Archive for the ‘Irish Web2.0 News’ Category

Domain Suggester For Your Business

conor 15th of June 2011 by conor

We got an email from Mark Frawley of Irish start-up Parsity. They have created a very nifty site called nametoolkit.com. It takes the simple concept of checking domain name availability and adds intelligent suggestion features. As anyone who has used the GoDaddy suggester knows, this is an area that needs a lot of improvement.

I just used it to try and come up with a domain around “Facebook Killer”. I like their suggestions! I think I’ll be using this site a lot in the coming months.

Kernel Capital Mobilizes €500k for FeedHenry

conor 9th of June 2011 by conor

Kernel Capital has just announced that they have invested €500k in Waterford-based FeedHenry, a spin-out from the TSSG group in Waterford Institute of Technology.

FeedHenry enables you to build cross-platform mobile applications using just HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. Two of their really cool features are:

  • the fact that you don’t need N SDKs to build for N platforms because they do the build for you in the cloud
  • and they have a powerful server-side JavaScript component to reduce the load on the client and to enable you to access things like SQL DBs, enterprise web services etc

If you are building a web-app and you don’t have a strong story in at least Android and iPhone, stop now and figure it out before you proceed any further. In fact, maybe you should be building for mobile first?

Web developers who know their way around JS should have a look at FeedHenry. Your existing skill-set is all you need to build an app. They have a free Developer tier and you can build for up to 8 mobile platforms.

10 Game/Web start-ups get €50k each from Enterprise Ireland

conor 25th of March 2011 by conor

EI has announced the 10 winners of this round of the Internet & Games Competitive Start Fund. Each start-up gets €50k for 10% equity stake by EI. 120 companies applied.

The winners are:

  • Tribal City Interactive – Games including iPhone/Android. Yay Alan!
  • Decisions For Heroes –  Emergency response team management and analytics (and winner of the IQPrize). Yay Robin!
  • Redwind Software – Game engines for mobile trivia games
  • Cellplay Networks – Social gaming
  • Jlizard – Cloud-based service for managing log data
  • Plendi – Automating receipt processing
  • Scurri – Helps consumers to discover affordable shipping
  • Calom Technologies-  Video delivery platform based on open web standards
  • Franklyweb – Subscription based clothing product range (URL?)
  • UnitedWeSave – Consumer web service for group buying around household bills

 

Digital Mines lands a €750,000 Diamond

conor 25th of March 2011 by conor

Digital Mines, a new Irish Cloud Computing provider, has just announced a funding round of €750,000. This includes Delta Partners first investment from their Bank of Ireland start-up and Emerging Sectors equity fund. Enterprise Ireland and existing investors were also part of the round.

The company is run by Ed Byrne is who well known to everyone in the web space in Ireland. Ed was General Manager of Hosting 365, which was sold last year to SunGard AS.

The whole idea behind Digital Mines is to take the power and usefulness of cloud services such as Amazon AWS and make them accessible to business users. Currently most cloud offerings required far too much technical knowledge. Digital Mines takes all of that and turns it into a set of one-click operations.

The Delta investment is not just important for Digital Mines, it is also sends a strong message that the Seed Funds in Ireland are out there investing in new and exciting companies despite all the doom and gloom. You can expect to see many more announcements from Shay and the team in Delta in the coming months.

Just over two weeks to go to the next Dublin Startup Weekend

admin 7th of February 2011 by admin

The next Dublin Startup Weekend will take place on February 25-27, 2011 in the National Digital Research Centre in Dublin 8.

The event will bring together people with different skillsets to build prototype web/mobile applications which could form the basis of a commercial opportunity; more specifically, the event will bring together software developers, graphics design folks and business strategists. During the event, the participants divide into teams, each of which builds a basic prototype of their concept and develops ideas on how it could form the basis of a startup.

Startup Weekends take place all over the world and are generally considered to be a place to learn about the startup world, get to know folks who are interested in doing something in the space, bounce around some ideas and, importantly, try to turn some of them into reality. Some of the teams formed during startup weekends have gone on to much bigger and better things, e.g. Foodspotting and memolane.

The event has been held once before in Dublin – May 2010 – and was a fantastic success: of the 6 teams that were formed throughout the weekend, 4 of them subsequently went on to enter the NDRC Launchpad incubator to bring their ideas from some basic concept prototype developed over the course of the weekend to a working system with a potential commercial case. (More info here).

The response to the weekend so far has been great – ticket sales have been strong and we’re expecting the event to sell out. Tickets for non-technical folk – people who have neither developer nor graphics skills – have sold out already and the amount of technical folk in attendance is increasing steadily.

We’re reaching out to developers and/or graphics design folks who are interested in the startup scene – it promises to be a great weekend, with some great people, great ideas and great energy and who knows, it might be the place where some great Irish startups are born!

Tickets are on sale here. There is a modest cost for participation which mainly covers the catering during the event. Further information can be found here.

Orchestra PHP Cloud Platform Launches

conor 2nd of February 2011 by conor

The guys over at Echolibre have launched Orchestra. Its tagline is DEPLOY, MANAGE & SCALE PHP APPS, which sums it up nicely.

Orchestra is a PHP platform built on Amazon AWS and worries about all of those issues so you can focus on building your app.

Sounds good to me. Sign-up is here.

Shhmooze one of the 20 finalists at the Mobile Premier Awards

conor 2nd of February 2011 by conor

Belfast-based tech start-up Shhmooze, founded just in April 2010, has been selected as one of the 20 finalists at the Mobile Premier Awards for the Mobile World Congress.

Shhmooze is a free location-based app that lets you use your smartphone to check into a conference or business event and broadcast your presence to other attendees. It is currently available on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad and is coming soon to Android (hurry!) and Blackberry.

Dogpatch Labs coming to Ireland

admin 16th of December 2010 by admin

With the news that the Innovation Fund Ireland, the Government initiative managed by the National Pension Reserve Fund (NPRF) and Enterprise Ireland to attract leading venture capital fund managers to Ireland, have invested $50m in Polaris Ventures.

Polaris Ventures are probably best known as an investor in Automattic (who are behind WordPress, and also the company which acquired Polldaddy).

Polaris Ventures are also behind the Dogpatch Labs initiative. Its goal is connect entrepreneurs and help founders conceive and launch startups. Check out this video from Robert Scoble

Conor O’Neill of LouderVoice talks about the evolution of #leweb

admin 9th of December 2010 by admin

Conor O’Neill of LouderVoice talks about the evolution of #leweb

Some great perspective from Conor on how #leweb began, evolved and how it is today. Excellent insight into one of the most significant technology conferences in Europe.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngMPRX8TOWg

Interview with Karen Hallez of Enterprise Ireland Paris @ #leweb

admin 9th of December 2010 by admin

Interview with Karen Hallez of Enterprise Ireland Paris @ #leweb

A good background to the EI presence at Le Web from Karen.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCcPwC7osXk