Web 2 Ireland

Any Irish widget developers around ? [2007 is the year of the widget ]

Plenty of platforms for widgets….

Vista, Yahoo,
Google, Myspace/Springwidget
Mac

Please leave comments on any Irish developed widgets/Irish widget developers….

BarCamp is arriving in little ole Dublin village on Saturday 21st April 2007.

If you're not familiar with BarCamp networking events, this is a great opportunity to hang out and chat with cool, smart and interesting people (and me)

Take a look at the official BarCamp Dublin blog and wiki for more detail. Get your name down now.

OJAX, home-grown-all-Irish federated search service software, is now in Beta release and available for download. Version 0.7 has improved performance, stability and user feedback, as well as additional features such as RSS/Atom feed support. (Atom feeds of stored searches alert users when new content matching their interests is harvested.)

OJAX illustrates how federated search services can respond to new user expectations generated by Web 2.0:

* Rich, dynamic user experience. OJAX uses Ajax technology to provide immediate dynamic response to user input.
* Intuitive interface. The OJAX interface provides the simplicity and familiarity of Google but with the power of advanced search
* Integration, interoperability and reuse. OJAX uses loosely coupled Web Services and supports the OpenSearch RSS standard, thus facilitating integration with a range of virtual library environments, institutional repositories, course management systems and institutional portals.
* Open source standards-compliance. OJAX supports best-practice open source standards and software, including OpenSearch, OAI-PMH, StAX and Apache Lucene.

Features of OJAX:
* Auto-completion of search terms
* Triggering of auto-searches
* Dynamically scrollable search results – no more navigating between pages
* Auto-expansion of search result details
* Rapid sorting of results
* Integrated with the Firefox 2 / IE 7 search feature
* Supports OpenSearch Discovery
* Stored searches as Atom feeds
* Includes an OAI-PMH harvester
* Easy to install in your own institution

Further information, demo and download: http://ojax.sourceforge.net/

Two alternative packages are available:
1. OJAX GUI, Web Services & Harvester
2. OJAX GUI, Web Services, Harvester & example repository index

–
Dr Judith Wusteman
UCD School of Information and Library Studies
University College Dublin
Belfield Dublin 4
Ireland
Tel: +353 1 716 7612
Fax: +353 1 716 1161
URL: http://www.ucd.ie/wusteman/

Barcamp Ireland is gaining momentum

We’ve had #1 – Cork and #2 – Waterford

Now we have

#3 – Dublin – April or May
#4 - Galway – September ’07
#5 – Cork [see post from Tom]

I’ve also heard of #6 – Sligo.

The Irish tech community is alive and well….

I know quite a few folks are for the future of web apps event in London on Feb 20th.

All meeting up at Brogan’s in Fulham Broadway [right across from tube station] – @8pm.

We have over 15 people attending… should be a great night…. Lent starts on Wednesday

Last year we had a very succesful event.

For 2007 – the plan is to get everyone together again

To estimate the interest level.. please vote on our poll

Mobile blogging at its best.

Around Ireland is a mobile documentary project completed as part of the MSc in Multmedia Systems at Trinity College Dublin

See the full list of SXSW Web Awards Finalists

The new Finance Bill has been published and is available on the Dept of Finance site. It looks like the new BES limits apply from Jan 1st 2007. But new schemes cannot be approved until the Bill gets through the Dáil and is OKed by the EU.

In summary:

The Business Expansion Scheme is being renewed from 1 January 2007 for a seven year period to 31 December 2013 subject to EU Commission State-Aid approval. The BES company limit is being increased from its current level of €1 million to €2 million, subject to a maximum of €1.5 million to be raised in a twelve month period. The investor limit is being increased from its current level of €31,750 to €150,000.

The Seed Capital Scheme is also being renewed from 1 January 2007 for a seven year period to 31 December 2013. The new BES limit of €2 million will also apply to the SCS, subject to a maximum of €1.5 million to be raised in a twelve month period. The investor limit is being increased from its current level of €31,750 to €100,000.

The following additional measures which were not announced in the Budget are also relevant to web2ireland:

• replace the feasibility grant payment requirement with a requirement that the relevant County Enterprise Board provide a certificate validating the business proposal
• require only that development agencies in future approve an employment grant for internationally traded services as opposed to actually paying the grant in order to gain entry to the scheme (with the grant, of course, being paid at a later stage)
• allow an individual to reduce his/her shareholding under SCS below 15% after one year (rather than the current two years) to facilitate additional equity funding
• increase the overall aggregate limit on amounts subscribed for share and loan capital of the company from €317,500 to €500,000 for an individual holding over 30% of the share capital of a company to ensure that the individual will not be regarded as connected with the company.

We’ll be doing a BES scheme in Argolon Solutions for LouderVoice once the new limits kick in. We’ll publish details here shortly for anyone who is interested.

Mike and Jason are running a new conference – with a bit of a twist.

Free for companies to present…. selection process by commitee.

It was announced from Demo – which is probably the premier event for startup/product launches. The Guidewire group – who run Demo – also run this European event – InnovateEurope

For more details see The TechCrunch20 Conference

Hopefully we will see some more European events – like techcrunch20….. we can’t have the folks in valley having all the fun.