Web 2 Ireland

Picked this up on The Alarm Clork Euro edition – alarm:clock euro: European Web 2.0 Contest

James Corbett has set up a wiki called Paddy’s Valley so we can all discuss “Seven Days in the Valley” and indicate things like preferred dates, desired aims etc. Head on over and start contributing.

Some discussion on James’s post

And more on Damien’s too.

I have many fond memories of the EI-organised trip I did to California back in 1999. We spent the week receiving lectures from some great people like Bob Sutton in Stanford and we also did a bunch of field trips to companies like Cisco, HP, Excite, Ideo etc.

At this stage there are a lot of us in Ireland who know the Valley and the Bay Area quite well and have a good bunch of contacts there. However because of the distance and cost, unless there is a direct and immediate business reason to go, most of us visit rarely.

Then I read Jeremy Fain’s Blog and I realised we are being far too short-term in our thinking. Jeremy writes:

That's why I decided a couple weeks ago to organize a study trip to Silicon Valley. It will be a week-long study trip focusing on the business of innovation & technology (entrepreneurship, venture capital, software, computer networks & hardware, consumer electronics & Internet, telecommunications) and actually take place between Sunday, 25th November 2007 and Sunday, 2nd December 2007. No kidding, it's serious business so save the dates!

In no time at all he had a bunch of people interested in joining him. Similar things have been done before with great success like the Israel Web Tour.

Perhaps we are getting too used to having the Valley come to us in Europe and it is time to return the compliment and meet all those people we admire on their turf? I’m open to helping to arrange something like this later this year. Who would like to discuss this further?

Saul has launched opencoffeeclub.org - and is using the ning platform.

check here for details.

Some Irish connections
- Eoghan McCabe did logo
- Diego Doval [ex-Trinity/CleverCactus] is the VP Engineering/Chief Architect at Ning !

Saul also mentions Irish Innovation in a recent blog post – very much appreciated.