So it’s goodbye from BN and hello again from Web2Ireland where I’ll be doing most of my writing about Irish startups from now on (with the odd post on Argolon too).
Thanks for all your support over the past few months. All of the old BN Ireland posts can now also be found on Web2Ireland and please post comments to them there.
The annual XTech Conference is coming to Dublin from May 6th-9th 2008 and they are looking for proposals for presentations and tutorials.
The theme for this year’s event is one close to my heart, “The Web on the Move” and it will focus on
the emerging portability of data, applications and identity on the internet. We will explore the benefits, issues, practicalities and fun of a web built on open standards, open source and commodity technology.
I’m looking forward to this one.
They are halfway through their week in Silicon Valley and the Paddy’s Valley crew are receiving an incredible welcome. It’s not often that a bunch of start-ups get to meet and talk with the following in the space of three days:
And they are not finished yet. Salim Ismail has invited them into the Yahoo Brickhouse and any of the Paddy’s Valleyers can pitch to them tonight.
They may even have a soccer match against Facebook and Yahoo.
On Tuesday night, five of the start-ups selected by Enterprise Ireland for the EI/ITI VC Forum got to pitch to some local VCs and invited guests. You can see all of them in video action on the Paddy’s Valley Blog. The winner of the night was Nubiq with their mobile web offerings. Here is their CEO Hélène Haughney’s pitch:
I just know the PV guys and gals are going to pull a few more rabbits out of the hat before the week is over.
[UPDATE] And I wasn’t wrong. Who did they meet yesterday? Jerry Yang! This trip blows any trade mission ever held completely out of the water. I’m in awe.
The best news I saw this week is that CreativeCamp 2008 is to be held in Kilkenny Castle on March 8th. I love seeing the BarCamp idea pushed forward and I’m so excited by the venue! I grew up down the road from the castle and spent many happy hours trying to find the secret tunnels that must exist.
The idea behind calling it CreativeCamp is to extend the reach beyond the core BarCamp audience of early stage start ups and tech entrepreneurs. This worked out very well for PodCamp which was also held in Kilkenny and where I was amazed to find that I knew very few of the attendees. This is as it should be; BarCamp should be about learning new things and meeting new people, not hanging out with your clique.
I really think Kilkenny City (yes it is a city!) is a perfect venue. Ignoring the touristy aspects, it has been transformed from the dour midlands horror I left in 1986 to the star of the south-east with a big creative community and tons to see and do.
Now to think of something to talk on!
Finally someone in big business has stuck their head over the parapet and called the broadband situation in Ireland a joke. John McElligott, Managing Director of eBay in Ireland, wrote to several Irish politicians and described the broadband infrastructure as at developing world levels. He said that he embarrassed to tell his peers in other countries about Ireland’s connectivity problems.
Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Micheál Martin, an ex-teacher, immediately launched the standard smokescreen defense. Nearly up to European average, blah, blah. Issues, blah, blah. Fault of private industry, blah. blah. I’m sure “knowledge economy” was mentioned at some point too. As McElligott said “We claim the 4th highest per capita GDP on Earth. And we want to be average?”.
I’m very impressed to hear this coming from eBay. They are one of the few multi-nationals based here who also advertise their service here. Bad broadband has no effect on their internal fibre connections but it does reduce the number of people who can potentially use the eBay service effectively.
I live about 2.5km from the local exchange. 2 Mbs on DSL is the fastest I can get. 3Mbs doesn’t work reliably. So talk of 8/16/32 or even (hah!) 100Mbs annoys me ever so slightly. We have these wonderful mythical MANs around most of our big cities now but people down the road from me are at 56kbs.
Broadband in Ireland remains a joke and those who justify the current situation are either clueless or shills. I’d love to see the MDs or SVPs of Amazon Ireland, Google Ireland, Intel Ireland and Microsoft Ireland back John McElligot in calling bulls*** on the current situation. Maybe if they all threaten to move to Bejing, some strategic planning execution might occur?
The Paddy’s Valley tour of the Bay Area is finally here. Tomorrow morning, a mixture of great Irish start-ups and tech tourists will land in SFO for a week of networking, pitching, sparkling conversation and sparkling Calistoga 
The week’s agenda has filled up incredibly well over the past week and all the travellers owe a major debt of gratitude to organisers Damien Mulley and James Corbett and to those of their peers who contributed to the arrangements.
If you are in the Valley and would like to hook up with the guys and gals, drop a line to paddysvalley AT gmail DOT com. Everyone is welcome to attend the Monday and Thursday social events and they are wide open on Friday and Saturday to hook up and talk business and tech.
The hope is that this will become a regular trip where new and upcoming Irish start-ups get a chance to see how SV operates and meet their international peers.
Have a blast y’all and let the rest of us know what you are up to on Twitter and the #paddysvalley channel on Jaiku.
