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 me this link to an article in The Economist.

The Fading Lustre of Clusters.

Well worth a read.

Maybe when they see the great outcome for the winners of the first one, we’ll have more youngfellas and youngwans getting up of their bums and giving it a go.

TechCrunch and Mashable have covered the first 20. Imagine, you could have had those hundreds of thousands of readers learning all about you.

Looking forward to seeing who makes the final 5 and then who gets the €50k.

p.s. you are applying to to SeedCorn, aren’t you? Aren’t you?

Who knows, maybe certain startup-clueless newspapers (yes I’m talking about you Irish Examiner) might even pick up on it.

I’ve been interviewing people for many years in all my different jobs. I’ve always been deeply disappointed by new tech graduates due to their total lack of personal interest in technology and technology businesses. They see a career in software development as no different to a career anywhere else, it’s just a job.

“Just a job” people don’t build Googles or DIGGs or YouTubes. Irish graduates are more than capable of building any of those businesses, they simply don’t seem to have the interest or the will. It is left to old farts like me who love business, love technology and love working in start-ups to try and do it instead.

The dotcom crash destroyed all faith in tech businesses in Ireland and the number of people doing tech degrees 6 years later proves that confidence hasn’t returned. Add to this the lack of training in entrepreneurship (as opposed to business) in Irish colleges and it is no wonder that there is so little activity from (under)grads. We teach people in Ireland how to be employees so there is never any incentive for them to try and build something interesting.

Rather than just griping about this, I think there are practical things we can do. David Copithorne in Waveson has proposed some fantastic ideas for bootstrapping tiny companies in Ireland. I hope he blogs these soon. My angle is basically a pre-SeedCamp one using many of the same ideas as David but targeted at a very specific audience. The deal would be this:

• Every summer we run a Hothouse in one/more of the colleges
• It is open to those who graduate that summer or the following summer
• 10 weeks long
• Build something you can demo
• You’ll have subsistence money to live/eat
• A limited company will be formed for you and all legals/IP taken care of
• You’ll get introductions to everyone you need to help you get the thing built
• You present your product at the end
• If your pitch is successful, you get further funding to launch and run it (equity angle could come in here)
• It might be a nice way for some of the multinationals based here who have zero local engagement with the local start-up scene to finally engage. The whole thing could be sponsored as follows:
  • Amazon – EC2 and S3
  • Google – Scalability training and maybe server farm access? Intro to some relevant SV people
  • Microsoft – Entire dev suite and run-time licences
  • Top 5 law Firm – All legals
  • SUN – servers, OSes
  • EMC – storage, intro to some relevant Boston people
  • UCC/CIT/UCD etc – the location, accommodation, business training
  • EI/CEB – access to compressed START or Genesis-style training
  • Delta/Trinity/Kernel – Pitch training and introductions
  • BIC – Angel introductions
  • All of the above – money

The first run of this will probably not work very well for all the reasons I outlined at the beginning. But bit by bit the message will get out that there are more interesting things to do with your summer than working in a pub in Newark. By year three, the competition to get in will hopefully be cut-throat.

Thoughts?

p.s. for those of you wondering who the hell David Heinemeier Hansson is, he’s the young guy who created Ruby on Rails, the framework behind many of your favourite web applications.
p.p.s yes of course there are some great webapps being built by young guys/gals here. Just not enough!

For those of you who don’t know, YCombinator is hugely successful project of Paul Graham in the US. Twice a year, once in Boston, once in SV, they ask (pre)startups to apply for a slot on the program. The small number who are accepted are then placed in a hothouse environment where they have a short few weeks to build a web application and pitch it. YCombinator also provides them with the small amount of money needed to execute on this and eat/sleep, for which they get a decent chunk of equity.

The teams are surrounded by all of the expertise and service providers and networking contacts they need to succeed. All of the nitty gritty is taken care of for them so they can concentrate on building the app and then convincing people that it is worth investing in to make it a commercial reality.

Not only is YCombinator succesful due to the number of great sites like Reddit which have resulted from it, but they also get lots of early exits for these businesses and make a decent profit.

SeedCamp is taking this model and asking teams from all over Europe to apply. Five will be selected and brought to London to build their apps under very similar conditions to the ones described above.

I encourage anyone who has an early stage start-up or is thinking about doing one to apply for this. It is an enormous opportunity to do something life-changing. In particular, if you are a college student with a decent idea and some friends who can execute with you, then apply. You have nothing to lose and you’ll have made your first contact to the investment community in Europe.

This brings up a point that was discussed at Essential Web which I believe is a big problem in Ireland – the almost total lack of new businesses or web ideas coming from undergraduates and new graduates over here. I believe there are a couple of reasons for this and I’ll address that and how we may be able to fix it, in a follow-up post.

UPDATE 1: These are the actual details of SeedCamp itself.

Seedcamp is an intensive week long event held in September in London targeted at young entrepreneurs from across EMEA. An open application available is online and 20 groups will be picked to participate in the Seedcamp Week. There will be a strong mentor network that will help the selected teams put together the foundations of a viable business. At the end of the week the organisers will make the funding decision to invest €50K each in 5 teams for a 10% stake.

If a team that is selected agrees to take the investment, the funding will be sufficient for them to move to London for at least three months. During the course of this, the groups get access to the same ecosystem of experts which participated in the Seedcamp.

Six weeks into the project, there will be a demo day where teams can show their products to the other groups from Seedcamp and a select group of investors. Ten weeks into the project there is an investor day where startups can present to potential investors.

