In the past few years the whole area of widgets has been growing at a phenomenal rate. There is a widget for displaying almost anything at this stage. Now imagine if you had a widget where you defined the ad content and it was for products you like? Imagine if you got paid every time one of those ads resulted in a sale?

Well that’s what Nooked has built. For example, if you are a Birkenstock fanatic, you can choose to just display ads for those on your blog, social network or other web-page. Select the products you like and you are up and running in minutes.

The big advantage for you as a “publisher” is that you display products you recommend and the likelihood is that those who read your blog or are connected to you on a social network will also find them interesting. The advantage for advertisers is that it is much much more targetted than even AdSense because it is focused on people and their interests instead of just content.

The Nooked guys have a great blog post pointing out some of the history of sell-side advertising. Why not head on over to their site and grab a widget showing the things you like?

• Mashup University – Monday 10th/Tuesday 11th
• Mashup Camp – Wednesday 12th/Thursday 13th
• Paddy’s Valley Meet-up- Thursday 13th
• DemoBar and FOWA Road trip – Thursday 13th
• OpenCoffee – Friday 14th

The Mashup Camp and Uni really looks like a wonderful four days. Only €25 nominal sign-up to learn a ton of stuff. If you are a developer and you are not attending at least one day of this, you missing out on something special. Don’t forget the IBM competition too.

Thursday the 13th is the night when start-ups can shine. Not only do you have the opportunity to demo your app to your peers, there will be a bunch of influential people in the audience too. Who knows, it might get you a slot at FOWA. Make sure to [a] apply to demo and [b] sign-up on Facebook.

As I said in the opening post:

blognation Ireland launches today to bring you all the latest news from the world of Web2.0 and mobile in Ireland. 2007 is the year when activity in web development has been at its most exciting here in a long time. Our aim is to raise the visibility of this local activity to a much wider global audience.

The Irish site is part of the blognation network which is building up to be the biggest tech news site on non-US Web 2.0 startups around the globe including EMEA, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Canada

Feel free to send me any news about your web or mobile application, no matter how early stage you are. conor.oneill AT blognation DOT com

You can also usually get me on skype at cwjoneill, conoro on Yahoo IM and GTalk on conor AT loudervoice DOT com

If you like the opening story, please consider DIGGing it.

Don’t worry, I’ll still be posting regularly here and web2ireland about all those topics which are appropriate to a local Irish audience.

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 going to the Web 2.0 Expo or, more importantly, for anyone hoping to present there.

Tom has all the details. Note that this is the only Irish stop-off for Jen. You’d be nuts to pass up on this opportunity. If you aren’t going, tell your buddies to.

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, that meant Series 40 phones but I then finally succumbed and bought an N70 a year ago.

With the right attitude from Nokia, the N70 and newer similar phones could be flying off the shelves and changing how we communicate. Instead they seem to take the attitude of “well this is the way we have always done things” and they show a total lack of vision. This is presumably a symptom of having to work with the closed mind-sets of mobile operators for the past twenty years. Unless Nokia changes soon they are going to be also-rans.

Nokia seems to view the world in terms of phone+desktop. The horror that is the totally unreliable Nokia PC Suite plus cable continues to limit and frustrate users.

A few simple problems:

• To sync contacts I need something like Outlook. Why?
• Why give me a multimedia player just so I can play 3GP movies rather than a tool which converts them as they are transferred from the phone?
• USB USB USB. Dump that idiotic mechanically incompetent Nokia connector now on ALL phones
• 3.5mm audio jack. It’s been a standard for decades, try it, on ALL phones
• Nokia Lifeblog. Potentially a killer app. But only works with Typepad or “blog software that is written to be compatible with LifeBlog”. Seriously? Not “Lifeblog conforms to the ubiquitous standards XMLRPC and ATOM APP”. A bad joke but the only easy way to get all your latest photos, movies and SMSes off your phone.
• Music Player – how about an MP3 player that understands how to navigate 60 minute podcasts and not just three minute songs?

To thrive, Nokia needs to totally embrace phone+web. LifeBlog should be totally revamped and become the input/output route from your phone to your online life.

It needs the following (by yesterday at the latest):

• Google Calendar Sync (no not crappy SMSes)
• GMail/Yahoo Mail/Hotmail/AOLMail Sync (mail and contacts)
• Remember The Milk or similar To-Do sync
• Flickr/Zooomr/Photobucket sync/upload
• WordPress, Blogger, and all standard blog platform integration
• YouTube/Blip.tv/etc integration
• Twitter and Jaiku integration

With the resources they have, none of these things should be hard, particularly considering you can cobble some of this together from third party apps written by people in their spare time.

