photo credit: kyz

We were looking into doing similar in Cork but have realised that we are flat-out with travel and meetings in the run up to Christmas. So that leaves two options - someone else grab the baton and arrange it instead of us or have a post-Christmas party in the horrible dead time around mid January. 

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

Over the past few months we have been trialling our business services with several clients. Some of those are already live, others will go live over the next quarter. We now have a very nice brochure site to go with these services and a very powerful content moderation back-end for our clients.

The LouderVoice for Business site gives the high level overview of our services which are currently in three areas:

• White-label review service based on a secure XML API
• SMS reviews and customer feedback
• Custom review widgets

We have a strong vision for this event and we need your help to make it happen on the day. Please read the first set of posts and give us your feedback. If you think you’ll be attending, please register. As always with BarCamps, it is completely free with the costs being taken care of by our kind sponsors.

If you wish to sponsor or help, please read the “what we need” post.

We have two mottos for BarCampCork II “talking with, not talking at” and “less talking, more doing”.

If you don’t know what a BarCamp/Unconference is or have never attended one, here is a simple description from the main BarCamp site:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.

Every attendee of BarCamp is expected to contribute in some way. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to give a talk. But at the very least, you should take part in lots of the discussions that occur and share the knowledge you have in your area of expertise.

We’d love to see you down in Cork and we encourage anyone based outside of Ireland who reads this blog to consider flying in for the day.

Sign-up now.

Head on down to Kilkenny this coming Saturday if you want to see what it’s all about. Tons of information and pre-conference activity on the PodCamp Ireland site.

The winners last year were:

• Emerging Company Award - Cubic Telecom
• High Potential Award Abtran
• R&D Project Award - Treemetrics
• Academic Award - Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4Cs)
• IT Department Winner - Thomas Crosbie Holdings

Nominations close on September 23rd. Vote here.

My most recent business hero is Pat Phelan. He overcame huge personal crisis to firstly build a great business locally and then build MaxRoam. What he has achieved with MaxRoam in those timescales is close to miraculous. Every chat with Pat consists of me going “no way?!” as he describes another major milestone.

Anyone doing a startup is going to have tons of criticism thrown at them. When I get reamed about LouderVoice by my peers, I value every word they say. The criticism is nearly always well-intentioned and I never take it personally.

However, when people who have never built anything in their lives, come along and throw insults around, making blanket criticisms of groups of companies or just make personal attacks, then that’s a different matter. These desperate attention-seekers have never done anything except comment on other people’s efforts. 

Robert Scoble, who used to be well-known as a Microsoft blogger, slagged off a ton of companies in his most recent link-baiting post. With his usual insight and depth, he said they sucked. I unsubbed from his blog over a year ago. Maybe if the rest of you do the same, he’ll learn some manners and show some respect.

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?

When I got back I checked my data charges on vodafone.ie to discover that they were zero for my trip! It seems as if the concept of “roaming” doesn’t occur on Vodafone Live as long as you are on the Vodafone network. I don’t know if this is by accident or not but I was thrilled. Of course the downside is that Live only gives you HTTP(S) and POP, you don’t get IM, IMAP, SSH or any other protocol/port.

I’m just back from a two week holiday in France and for the most part I tried to use Live on the SFR network which Vodafone owns. I had no idea what the charges would be so I was very conservative in my use. For some of the LouderVoice site work, I had to use the Vodafone ISP connection to get SSH access but the usage was minimal so I wasn’t too worried.

Yesterday I logged on to vodafone.ie and bless their little hearts, the trick works in France too! Zero data charges for all my GMail, RSS reading and Nokia Maps over Vodafone Live with a few cent here and there for the ISP connections.

The only other downside of this is that you cannot use the phone as a modem for your laptop with a Live connection since it is not a real access point, it’s a legacy WAP thingy. But if, like me, you can get most things done on your N95-8GB along with the brilliant iGo Stowaway keyboard, then you’ll save a packet on your travels in Europe.

