Web 2 Ireland

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

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Irish Web2.0 News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.