Web 2 Ireland

Wise words from one of the team at Slide – Johnnie Manzari on how it takes time, patience, experimentation and innovation to get to the top of the pile.

An Irish entrepreneur, Sinead Mooney of Ranelgh, Dublin 6 is the proud owner of boo.com and is in the news.

Techcrunch picked up on the boo.com rebirth, as well as gigaom.

John Collins – top notch Irish tech journalist – covered this way back in February.

Boo.com was a very famous startup from the last 90′s….. read this piece from the Industry standard

Another good night was to be had at the Internet People event last night. I turned up with Sam Sethi from TechCrunch after a great meeting about how to mash the Semantic Web, GRDDL, Microformats and other such stuff together more on that soon I hope.

It was good to hook up with Robert Loch who runs the event and Alex from Milliondollarhomepage.com again Keep an eye on Alex's page to learn about his new project launch in a few weeks.

Other interesting people that I had a chat with include Iain and Cary from mydeo and Martine, Head of Genes Reunited a non-widget company actually making a healthy profit!

The next event in my diary is Tom Raftery's bloggers dinner in Cork on November 28th. He has some cool guests lined up;
Hugh MacLeod
Marc Canter
Salim Ismail
Jeff Nolan

I'm hoping to make it but I'm Chair of the BIMA Awards on the 29th, so it's a little tight!

2 years later and 10 – 12% market share – not bad eh!

The Firefox Ireland party was a blast, with great attendance from all walks of life; Google, Amazon, AOL, HP, IBM, iMobi, Colgate and more. Someone said that one of the radio stations turned up but I missed 'em Mozilla sent lots of goodies to give out and I decided to add an iPod to the mix to make it a little interesting prizes went down a treat

There seems to be quite a bit of interest in getting more networking events off the ground in Dublin with .mobi looking to sponsor something. I'm all ears if anyone has any ideas on what to do next.

BTW, a very good friend of mine is hosting the Firefox Party in London, so I'll be there if anyone on the list would like to hook up.

Ok, this isn't strictly Web 2.0 related, but I'm pretty confident that some of you will be interested pls accept my apology if you're not.

If you're interested in helping to evangelise standards through an official channel I'd like to hear from you. Rotan Hanrahan from mobileaware has managed to get backing from Enterprise Ireland to stimulate awareness and adoption of standards in Ireland. He has asked me to help test the water so please get in touch if you want to be involved.

Usability Professional Association coming to Ireland
I'm also setting up the Usability Professional Association I'm looking for more companies to help get this off the ground. Do you fancy becoming a 'founding member'? Please get in touch.

Sequoia golden rules

Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed: What Sequoia Capital Looks for in Startups

2 big events @ web2.0 in Europe coming up.

Le Web 3 – Paris – December 11/12 2006 – over 500 people already signed-up, with a few Irish folks sprinkled in this list.

Future of Web Apps – London – February 20-22, 2007.

Both events are selling out fast, so sign-up now.

if you’re attending either event, do comment below, so we can arrange an “Irish meetup”

I attended another one of Robert Loch's great networking events last week (and ended up in a club with Rob + 1 afterwards… ouch!). Guest speaker was Simon Murdoch, first head of Amazon UK. You can read more about the evening on TechCrunch.

Ok, I'm a little late off the block with this post, but better late than never. As usual the event attracted a lot of interesting folk and I hooked up with some innovative individuals – amongst them was Alex Tew, creator of milliondollarhomepage.com who’s got a new iron in the fire. I look forward to hearing more about that soon.

I did come across a brilliant new idea, hence the reason for my post automatic brand creation for all those widget companies (a phrase I’ve just coined to describe Web 2.0 related companies) that require a professional, yet cheap brand identity. Justin Champney, Head of Brand Innovation at McCann WorldGroup is responsible for coming up with the idea. Justin told me, it's perfect timing given all the new start-ups that need a brand identity quickly and cheaply. Personally, I think this is a fantastic idea.

Apparently, the tool won't allow the same brand to be created more than once. The tool, being built between San Francisco and India, will ask plenty of intelligent questions to get a feel for your company. It will then build the brand identity online with all the required iconography.

I introduced Justin to an investor I knew at the event so fingers crossed!

I blogged this already over at LouderVoice and I highly recommend you check out what Mike Butcher has to say about it. In a nutshell, each Monday for a month, starting on Monday 20th November, they will showcase, and publish contact details for, a web or mobile startup which has yet to secure formal funding on TechCrunch UK and Ireland. I hope there are lots of stealth-mode Irish start-ups out there who take advantage of this.

Technorati Tags: TechCrunch, TechCrunch+UK+Ireland

Apologies for the shameless self-promotion but I’ve kicked off the blog for our new venture over at blog.loudervoice.com. We are not really out in the open yet but I’ll be talking about all of the stuff we are dealing with as we try to get the business off the ground and get the prototype into the hands of some friendly testers so they can help us figure out how to finish it and launch it.

If you are interested in giving us some tough love on the prototype starting around the first week of December, drop me a line at conor at loudervoice dot com.

Technorati Tags: LouderVoice, Argolon