The Seedcorn winners for 2007 are Movidia as Best International Emerging Company and Openplain as Best Emerging Company.
Movidia won the €100k prize due to their mobile processor technology which is targeted at activities like mobile gaming. I worked many years ago in S3 with their CEO Sean Mitchell and I’m not surprised to see him do so well. After S3 he worked in Parthus and Silansys so Movidia is a logical progression for him. You can expect to see some unique IP from these guys. Of course the challenge (as in Parthus) is to secure licencees. Competition in this space continues to be intense and it is not necessarily the best IP which gets the deals.
Openplain which won the €50000 prize provides productivity tools so that employees and employers can track and manage their time and application use more efficiently. They can also use it to compare their work performance to that of peers, team, department and company averages. Businesses like call centers live and die by productivity and require tools like this to constantly monitor and refine. It’ll be interesting to see what unique benefits this tool brings as I have seen similar in the market for many years. On a side note, as a blogger, seeing a product called JournalLive really grates!
It’s good to see that Seedcorn has overcome their slight obsession with life sciences and is looking again at both hardware and software. A useful exercise each year would be for them to look back and see how all the previous winners are doing.
Swarmteams, the mobile social network, has just launched its Music service to bring bands and fans together. The upside for bands is obvious - grow the fanbase, motivate existing fans to buy more and help with organising live gigs. For fans its an opportunity to feel more part of a community around the bands you love.
I wrote very positively about Swarmteams in the past and I continue to think it has the potential to be a global success. Since then, based on my own experiences of building an SMS service, I have become concerned about the complexity of the system. Unless you are an avid user, you will need to bring a cheat sheet with you in order to remember the commands. I wonder if a simpler, less featureful approach for the average punter might be appropriate?
Bands will have to be very careful how they use the system so that they do not alienate fans in an attempt to drive up music or merchandise sales. But I know I’d be very happy to be part of a Kings of Leon swarm, if such a thing was ever created.
The company has announced that a number of UK bands will be able to use the system for free for a year through sponsorship from Nesta. They already have some bands from the North using it. I expect to see lots more in the coming months.
On a related topic, Swarmteams would be an ideal co-ordination tool for the Paddy’s Valley trip to Silicon Valley starting on Sunday. There are lots of sub-groups visiting different companies and it could help hugely with everyone knowing what is going on at any particular moment.
I’ll continue to make the same points about mobile over and over. Start-ups like Swarmteams and DownloadMusic show that there is lots of innovation still possible using something as simple as SMS. With the marketing muscle of O2 or Vodafone behind them, these services could grow very quickly indeed.
Pat Phelan, CEO of Cubic Telecom, has just anounced a partnership deal with Global Roaming which is known for its CelTrek brand. The idea is that it will allow both companies to offer extended geographic coverage and data roaming to their customer bases. In addition they can now do joint proposals to large enterprises and Pat says that announcements on these are imminent.
Anything that reduces costs will always be celebrated by long suffering customers of the global mobile monopolies.
Yesterday I spoke at the ICT Ireland conference on “Marketing in a Total Access World”. The keynote was legendary Marketeer Regis McKenna who had a gem of insight for everyone in the audience. Michael Platt from Microsoft also gave a great whirlwind tour of business and technology with an MSFT twist.
My talk was a very simple personal potted history called “d’internet, Being Social 1990-2007″. My basic proposal was that we’ve been social networking since the days of Usenet, but the tools and possibilities improve with each new generation. I also made the prediction that 2008 would be the year of Mobile. It’s probably been said by someone every year since 1997 but the progress in 2007 with Twitter, Jaiku, iPhone, N95, GPS, cheaper mobile data etc has me convinced we have finally got there.
I was asked if that was realistic given the seeming inability of the mobile operators to build new sticky value-added services. As long as they are in control, is it just a pipe-dream? I replied that they are improving and those I’ve talked to in the telcos know that things have to change. I also thought that Android could be a way for Google to get apps like Jaiku onto many phones and potentially bypass the operator veto.
Michael Platt agreed wholeheartedly and clearly Microsoft sees mobile as a critical part of their strategy. I then ran into a person from one of the mobile operators who confirmed both the positive and negative aspects - yes they know they have to change; no, they don’t know how to do that. I suggested that (for example with LBS) they take the Google approach of building APIs and releasing them into the wild to see what people do with them. He admitted that such an approach would be very difficult for them with their current “target driven” organisational structure.
Today I woke up to find that Google have added “My Location” to their Mobile Maps application. Using community generated location information which relates mobile tower IDs to GPS locations, you can now get some sense of where you are using your phone even if it does not have GPS. An simple elegant solution to a problem.
Perhaps that is the future for the mobile operators? They spend their time trying to figure out what the next big thing is and everyone else just finds ways around their roadblocks.
