Web 2 Ireland

Richard MacManus is doing a global review of web2.0 companies

Lets get the Irish list organized… please comment or blog about companies so we can build a list for Richard, as well as creating our own directory here on web2ireland.org

A quick checkpoint on the Irish Web related exits this year

- Needahotel – $60m
- Stockbyte – $135m
- Myhome.ie – $64m

$259million…. and counting….

Update:Rafat at PaidContent covers the recent Myhome.ie acquistion, and this blog post

Kudos to Walter at PXN8 with this compliment from Mike Arrington at Techcrunch

“My favorite is PXN8, which also offers Flickr integration.”

Paul Browne gives some excellent advice regarding the various options for mobile development and what considerations to make in terms of supporting Web 2.0 (AJAX) on mobile devices -

… the Opera Browser supports Ajax on phones , but not all phones use Opera. The best way of approaching this is to build your application using one of the Ajax frameworks. The framework handles the differences between Ajax / non-Ajax enabled browsers and renders the web page accordingly. Non-Ajax users don't get as slick an application , but they do get an application that they can use. I've a good summary of Ajax Frameworks here not forgetting the Google Web Toolkit. The other advantage is that as Google and others upgrade their frameworks , you get the benefit of the new features. This Article is a fairly good introduction to the area of Ajax on mobile phones.

Click through to Paul’s post to follow the links to those articles.

I’m reposting this from the Argolon blog too. Unfortunately, I have only received a few tips on potential outsourcers who might be able to work with us on building our Web 2.0 App. Once again, any pointers would be hugely appreciated.

We intend to outsource the bulk of the development of our application. This will be broken down into several areas including:

1. Design
2. XHTML/CSS
3. Application development
4. Hosting
5. Operations

I have received plenty of recommendations for Design and some for XHTML/CSS but other than Ryan Carson recommending Nick in Plum Digital Media, it is proving difficult to get recommendations for top-class web application development houses. I am following up on some leads but thought it would be useful to cast the net wider.

We are completely open on the location but obviously we will be keeping a close eye on the cost. One-man shops are not sufficient for our needs, this is a meaty application requiring several developers and (as per the recent job posting) strong skills in architecture and scalability.

If you have any personal recommendations for dev shops in Ireland, UK, Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia or India, we would deeply appreciate any contact names you can give us. If you don't want to post a public comment, feel free to mail me at conor [at] argolon dot com. Alternatively, if you know of good sites/forums where this type of information is exchanged, we'd appreciate that too. Of course, feel free to make recommendations on any of the other areas and names of ones to avoid are equally valuable.

These are the questions I have been asking those development companies I have contacted already:

* General approach to development
* General approach to customer engagement
* Experience in developing Web 2.0 apps
* Large scale application development using Python, Ruby or PHP
* Distributed and high-performance application architectures using PostgreSQL, MySQL or Oracle
* Web Frameworks such as Django, Turbogears, Pylons, Rails, Zend, Symfony or CodeIgniter
* Experience in developing scalable apps (both from a software and hardware perspective)
* Data modelling and ORM
* ATOM/RSS
* XHTML/CSS/Semantic Markup
* AJAX UIs
* Other development tools that you use
* Biggest project you have taken on
* Do you have an agile methodology like Scrum or XP
* Traffic statistics on the busiest sites you have created
* Experience in working with other third parties
* Customer references in this area I could contact
* Interaction tools like Basecamp, Trac etc
* Can you work with a “release early, release often” approach?
* Approach to maintenance?

I recently wrote about Carson Systems’ one day whirlwind tour of how to build a WebApp over at the Argolon blog.

If you are not familiar with Ryan Carson, DropSend, Bare Naked App or Vitamin and you are trying to build something in this space then you are doing yourself a disservice. Ryan and Gill have tons of useful tips, advice and information on their various sites and you should subscribe to their various RSS feeds.

Well known VC, Rick Segal and Naked Conversations author, Shel Israel are on a world tour.

Ireland is on the travel plans, and they will be in Dublin and Cork. Our friends in Cork, Tom and Walter have blog posts on the trip to the Republic of Cork.

For the Dublin part, the Web2Ireland EI evangelists Brian and Ben, are hosting a get-together of entrepreneurs, VCs, industry folks, etc. on Friday 8th September, starting at 1.30pm.

As part of the get-together, some 1:1 sessions can be arranged through organizer supreme Mary Boyle (email: Mary.Boyle AT enterprise-ireland.com).

We will follow up with a Geek/Blog dinner/drinks at 8pm in the Market Bar, Fade Street.

Damien points to the news that Irish Times buys myHome.ie for €50 Million

Another nice exit for an Irish web service

A must have for any wanabee web2.0 startup – Scrum – and its not with a rugby ball.

Read what Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon have been doing with Scrum – a software development process

SiliconBeat has a piece on how Venture capitalists are going nutty over Web 2.0 companies, pouring $870 million into these companies during the first three months of the year.

Compare that with the Irish VC investment scene [due to get €200m from the Govt] – which has ZERO web2.0 investments to date.

What problems do we face

- number of investable project
- lack of risk with Irish VCs
- Internet “bubble” notions

Its not as if we haven’t had success with internet exits