Web 2 Ireland

Venturebeat has the details on the launch of Zignals – a Dublin based company – supported by Microsoft IP ventures.

Finfacts have more details on Zignals
“Microsoft has taken a 15% stake in the software company, which has so far raised €2.5m in private equity finance from investors including Manresa Partners, Enterprise Ireland and a number of private investors.”
“Enterprise Ireland made the original introduction of Brazel to IP Ventures, which resulted in the establishment of Zignals.”

I’ve been thrilled to see all the coverage of Skydeck recently. Their CEO is Jason Devitt who did Elec Eng in UCD just after me and who I could tell would do well even back then. I think at one point he was doing a Masters in Engineering and a Law Degree at the same time!

He showed amazing vision in building Vindigo in the late 90′s and I made use of their Palm Pilot City Guides many times. It’s only now that the technology has caught up with some of the things they were trying to do back then.

Read Write Web has a great piece on him and what he is now trying to build with Skydeck. They are creating something very interesting indeed off the back of your mobile-phone bill and address book.Think intelligent mobile social network.

Just to get some sense of the guy, you have to watch this YouTube video, seriously!

Mike Dunn – Vice President, Hearst Interactive Media [former CTO of Time Warner and Dell] – has a great series of posts on due dilligence.

Check out the summary post … some great pointers on what’s required for companies who have to go through this process.

Had the pleasure of meeting Mike a few years ago – hopefully we can get him over to Ireland sometime soon.

Some bits and bobs from around the Web2Ireland scene…

Joe survives at UTR – and gets great coveage for PutPlace in webware

Exceptional launches – Error tracking and managing for Rails folks and their apps

edenbee gets coverage on Mashable – “Edenbee or Not to Be? Climate Change Social Network Steps In To Help”

Firefox Party – Dublin – June 19th. All over the world, Mozilla will be celebrating the launch of Firefox 3 in late June. Mozilla is sending over lots of prizes/swag for us to give away on the night. The Irish need to live up to the great name we have for partying. Contact Paul Walsh for sponsorship opportunity – paul AT segala.com SPONSORS BY: BT, putplace (http://putplace.com) and Blacknight

Curry 2.0 dinner coming up in Dublin – more details to follow.

Wexford based ubcam launches – looks cool…

Polldaddy at 116 million + votes and counting – Lenny is building quite the database of value

Investment scene/activity @ web – no mention of Ireland…

Sean McGrath – XML and python expert – looking for some folks in Web2.0 space to work together..

Pixenate – plugins for wordpress and MT – Walter is building a great business in the photo editing space.

Downloadmusic – selling lots of songs via SMS – clever service with some great International plans

Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf is a venture capitalist with YL Ventures, “a mid-market venture capital fund that invests in European Internet, telecommunications and media software companies, accelerates their development via active business development, and arranges their medium-size (not home run) acquisitions within 6-24 months, mainly to US-based corporations.”

TechCrunch UK & Ireland went into more detail on the YL strategy and Tom Raftery reported that he met with Yoav in Berlin last year.

Yoav has been Founder and CEO of multiple start-ups for which he arranged successful medium-size exits. And now he wants to make contact with Irish startups and get better visibility for his fund among local companies that may be suitable for their investment criteria. This is part of a wider initiative at YL Ventures to expand the geographical footprint of their deal flow.

As Yoav can’t travel to Ireland at the moment I’m organizing a meet & greet with him over video conference. So hands up (via comment) who wants to be included – it’s first come first served.