We have just launched a new partner program paying out substantial commission and bonus payments to web professionals, developers and marketers that refer customers.

LouderVoice is Ireland’s largest and longest standing provider of Review & Rate (R&R) solutions to e-businesses. These solutions give customers the ability to post reviews of a products or services on the website they bought from. R&R tools are seen by market analysts as one of the most important tools for any website serious about online business*.

Our system is delivered using a Software as a Service (SaaS) model which scales effortlessly with a company’s online sales growth. Installation can be as simple as pasting a line of code on a web-page and typically takes less than an hour.

Since 2008, the company has sold direct. On March 1st, we suspended our direct channel and now only sell through partners.

We recognise that companies with serious web businesses already have suppliers they trust to manage the ongoing development of their e-business. We now exclusively support these partners in delivering the hottest web tool of the year to their clients.

We offer an extremely rewarding commission and bonus program. Partners that have 50 customers can earn as much as €7,200 in their first year and larger partners, with 200 customers, can earn over €35,000 within 12 months. Plus, we pay an ongoing commission for the life of the customer.

Launch Partners include Webtrade, WSI, Hotel Consult, Granite Consulting, Digital Crew, Monsoon Consulting, TNS Distribution and WeddingDates.ie.

As our VP of Sales, Karl Llewellyn tells our customers: ‘All serious web business should have a Review & Rate tool on their site, today. They are missing out on sales without it. We provide our partners with all the sales material and support to allow them convert the maximum number of their customers; all they have to do is implement one of our ready-made campaigns.’

For more information on becoming a LouderVoice partner go to http://www.loudervoice.com/partner-program/

*26% of US e-businesses surveyed use an R&R Solution with a further 73% citing customer reviews as being an investment priority in the next 12 months. Jan 2010, Forrester Research

Don’t forget to vote for all your favourite Irish WebApps, many of which can be found over at Web2Ireland.org.

So Dan Cederholm likes LouderTweets.

We’ve been getting LouderTweets from as far away as Japan and The Philippines. Keep them coming.

Just to give a sense of the variety of those mini-reviews, some of the most recent were:

• A movie: “Live Free or Die Hard”. Original Tweet
• A restaurant: “Boqueria Cork”. Original Tweet
• A shop: “Habitat France”. Original Tweet
• A boat: “Late night Stena ferry to UK”. Original Tweet
• A campaign: “Save the Internet”. Original On Jaiku

Try it out and let us know what you think.

LouderVoice, a new kind of reviews web-site, is the only Irish company invited to present at the Essential Web 2007 conference in London on June 27th. This one-day event will showcase and celebrate Europe’s web innovators.

The purpose of the event is to provide a picture of the status and temperature of the web scene in Europe. The sessions will have a mix of upcoming and hot web companies – some will be pre-funded, raw start-ups, others will be well-funded and well-known.

“This as an incredible opportunity for us to attract further funding from world-class investors.” said CEO, Conor O’Neill. “Our plan to grow LouderVoice into a pan-European community-driven site for finding, writing and sharing reviews will be compelling for this audience”

Each showcase company will make a five minute pitch to an expert panel of VCs and business people and to the entire audience which will contain many high profile European investors, journalists and other entrepreneurs.

LouderVoice will share the stage with some of the other hottest web-sites in Europe, including Jaiku and Zubka to discuss “Bringing people together in trust based environments: the next wave of online communities”

I hope to see you there!

Last night we turned on LouderViesti which is the equivalent feature for the superb Jaiku. Jaiku is like Twitter but can do much much more. They are based in Finland and are adding great features at a fast rate.

We are now calling LouderTweets+LouderViesti = LouderMinis!

Using LouderViesti is even easier than LouderTweets.

• Sign Up on Jaiku if you are not already a member
• Join the #reviews channel
• On the #reviews channels page, write reviews using the following format:
• RatingOutOf5 Item Name. Review Text
• For example:
• 3 Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc. Cheap for Marlborough. Not at Villa Maria or Montana level
• That’s it! Within 30 minutes that review will be searchable/rateable/bookmarkable/shareable on LouderVoice

Of course if you have registered your mobile with Jaiku, you can send reviews from that too

• Just send a text message to +46 737 494 0501 in the following format:
• #reviews 3 Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc. Cheap for Marlborough. Not at Villa Maria or Montana level
• That’s all there is to it! Give it a twirl. We have some fun ideas for it that we’ll announce next week

An important point is that you don’t have to be a LouderVoice member to send LouderTweets but you should join if you want to rate, bookmark and build/share useful collections of reviews and mini-reviews.

And how do you send LouderTweets as a Twitter user? It’s very simple:

1. Add the Twitter “review” user as a friend here
2. Wait until you get a confirmation that you have been added back as a friend
3. Post reviews using this format on Twitter: @review RATING ITEM. REVIEW
4. Example: @review 4 The Apprentice UK. A stonkingly good series that has thrown up plenty of surprises
5. That format is very specific otherwise we won’t pick up the review. Rating is in the range 1-5. Full-stop/Period mandatory.
6. Shortly afterwards that review can be found by searching on www.loudervoice.com (in an open community microformat called hreview)

You can see an example here:

Tweet: http://twitter.com/oldchapel/statuses/101344802
LouderVoice: http://www.loudervoice.com/search?q=tesco+chocolate

As with all tweets, you can send your review tweet using whatever tool you like: web-page, Google GTalk, SMS, Tweetr etc

This is the first step in supporting LouderTweets and it is highly experimental. We’d love to hear you feedback on what you think.