Now if Nokia needs a tester/reviewer for the soon-I-hope-to-be-launched touch screen phone, I’m ready and waiting.

It will be quite informal, the aim is to get practical advice from each other on answering some of the questions on the application form so that you promote your business or idea as best as possible.

He’ll have printouts of the questions with him on the day. For anyone who’d like to work on it beforehand, here’s a link to the the Seedcamp application PDF.

Some further information about the Oriel house location over on his blog.

Our big area of mutual frustration was the lack of take-up on the Tech-Check scheme. I’ve written about it before on my personal blog and in summary, if you are a local biz in Ireland with even one laptop and you’ve never even talked to an Enterprise Board, then you are missing out hugely.

For €150 you’ll get up to 6 hours of consultancy on your IT setup. Some people seem to think they are only getting €150 worth of consultancy but it’s obviously heavily subsidised. It covers everything from making sure you have anti-virus software and proper backup all the way up to EPOS systems and web-site development.

Despite tons of advertising, it just isn’t getting noticed and I think the people who need it most are the ones who realise it least. Perhaps a national intense campaign that focuses on the low-end basic problems that I see everywhere rather than “IT efficiency” etc would be more effective?

Tech-Checks are available to a much wider range of businesses than CEBs would normally cover. This is important to understand for the other support measures.

Training is a huge part of the budget for all the CEBs and Argolon has been the beneficiary of the courses offered in West Cork. The “starting a business” and basic accounting ones should be mandated by all bank managers handing out new business loans. They really are that important and the cost is minimal.

On the grant side of things, the range of companies that can avail is smaller. The main caveat seems to be that you won’t get grant support if you are a local-only business like a shop. But, for example, if you are a craft shop and you sell your products online, then you do qualify.

There were three grant aids that I discussed with Christine, one of which I was completely unaware of.

The first is a simple feasibility study grant to a value up to €5100. The grant is paid 6 months after you run your study. The range of areas that this covers is very wide and anyone kicking off a new biz would be well advised to apply.

The next one is the Small Exporters Scheme. This is something that I’d be very interested in making use of for the Web2.0 Expo in New York. Its main function is to help you attend trade shows abroad. They provide matching funding up to €2000. This is really a superb support and I believe that not many people are making use of it. It does have one catch, you must have already received grant aid from WCEB to qualify. I assume the route for many people is Feasibility Study->Small Exporters Scheme.

The final one we discussed was the one I was unaware of and the one that really excited me. WCEB will provide up to €1500 matching funding to help you get an ecommerce web-site built. I can think of so many businesses in West Cork that could benefit from this. Obviously it cannot be a brochure site or a local-biz-only site, the intention is to get you trading nationally and internationally via your web-site. One thing to note is that you must be able to show the bona fides of the company/individual you are hiring to do the work. This doesn’t mean tax clearance certs etc, just that it’s a genuine operation. It does not even have to be an Irish vendor; if you are comfortable offshoring, then that is allowed too. Like most other grants, this is paid after the work is done.

Let’s be honest, the standard of small business web-sites in Ireland is terrible. There are so many cowboys out there charging a small fortune for badly-implemented off-the-shelf templates. If you have a business with a small number of products for sale, it should not cost you €3000 for a great looking ecommerce site using an opensource or minimal-cost shopping cart.

One side-note: You should also keep an eye on Irish conferences/events that you would like to attend. Many of them (including the IIA) give discounts to CEB clients.

I’ve said it many times recently that I see a strong match between the CEBs and web businesses in Ireland. Many online businesses who either provide services via web applications or sell online will be very successful but may never grow beyond a few employees and are therefore under the radar for Enterprise Ireland. The level of paperwork with CEBs is also much lower than with EI.

I genuinely think that if you are kicking off a web biz, your first port of call should be your local Enterprise Board.

Contact:

• West Cork Enterprise Board
• South Cork Enterprise Board
• Cork City Enterprise Board
• North Cork Enterprise Board