Web 2 Ireland

Dublin gets a mention in a recent CNET articleTech without borders: The world’s tech hot spots

Dublin. For years, Ireland served as a manufacturing and software center for multinationals. The government is now trying to flush out start-ups. A secret weapon: 40 percent of the population is under 25, and a lot of people have work experience from places such as Hewlett-Packard, says David Smith, senior vice president of Enterprise Ireland, a development agency for Irish industry. Some native successes include Haptica (medical devices), Airtricity (wind farms), and Anam (fund transfers via phones).

Eircom, the biggest ISP in Ireland are adopting web2.0 technologies into their online offerings.

Eircom – who were a recent sponsor of the Web2Ireland DemoBar – are engaging with a lot of Web2Ireland companies. A good example is the new online music store where they are using the MySay service – “tell your favourite Led Zep story!!”.

Mark Taylor and his team are doing a great job of engaging with the local web2.0 community and vendors.

Conor has more details on the Eircom Music Store Launch

Eircom has launched a new online music store which impresses with its mix of local/global and combination of unique and aggregated content.

As the incumbent telco and by far the biggest ISP, the Eircom.net site has always been well trafficked but has never impressed. However the latest owners are showing an entirely different and very refreshing attitude which is reflected perfectly in this totally revamped music site.

They could easily have taken some off-the-shelf white-label globo-solution to building an Irish online music store. Instead they have synthesised a unique Irish offering which I expect to do extremely well. The core features are all there with song and album downloads, streaming, charts, reviews, news, events, RSS feeds and videos but the execution is particularly good.

Their willingness to work with local operations like Entertainment.ie and start-ups like DownloadMusic.ie rather than trying to out-muscle them should be applauded and I've love to see it replicated across all the Eircom properties. Leopards really can change their spots!

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Comment posted by pete
at 11/3/2007 11:01:14 AM

Orange..boringand full of ads does it get that much traffic anyhow?

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 11/2/2007 3:24:36 AM

Should work just fine on my Nokia then

Comment posted by Storagezilla
at 11/1/2007 8:52:31 PM

Ugh! They're a Plays For Sure store which means you're out of luck if you're using an iPod or a Zune.

SanDisk Sansa it is then.. -puke-