the highest ranked blogger in Ireland and he also writes [...]

Posted in Business, Marketing, Startups 4 Comments »

Web 2.0 Expo is coming to Berlin from 5th-8th November and it is a serious opportunity for those involved in web development in Ireland to get noticed.
Jennifer Pahlka, one of the organisers, is coming to Cork on July 14th and Tom Raftery has arranged an OpenDrinks Event that evening for any Irish people interested in [...]

Posted in Business, Conferences, Web20 1 Comment »

I’ve been thinking recently about Nokia and my general feeling is that they are missing many simple opportunities to retain leadership in mobile development.
Apart from one crappy Panasonic and a dog-slow Sony-Ericcson T610, I’ve always used Nokia phones. They have been solid workhorses with just the right combination of features for me. Until last year, [...]

Posted in Business, Tools, Web20 1 Comment »

At the Essential Web conference last week Saul Klein announced SeedCamp. This is an incredibly important initiative that will help grow the spirit of entrepreneurship across Europe. It basically takes a YCombinator type model and implements it here.
For those of you who don’t know, YCombinator is hugely successful project of Paul Graham in the [...]

Posted in Business, Investment, Startups, Web20 No Comments »

Paul Walsh’s Curry 2.0 was held last night in Jaipur in Dublin and was stonkingly good. A great mix of people from different backgrounds spent the night talking about tech, business and naan.
I started badly by sitting down next to someone and asking them if they were with Microsoft, given that they were wearing a [...]

Posted in Business, Events, Web20 1 Comment »

Gordon Murray from eWrite is a Cork OpenCoffee stalwart and his eWrite business has been very successful in Ireland. They provide web CMSes and Apps for SMEs. They have put a lot of work into protecting the forms on their customers sites against spam and recently decided to spin this out as a product in [...]

Posted in Business, Startups No Comments »

Essential Web 07

Fantastic day with a strong mix of investors and entrepreneurs. Some wonderful pitches and a killer opportunity for start-ups

We were thrilled [...]

Posted in Business, Conferences, Investment 1 Comment »

Not just because it is a brilliant product but also because Lenny, Jonathan and the guys have shown that small Irish technology companies can have global reach!
These guys pushed out 14 million polls last month and over half of them were non-English-language.
Vote early and often.

Posted in Business, Startups, Web20, widgets 1 Comment »

This post should have been written over a week ago but I’m only finally getting the time now.
On Thursday 10th May, three of us from Cork Open Coffee (Walter Higgins, David Copithorne and myself) headed over to London Open Coffee. As someone who has never worked into the UK (The Netherlands and Germany being [...]

Posted in Business, Community, OpenCoffee 5 Comments »

I did a short interview with Emma McNamara this afternoon for Radio 1. The overall theme of her piece was “The Economy” and as with other items in the series they took a regional focus which was Cork/Munster on this occasion.
I talked for far too long about the start-up scene down here, Open Coffee, LouderVoice, [...]

Posted in Business, Community, Investment, LouderVoice, OpenCoffee No Comments »

The Startup 2.0 guys have launched a wiki to try and build a Europe-wide directory of web applications. Make sure to add your app. The Irish page is here.

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Go, read Ben Barren’s post on ” Who Will Fund Local Web 2.0 Aussie Businesses?” and replace Australia everywhere with Ireland.
It’s a simple formula, I believe it can work.
Anything is better than where we are right now. When your VC activity is mentioned in the same sentence as Romania, you know you have a [...]

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I have huge respect for Munjal Shah of Riya and I was pretty gob-smacked to read his most recent blog post announcing that they are shutting their Bangalore office and centralising all development in Silicon Valley. His reasons are compelling, particularly for a start-up, even a well funded one.
When we started our outsourcing search last [...]

Posted in Business, Outsourcing 2 Comments »

Blog Polls - Take Our Poll

Posted in Business, Community, Events No Comments »

We did this press release this morning. Please forward to anyone you think might have an interest:
An ad-hoc group of Irish business people have decided to form their own delegation to tour Silicon Valley and create closer bonds with companies and people in the mecca of the computer world. The tour nicknamed “PaddysValley” will head [...]

Posted in Business, Community, Events, Web20 No Comments »

Haydn has offered up some quite controversial opinions on where many Irish web companies should put their energies and also what the BarCampDublin focus should be. It’s something I’d like to see argued from both points of view so please head over to Mediangler and offer your thoughts.

Posted in BarCamp, BarCampIreland, Business, Web20 No Comments »

We had another good turnout this morning at Open Coffee and covered a lot of ground from technology companies not building good links with content companies to quite a long discussion about aims and metrics associated with Cork Open Coffee.
Haydn made some strong points about the fact that many web businesses are very heavily [...]

Posted in Business, Community, OpenCoffee 25 Comments »

We were chuffed to bits and tickled pink this morning to see that David Lenehan has done an article about Irish webapps on the very highly regarded Read/WriteWeb site and we got a mention!
Thanks guys.
He also profiled some of the older guys like Pigsback and newer ones like Pixenate, Putplace and Nooked and not forgetting [...]

Posted in Business, LouderVoice 1 Comment »

I read a LOT of material about startups, entrepreneurs, funding and technology but Paul Graham’s “Why to Not Not Start a Startup” is one of the smartest things I’ve read in a long time.
I constantly wonder why we don’t see more startups in Ireland, particularly by young people who have little to lose. Here are [...]

Posted in Business, Startups 2 Comments »