Web 2 Ireland

Just to round off ‘Collison week’ comes notice that Patrick will visit OpenCoffee Club Limerick this Thursday April 3rd at 11am. Attendees will enjoy the opportunity to pick his brain and pat him on the back for their huge success.

The venue is the Absolute Hotel and all are welcome. Remember OpenCoffee is a free of charge event where the emphasis is on networking, so new-comers are always welcome. Need directions or have any questions? Just comment here.

The Collison brothers were on the Late Late Show tonite – telling the Irish nation the story behind Auctomatic . Auctomatic was recently sold for a reputed $5m – making the lads instant millionaires.

Thanks to Bernie for capturing the interview – some great dialogue, tips and insights into the Irish startup ecosystem

QIK | Streaming video right from your phone

The only words needed are the congratulations of everyone in the Web community in Ireland to Patrick and John Collison. Result!

John Breslin over at DERI in Galway has announced that they are working with Touristr to develop the next big leap forward in trip planning using Semantic Web technologies.

TripPlanr, an integrated trip-planning advisor, is the result: a joint project between Tourist Republic and DERI that will tackle the information overload and planning problems by filtering and making recommendations based on the preferences of the traveller and their social network. The TripPlanr application builds on the existing TouristR platform and DERI's specialised expertise in recommender systems, information mining, the Semantic Web and Web 2.0.

Today, online travel booking is used mainly for trips with few parts, like airline tickets. Unlike existing trip planning applications, it is envisioned that the new TripPlanr application will allow users to book more complex and personalised trips with a number of parts. By collecting relevant data and suggesting it to the right user at the right time, TripPlanr increases the probability for that user to book or purchase the product or service in question.

The project is being funded by Enterprise Ireland.

IBM to establish Europe's first Cloud Computing Centre in Dublin and create 21 new jobs

“The need for cloud computing is fuelled by the dramatic growth in business collaboration, connected devices, real-time data streams, and Web 2.0 applications such as streaming media and entertainment, social networking and mobile commerce.

Using Web 2.0 technology, IBM Idea Factory, one of the Dublin centre’s first offerings to clients allows communities of business professionals to be assembled into social networks to facilitate the development of new business ideas. IBM Idea Factory for Cloud Computing captures business processes – from their beginnings as ideas to commercialization – speeding up brainstorming among employees, partners, software developers and other third party participants.”

Ye know when you find an app that just makes 100% sense? Not the next Flickr or Facebook, just incredibly bloody useful? YellIfItChanges is one of those apps.

It lets you know if:

• a website is updated
• a website changes Google Page Rank
• a website receives more incoming links
• a website changes position on Google search engine results page (SERP)

and it can let you know via

• email
• RSS Feed
• iCal Calendar

Sure, lots of sites have RSS but there are still a huge number that don’t and site-RSS doesn’t provide all those other features above. I’m using it to watch when certain sites come out of closed beta, but there are tons of different ways to use it. Check it out.

One of my favourite mobile social networks, Belfast-based Swarmteams, is based on the the ideas around bioteams promoted by its founder Ken Thompson.

I’m delighted to see that he has published a book which presents a way to build agile, high performing teams based on the communication principles that underpin nature’s most successful groups. In the book Ken explains how “bioteaming” moves from command-and-control leadership to connect-and-collaborate, where every member of an organizational team is a leader.

That’s definitely one for my next Amazon purchase.

I’m very pleased to see that it@cork have arranged for Amazon Web Services Evangelist Mike Culver to talk in Cork on April 1st. There appears to be a distinct uptick in the use of EC2 and S3 here in Ireland and I’m interested to see what’s coming on the roadmap.

The title of his talk is “What's possible in a post Web 2.0 World?” and will cover Amazon’s cloud and utility computing initiatives with at least one demo. I wonder if Sxoop/Pixenate or other AWS users in the region like to get involved in the session?

The venue is the Kingsley Hotel in Cork from 4 6pm on Tuesday April 1st.

The fee is €30 per person for members. If you book a group of 4, you get a 5th place free. Please register on the it@cork site.

PutPlace are looking for a Mac Developer – check job post

Candidate Requirements:

PutPlace is looking for a developer to build a Mac version of its existing Windows client software. The ideal candidate will have demonstrable experience of building whole applications on Panther, Tiger and Leopard. Ideally with Objective-C using the Cocoa framework. Knowledge of Python, Django, SQLite and PostGres will get you bonus points.

We are not looking for ten years experience but we are looking for enthusiasm. The candidate must be smart and be able to get things done (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html).

Working Location:

PutPlace is based in Dublin, but we realise that the world's Mac programmers don't live in Ireland. So while we are happy to pay for you to relocate to Dublin, we are also happy for you to work from your current location. However that location must be within two timezones of Dublin.

Our working model is based on the scrum development model and everything is hosted, so working remotely is not as difficult as it might sound.

Package:

We pay market rates and above for the right people. We offer stock options and a health plan. We also give you the ability to build someting from scratch that will make real world users happy.

About PutPlace:

PutPlace is an online service that helps home users manage long term storage of their digital content. We are all accumulating digital stuff at a tremendous rate. Scientific American reckons we will have over a terabyte of data stored in our homes by 2010. That's ten times what is stored on an average PC today. What's more, we will create over a terabyte of data every year after that.

PutPlace provides you with an online backup service that backups up all your digital content, across all the devices in the home and recognises the fact that these devices are related to each other.

PutPlace then recreates the relationships between the content in your home, the stuff in your backup and anything you have shared or published on the web. If you ever want to find a file again, where it came from and where it went to is as important as what's inside it. Every digital copy came from somewhere originally and PutPlace finds that original and links all the copies back to it ,so that you can track every piece of content you own over its complete digital lifetime.

PutPlace is Digital Memory for your Digital Lifetime.

Irish Mobile advertising company – Xiam has beenacquired by Qualcomm – Qualcomm will pay approximately $32 million for Xiam.

Xiam is the leading provider of targeted advertising, content discovery and recommendations solutions for communications providers. Xiam's MPOS (My Personal Offers System) enables communications companies to dramatically improve usage and adoption of digital content and services by presenting highly relevant and targeted offers to customers across all digital channels.

Congratulations to Colm and the team.