Web 2 Ireland

Call to action is working.

We have…

Dublin – morrison hotel – 9am

Limerick – the clarion

Others in the pipeline

- Sligo
- Galway
- Cork
- Belfast

Saul has some more details on the London opencoffee

John Breslin points to a “webcamp on Social networks” in Galway

WebCamp on Social Networks (Galway, 7th March 2007) at Cloudlands

Matt and Anil from Last.fm wooed the FOWA audience with their presentation last week.

One of the highlights was the way they use IRC to communicate accross the team.

Thankfully the team have released the source code to the community. See Matt’s posthere

Thanks guys !!

Chris Horn [of IONA fame] has started blogging – and has kicked off with some great blog posts.

His latest is Global Entrepreneurs from Ireland – with the question

“Why would any entrepreneur chose Ireland as the headquarters for her global start-up ?”

Chris is participating with the EI/ISA initiative on “leadership for growth” programme – see previous post

Over dinner, Chris and the group discussed a trend where the “new immigrants” are starting businesses in Ireland… and highlighted Ammado as an example.

“Ultimately, the striking observation is that the most successful world class entrepreneurs based in Ireland, have done so despite the challenges: the physical infrastructure, even the physical location of Ireland, the cost challenges, and the frequently dysfunctional civil service. The Irish have historically been the under-dogs, and rise to the challenge. Ireland has now become culturally deeply entrepreneurial, with a deep can do attitude swelling in its national psyche.”

One sobering point from Chris

“clearly Ireland needs to grow its own indigenous companies and entrepreneurs to sustain economic growth as multinationals in due course move elsewhere.”

Conor captures in a great blog post – on a bunch of recent activity that is creating the environment for Irish and European entrepreneurs to build global businesses….

MySay, a new service from rococo has been selected to present at the ETel Conference 2007 launchpad

The ETel Launch Pad is co-organized by Om Malik and co-produced by GigaOm.

Check out the poem from MySay – to introduce themselves….

Please report any problems as comments here. Authors, I have turned on the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin so you can easily add tags to posts using the entry field below the main post field. I have also removed the SB plug-in as it was never used here and I’ve seen reports of breakage with this version of WP.

We’ve just had a very important few weeks in the start-up world in Europe. A set of blog-posts and activities have jump-started what I hope is a new phase of entrepreneurs and investors building great European companies together.

A lot of us have been writing for quite a while about the entrepreneur-investor disconnect in our respective countries. I think some of us have been guilty of complaining without doing much about it. There was perhaps a sense that there was still little investor interest in funding early stage tech start-ups. Exactly one week ago Saul Klein wrote a post which is easily the most important call-to-arms in the world of early-stage start-ups in the past few years. The torrent of comments and blog posts tells you how passionate we all are about what we are doing and our desire for success.

On Tuesday, Ryan held the Future of Web Apps summit, one of the best conferences I have attended. Whilst the technical content of the two days was deeply interesting, the thing that I noted more was the very strong sense of community. This is obviously a key message of Tara and Chris from Citizen Agency and they had great success in spreading it over the few days of BarCamp London 2, FoWA and the Geek Dinner.

I just blogged yesterday about Coworking which Chris has been promoting and it is a critical part of this community jigsaw. Coworking is

a cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents. Or, it's like this: start with a shared office and add cafe culture. Which is the opposite of most modern cafes.

I’m already getting interest here in Ireland from people who want to get involved. I should have some updates on that regarding feedback in Cork early next week.

Then Saul added more to the mix with his announcement of OpenCoffee Club,

An attempt to establish recognized, open and regular meeting places where entrepreneurs can meet with investors (and anyone else who fancies coming along) in a totally informal setting.

Within hours we had announcements of Clubs in Dublin and Limerick. However I think a critical aspect of Saul’s announcement is that it comes from an investor. Now that he has set the benchmark (pun intended), will we see similar announcements in Ireland from Trinity, Benchmark, ACT, Kernel or Mianach?

In from left-field we also have FON announcing their Starbucks community enabler. I suggested FON provide Wifi to conferences, events and BarCamps as a marketing tool but how about they offer special deals to those who share their offices? Once again we can find ways of receiving mutual benefit.

Let’s not lose the momentum now, let’s keep building those communities, working together so we can all be successful and also building those bridges between “need investment” and “have investment”.

Barcamp, Chris Messina, coworking, Geek Dinner, Tara Hunt, Saul Klein, FON, OpenCoffee Club

Mark Fletcher has just launched Startupping – A Community for Entrepreneurs

Mark was the founder of bloglines and OneList – both sold to Ask and Yahoo – smart guy who’s helping entrepreneurs.

1. Brillant event – cheers to Ryan, Gillian and team – best value event in Europe.
2. Great Irish presence – infacta, polldaddy, nooked, putplace, segala, loudervoice, toddle, touristr and a few stealths
3. Pancake (Pint) Tuesday
4. Lenny’s write-ups for readwriteweb
5. workshops – brain dump from some great people
6. Mike Arrington to BBC – “third series of the office” – bbc should be dissolved… Conor has the details.
7. open id – thanks to Simon Willison for sharing his knowledge
8. wifi – or the lack of it. Ryan apologized – next year – FON – please……
9. “founders red-pill”- Index‘s Ben Holmes on investment – Fred has a good writeup
10. Buzz – lots of people, lots of accents, lots of networking…..

Saul just kicked off a great idea – the “Open Coffee club” – every Thursday morning from 9-12 – open to anyone.

See here OpenCoffee Club

What is it?
An attempt to establish recognized, open and regular meeting places where entrepreneurs can meet with investors (and anyone else who fancies coming along) in a totally informal setting.

Something that can be replicated in anywhere else at little or no cost — though we do want to build a list of all the places where entrepreneurs can meet and who will be around for them to talk with.

Call to action: Irish OpenCoffee Clubs

Dublin, Cork, Sligo, Galway, Limerick, Waterford, Belfast, Derry, etc.

Lets pick a location in each of these areas – coffee shop – an open space – one with wifi – etc.