Web 2 Ireland

Nice write-up on Liam Casey on TechCrunch today. This Corkman has built an amazing supply chain manufacturing business in China over the past few years. It looks like he is the go-to guy if you need anything electronic built in serious volumes at low cost. He recently raised $21m in VC and it’ll be interesting to see how he makes use of that.

It has been over two years since the last one, but BarCamp is finally coming back to Cork. It’s soon, very soon, only four weeks away. The venue is the lovely Webworks building in the City Centre, just like the last time.

We have a strong vision for this event and we need your help to make it happen on the day. Please read the first set of posts and give us your feedback. If you think you’ll be attending, please register. As always with BarCamps, it is completely free with the costs being taken care of by our kind sponsors.

If you wish to sponsor or help, please read the “what we need” post.

We have two mottos for BarCampCork II “talking with, not talking at” and “less talking, more doing”.

If you don’t know what a BarCamp/Unconference is or have never attended one, here is a simple description from the main BarCamp site:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.

Every attendee of BarCamp is expected to contribute in some way. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to give a talk. But at the very least, you should take part in lots of the discussions that occur and share the knowledge you have in your area of expertise.

We’d love to see you down in Cork and we encourage anyone based outside of Ireland who reads Web2Ireland to consider flying in for the day.

Sign-up now.

Enterprise Ireland has finally done the move and consolidated all their Dublin offices into The Plaza at East Point Business Park. If you don’t know where that is, just head towards Howth.

This came as a shock to me last night when I went to check the closing time for Seedcorn applications. The deadline is not close-of-business, it is 1pm! So if you are doing any last minute edits, hurry up.

And good luck.

200 folk already registered for Moviestar.ie Irish Web Awards

Event is on on October 11th in Dublin – great opportunity for community to come together and it should be fantastic.

Everyone is welcome too. You don't need to be nominated, you don't need a cool web2.0 service or a fancy blog.

Signup Now for a great night – only 30 euros

Dial2Do which lets you do common tasks by just calling a number and speaking – for EMAIL, TEXT messages, REMINDERS, updates to TWITTER and even LISTEN to your favourite internet content – has updated its services.

Some new features – and an improved layout. Sign Up its free

Based on numerous requests for information on Web2Ireland companies [in a structured format] – we’re going to add support for Crunchbase on web2ireland.org

To get this done we need

1. Companies to submit information to Crunchbase
2. make sure you enter in location details
3. tag as web2ireland
4. update all sections – including funding – and references to likes of EI
5. leave a comment on this blog post – when you’ve got it all completed

On Web2Ireland we will

1. add live data to replace http://web2ireland.org/companies/
2. use Crunchbase widget in our blog posts

There are apps/sites I like and apps/sites I love. DownloadMusic is in the latter category. One of those businesses that just nails the elevator pitch. As soon as you hear how it works, you get it. 

Johnny Beirne is the guy behind it and he has built something of perfect simplicity. Buy independent Irish music using SMS shortcodes. That’s it. I’ve used it, I’m in a permanent state of envy over how well it works.

From such a simple system, he has added value in so many places. The downloads now count in the Irish charts and have had a material effect on them on many occasions. The knock-on effect for small Irish bands is just enormous.

Because it is SMS based, bands can literally shout out short-codes on stage. Offline and online are now seamless! Not only that, but the site has been expanded to include band merchandise too. 

The recent launch of a USB key featuring 15 of the best Indie tracks from DownloadMusic is another bit of marketing brilliance.

Head on over, play a few clips and try it out. If you like it, why not blog about it too?