Of course you have great phone apps like Shozu but uploading my media at the current extortionate mobile rates should only be a last resort. All of the features above should be in a desktop app where the desktop only acts as a cheap gateway between my phone and the web.

My phone is not an extension of my desktop, it is an extension of my online presence. Forget the jesusphone, cheap combo GSM-Wifi phones from guys like HTC with flat-rate pricing from 3 could kill Nokia and their buddies in Voda and O2. I’d switch to in a second once I know I can do reasonably priced roaming. Open beats closed every time, wake up and smell the coffee.

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.

I started badly by sitting down next to someone and asking them if they were with Microsoft, given that they were wearing a blue monster t-shirt. It turned out to be Dennis Howlett (Accman) who took great good-humoured umbrage.

My longest conversation of the night was with Joe from PutPlace and Ben from Microsoft Mobile. Three strongly held viewpoints on the future of mobile and search and apps and the desktop and the jesusphone were expressed. None of which is re-printable, all of which was deeply interesting.

The “pitch to a waiter” turned into “pitch to Sanjay the head chef”. This was great fun and useful too. We had everything from Robert Loch spoof-pitching Joke-Eoke (Karoke for people who cannot sing) to several mobile pitches, my own LouderVoice pitch and a few others. Highlight for me was a pitch done by one of the guys in Punjabi – know your customer! The winner, as selected by Paul, Sanjay and Brian Caulfield, now gets a networking trip over to London including OpenCoffee and an Internet People dinner.

Once the scrummy food was done, Paul kicked off a round-table on general topics related to networking and access to investors in Ireland as compared to London. He made some good points about the lack of a networking culture over here and had a couple of sharp comments for EI which I felt that Ruairi answered well. Dennis Howlett countered with the simple fact that there is far more money in London and people flock to where the money is. I know that’s what we’ve basically decided to do since May.

My contribution to this conversation was just that we shouldn’t rely on EI to arrange anything for us but we do expect them to help communicate what we are doing to other potentially interested parties. I was particularly talking about Open Coffee but it also includes it@cork, Soho Solo, Curry 2.0, Paddy’s Valley and any other networking opportunities. EI should be in the role of facilitiator for all of these initiatives, using that uber-rolodex to make sure those who should know about events hear about them.

Ruairi made some very refreshing comments regarding how R&D grant aid is provided to Irish companies and how new models need to be examined given the iterative nature of Web2 businesses. I don’t know how far along they are in discussing this in EI, but it’s important we see changes soon.

I had to leave early which was a pity since we really needed to extend the round table to discuss YCombinator, SeedCamp and similar ideas. Ireland is crying out for something like this and I’ll be blogging shortly about one possible way of bootstrapping it.

A huge thanks to Paul for arranging the night, I hope we see more like it soon. Actually, apart from the it@cork summer bash, we haven’t even had a blogger dinner in Cork in quite a while. Anyone up for something in the next few weeks?

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.

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

Vote early and often.

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.

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.

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 off at the start of November, taking advantage of the new air routes from Aer Lingus.

Tour organiser James Corbett stated ‘The general idea is that it is hard to attract inward investment and start collaborations when our startups are over here in Ireland while the largest group of investors and tech companies are concentrated in Silicon Valley. As a result it is hard to convince Valley investors and potential partners why they
should come to Ireland when they have such rich pickings over there. With this current situation it was decided we should visit them, or as I like to put it “if you can’t bring the Valley to Paddy, bring Paddy to the Valley” ‘

Conor O’Neill of LouderVoice is a strong believer in the ability of European start-ups to compete at a global level. “It is crucial for us to build our networks and our profile in the places that matter. Silicon Valley remains one of the places that matters most. An important job for all Irish entrepreneurs is to get out there, meet all those who we have admired for so long and learn from them”. He added “We must continue to build a start-up culture in this country and PaddysValley is one of the ways we can do that.”

It is hoped that the group will meet some of the big names of Silicon Valley as well as host an Irish night where Irish businesses will demo what they are doing to the Silicon Valley executives, venture capitalists and Irish ex-pats. So far 17 Irish companies have signed up for the tour but the organisers stress it is open to everyone and they’d welcome anyone who wants to come along.

More details are available on the Web 2.0 Ireland website at: www.web2ireland.org

Irish Web companies have been getting a lot of International attention of late with a detailed writeup about them on tech website ReadWriteWeb: showing what the Irish have to offer.

Contact Details: Conor O’Neill is available on +353-87-9790297