Whilst I’ve had a lot of conversations with other start-ups about how the Government can help entrepreneurs more, I’ve also had a few with those who think it should do less.
One of those, an ex-pat Irish Angel, whose thoughts we hope to be able to share with a wider audience in the coming weeks, sent [...]

Posted in Business, Startups 3 Comments »

I was disappointed to see that no Irish start-ups made it through to the initial 20 on SeedCamp. My gut tells me this is simply due to lack of applications. I only knew of one start-up here that applied. Did you? As the old ad goes “if you’re not in, you can’t win”.
Maybe when they [...]

Posted in Business, Startups No Comments »

Saul Klein reports that they received over 260 applications from around Europe for SeedCamp. I hope there is a bunch of Irish ones in there!

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The Irish Times has covered the latest press release about our Paddy’s Valley trip. The support of Enterprise Ireland in not just important but it is really getting noticed by the press. Finfacts also give us a mention and I was interviewed by Cork 103FM and ENN. There are still plenty of places left but [...]

Posted in Business, Events, Startups No Comments »

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 »

We have a deep rooted problem in Ireland with getting young people to take part in the start-up culture. Every kid who leaves college with a degree in engineering/computing/business in the US wants to build something great. Every kid who leaves college in Ireland with a degree in engineering/computing/business wants a nice job in a [...]

Posted in Startups 5 Comments »

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 »

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 [...]

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Apologies for the lack of information forthcoming about Paddy’s Valley, the blame lays firmly at my door. Few quick updates:

The dates have been decided, December 2nd to December 9th
we now have an official blog. Please subscribe to the RSS feed
Damien has listed some of our ideas
Even if you signed up on the old wiki, please [...]

Posted in Events, Startups 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 »

I recently had a great meeting with Paul Healy of the Rubicon Incubation Centre in CIT in Cork. This has been a runaway success since it opened a year ago and I wanted to find out more. The Centre is probably best know for the Genesis Enterprise Programme but actually offers a lot more than [...]

Posted in Community, Startups No Comments »

Jan Blanchard has been building a great travel site called Touristr for quite a while. I did some beta testing for him a while back and the potential was obvious. With their latest open beta, they’ve really improved the look and navigation of the site.
In their own words:

TouristR allows you to save favorite flags onto [...]

Posted in Community, Startups, Web20 3 Comments »

Vinny Glennon has a genuinely useful site in UseAMap. Starting from the simple idea of doing a “TinyURL for Maps”, Vinny has built one of my favourite mapping apps.
The most recent addition is a huge boon to those of us who live in The Google Maps Darklands - UseAMap is now integrated with Yahoo [...]

Posted in Startups 4 Comments »

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 »

I previously mentioned the ShareIT initiative by the Irish Small Business Advisory Group and the first session is on this coming Saturday in UCC. Put simply
ShareIT will offer free training by experienced business people who are experts in their respect areas to companies and individuals starting out in the world of IT. These training [...]

Posted in Business, Community, Conferences, Events, Startups No Comments »

James over at Eirepreneur has very neatly brought together the idea of Coworking with Twitter. He has taken the Twitter feeds of a set of Irish developers and freelancers that he knows and spliced them into Grazr. It provides a single combined feed of a set of people who are all in Ireland, work in [...]

Posted in Community, Startups 5 Comments »

Keith has uploaded videos of the “Finding money for your start-up” session. I enjoyed the differing views of the panel on this topic but anyone who thought they’d come away with “so that’s how I do it” would have been disappointed. There should definitely be a follow-up session at BarCamp Dublin with a focus on [...]

Posted in BarCampIreland, Business, Startups 2 Comments »

Damien has just announced the Share IT Free Training sessions which he has organised under the umbrella of BusinessAdvisory.ie. This is a fantastic idea where those with expertise in certain areas give training for free to those who are seeking it.
Initially it the focus is on IT/Technology but if it proves successful, I’m sure the [...]

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

They’ve just done an overview of all the online Photo Editors out there and once again PXN8 gets a very favourable mention. Walter is a shining example of what a tiny team with a great developer and a very strong commercial instinct can achieve. Everything to date has been entirely self-funded and the application just [...]

Posted in Startups, Web20 1 Comment »

Jan over at Touristr has written a really useful post on spending as little as possible on building a web-app here.
We’ve avoided going down the bank loan route as we assumed that a pre-launch start-up would have a hard time securing one. The Seed Capital Scheme is definitely worth a look and the Feasibility [...]

Posted in Business, Investment, Startups 4 Comments »