Sounds fantastic. Hurry up and apply.

This is one of those simple but extremely useful apps. You can select from a set of forms on the eWrite Forms site and then embed that on your own site. They will also build you whatever form you need for a small fee and they take care of protecting it against spam entries.

eWrite is currently offering a one month free trial and if you are nice to Gordon at the next OpenCoffee, he might have some other offers there too!

1. The dates have been decided, December 2nd to December 9th
2. we now have an official blog. Please subscribe to the RSS feed
3. Damien has listed some of our ideas
4. Even if you signed up on the old wiki, please re-sign up here
5. We’re going to set a cut-off date for sign-ups very soon and we will probably be asking for a small deposit to cover basic expenses between now and the trip
6. Enterprise Ireland will help us with getting access to people in the Bay area
7. More Soon!

These guys pushed out 14 million polls last month and over half of them were non-English-language.

Vote early and often.

The Centre has not had a lot of marketing around it and I wondered why. The reason is simple; they have been full from almost the very start! Slots only appear when start-ups move on or when those taking part in GEP complete their stint. As a result, they are opening a new building on Model Farm Road right now and are just about to start an extension to the current building.

Here are some of the Rubicon stats:

• Currently 80 seat – full
• 20 of those are for Genesis
• They run the Enterprise Start program for those considering the jump (€275)
• Recently ran a special one for ex-Motorola people – strong interest
• Rubicon is self-financing, and gets no money from CIT
• They have to balance their books

The way the current building is setup for GEP gives it some of the attributes of a co-working space. Multiple start-ups share a room with no partitions etc. I’ve already seen how this is a big enabler for networking as Walter from Pixenate has put me in contact with people in there with similar interests.

The new building on Model Farm Road sounds like an ideal co-working space and Paul is very interested in facilitating that. The basic stats are:

• Building is 20,000 sq feet
• 80 seats
• It also has lab space due to chronic shortage of this in the region
• 10x Hot Desks initially with more coming
• 5x already gone
• €220 per month
• Rolling one month agreement with same desk for each month
• Phone , 10MB broadband, Wifi
• Secure server room

It really does sound like a perfect setup and the location means you avoid the worst of City Centre traffic whilst being quite close to the centre. The price is fantastic! I think I can see us using this over the summer.

I also gave Kay Wright in Webworks a call as I had been told they do hot-desking too. The Webworks building is slap bang in the City Centre and provided an awesome venue for the first BarCamp Ireland. The whole layout was created to encourage “water cooler conversations” and has lots of breakout areas. It’s biggest flaw remains the price. I really don’t think it can be called an incubation centre given that it charges full-ticket city-centre rates for the standard offices. Hopefully this will change given that the building remains almost totally unused apart from Cubic and one or two others.

The Webworks hot-desking stats are as follows:

• €125 per week plus VAT
• Wifi. Broadband (2MB symmetrical I think)
• Phone on desk. Pay for line rental and calls
• 14 desks. 6 in one room, 8 in other
• Coffee Dock with burka boiler
• Underground car-park, not sure if spaces cost

If I can suggest one thing to both locations – instant coffee doesn’t cut it any more! One of those wee on-demand latte/espresso machines, whilst not perfect, is a huge leap forward from Maxwell House Maybe even one of those single serve pod systems.

I should also mention the great sounding building out in The Macroom Environmental Industrial Park which served as the inspiration for the Rubicon hot-desking. I know Walter was highly impressed when he checked it out.

In their own words:

TouristR allows you to save favorite flags onto your personal map, create itineraries for your next holiday and book great deals from local providers.
Post your pics and stories, rate flags and add your own travel adventures. You can make or break someone’s holiday! lead by example.
Experienced travellers have left golden nuggets of information. Sign up to read their tips and reviews and get on the unbeaten track

I think they have a winner on their hands.

Check it out here.

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 Maps too.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft do a far superior job of mapping West Cork than Google. This is very surprising giving how many billion dollars Google funnels through Ireland every year. I doubt they’d miss a few euro going to the Ordnance Survey.

Here is an example of a location I have set in UseAMap.

Check it out.

I constantly wonder why we don’t see more startups in Ireland, particularly by young people who have little to lose. Here are all the reasons Paul gives why YOU aren’t doing it, and shows why most (but not all) should be ignored:

1. Too young
2. Too inexperienced
3. Not determined enough
4. Not smart enough
5. Know nothing about business
6. No cofounder
7. No idea
8. No room for more startups
9. Family to support
10. Independently wealthy
11. Not ready for commitment
12. Need for structure
13. Fear of uncertainty
14. Don’t realize what you’re avoiding
15. Parents want you to be a doctor
16. A job is the default

This should be mandatory study material in every Institute of Technology and University course on business and technology in the country.

Can we call it the Entrepreneur’s UnManifesto?

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 days are open to startup companies, companies with less than 10 employees and individuals considering starting an IT business.

The areas which will be covered in Cork include:

• Bootstrapping a small independent software vendor
• Effective communications
• How to use outsourcing to grow a small IT business
• Marketing research for Tech Startups
• Search Engine Optimisation for your website
• Managing web projects
• Sales in the IT environment

I’ll be giving the presentation on “How to use outsourcing to grow a small IT business” based on many years providing outsourcing services and now making heavy use of them.

I strongly encourage you to sign up for this. It is completely free and I think all attendees will learn a lot and hopefully avoid many of the mistakes we all made in the same start-up situation.

More details including contact information at the BusinessAdvisory Site.