Looking forward to seeing more Tom!

I talked for far too long about the start-up scene down here, Open Coffee, LouderVoice, PaddysValley, the Ireland=Romania state of Venture Capital here and the difficulty many have in getting access to capital. I hope I gave a balance of positives and negatives and gave some useful suggestions.

The segment is on at around 7.50am Friday on RTE Radio 1. It’ll be about 4 minutes long with multiple contributors. You can also listen to the live stream here.

UPDATE: For those of you who didn’t hear it, they mainly included my mentions of OCC and the need to get Academia+Talent+Money together if we want to create anything like the Silicon Valley culture. The show was heard by about 400k people and I was told by RTE that they had plenty of calls afterwards enquiring about OCC. I think Luigi’s at 3pm on Friday is going to be busy!

Bloggers who write reviews now have a site which is built around enabling them to publish reviews to blogs in a widely accepted format. Everyone else now has a site where they can find great reviews, read them on those blogs and then rate them, share them and subscribe to more.

Thanks guys.

He also profiled some of the older guys like Pigsback and newer ones like Pixenate, Putplace and Nooked and not forgetting PollDaddy itself.

If you liked what David had to say, maybe consider voting for it over at Digg?

Technorati Tags: loudervoice, argolon, barcamp, barcampireland, barcampirelandsoutheast

The launch of the Structured Blogging initiative last December kicked off our interest in microformats both as end-users and from a business perspective. We struggled with viable business ideas for a while and it was the Web 2 conference in April in Dublin that finally made all the pieces fall into place. In particular, the talk given by Judy Gibbons of Accel Partners was an epiphany and made me realise how we could successfully deal with the inevitable competition.

The infamous Web 2.0 conference in June was the trigger for us to finally say “we’re going for this 100%” and it’s been a wild six months as a result. Yes we’re behind schedule but we’re as confident now as we were in June that LouderVoice is going to be a major success.

Where will we be in another year’s time? Hopefully struggling desperately with scalability and fighting off potential investors. If we entered 2006 with some trepidation for the future, we are entering 2007 with all cylinders firing and ready for a fantastic busy year.

Happy Christmas all.

Technorati Tags: LouderVoice, Argolon, Web2Ireland, Judy+Gibbons

The plan at the moment is that we’ll be inviting a very small number of people we know into the Beta1 phase in the next few days. This is because we know there are missing features and some holes in the exception handling but it is still a highly functional application and we want to get that initial feedback. The focus in that phase is around features not stability. Questions we will be asking include:

• What features do you like?
• What do you not like?
• What’s missing?
• Would you use the following if we implemented it?

We will then move into Beta2 in January with a much bigger group of people and with the functionality that the early group thought was top priority. We will continue to ask questions about functionality but the main focus will be stability and usability.

So who should sign up? Actually a few different groups of people.

1. Bloggers – as many of you as possible. If you have one reader or a thousand, we want to hear from you. If you have ever written valuable information that you think others will find useful, then I think you’ll like what we have to offer you.
2. Searchers – During Beta the volume of content will be small but we’d love some enthusiastic testers to sign up and make sure you have everything you need to find and use the information on the site
3. The Opinionated – If you don’t blog but are willing to create interesting useful information which will always belong to you building your reputation, then we’ll provide the tools you need to get heard.

So go on, we’re sure you are going to love this site and the only thing you need to provide is your e-mail address. We promise never to use it for any purpose other than inviting you to try the Beta. We will never sell your e-mail address to anyone.

Technorati Tags: LouderVoice

I had asked for the meeting to see if there was any interest from them in investing in LouderVoice with a particular focus on their private clients for whom they do wealth management. I did my little pitch and the immediate response was that they were not interested at all in any kind of investment. This was no problem, I’ve been around long enough not to take such things personally.

I decided to dig a little deeper (considering we were now less than ten minutes into the conversation). It turns out that not only do they not get involved in early-stage tech investment but they have made zero tech investments since the crash! Their clients “still have the scars from the last time”. It also turns out that “early stage” in their view was anything prior to exit/IPO.

The message I got was that this was a general view not just limited to themselves. Is it really that bad? I find it hard to believe that the entire Irish investment scene is that lacking in sophistication. Is everyone just doing shooting-fish-in-a-barrel property investment with no interest in something a little bit more exciting? I’ve already started talking to UK and European based VCs who appear far more amenable to at least looking at a web-based opportunity.

The person I talked to made one point that I had not heard before and it is an important one. Not only were early-stage investors hurt by all of the companies that crashed, they were also not able to do well out of the ones who survived. The reason for that was the huge levels of dilution that were forced by the VCs in later rounds. I believe this kind of behaviour is less common now but I can understand why someone would be wary of getting in too early with such a history.

Despite getting burned quite badly during the crash, my scars are healing nicely and I can see the wealth of opportunity in tech. In fact, if I had spare funds, I know of at least two Irish start-ups that I would invest in right now apart from LouderVoice. I’m convinced one of them will become a major global player.

I don’t know what the solution is to getting Irish investors back in the tech saddle. Is it the investors or the investment houses that are scared? i.e. is access the issue? Would a few more Stockbytes do the trick? An Irish YouTube (FeadánTusa)? LouderVoice launching in Japan in 2008?

Thoughts anyone?

Technorati Tags: Irish+Investment, Irish+VC, Irish+Entrepreneur, Scars, Tech+Crash