Web 2 Ireland

The site goes live at 2pm today. It’s very simple, send IQContent a 5-page business plan that shows how your will turn your idea into a great online business.

The best submissions will be shortlisted and asked to present their business plans before a panel of independent judges.

The final winner will be announced at the end of June.

This bit is important:

We're not investors. We're not venture capitalists. We're not looking for equity and we don't want any intellectual property. There's no catch. There are no strings. Seriously.

All details on iqprize.ie. What are you waiting for, get your ass over there!

Last year’s Eircom Fund got a lot of buzz and it was fantastic to see Locle, Touristr, Heystaks and Playza win. They have spent the year busy building their apps with financial and other supports from Eircom.

This year’s Web Innovation fund has been announced and once again they are looking for fantastic web ideas that they can help nuture and promote on the eircom.net site. Each of the 4 winners will get €16k upfront prize money to start with followed by a year of mentoring and support.

Your idea should be in one of the following areas:

• Content (e.g. video, short films, animations, UGC)
• Movies and TV (e.g. programme recommendations, listings application, information aggregation, content search, fan communities, recommender systems, discovery tools e.g. data visualisations))
• Games (e.g. Flash games, game communities, platforms, multiplayer games, persistent worlds, avatar-based social networks, game creation tools, ratings, reviews, gambling)
• News (e.g. personalised news gathering, news aggregation, news submission tools, communities of interest, domain-specific news services)
• Music (e.g. Internet radio, streaming / OD services, search / recommendations / personalisation, community tools)
• Sport (e.g. communities, results aggregation, fan communities, results prediction, betting, games)
• Widgets (e.g. any widget(s) based on the above or additional categories)

Closing Date for applications is April 30th and they have a Facebook Group here.

DineToRead is an online book club. Regular events are organised where members can meet to discuss books and enjoy a meal at the same time.

If you have a blog, why not check it out and write about them. The site was built by the brilliant John Blackbourn and has a beautiful friendly design.

Enterprise Ireland is doing an information evening on starting a tech business in Letterkenny on 25th March.

It looks like a very useful session with speakers on:

• Business Planning Process
• EI supports to High Potential Start ups
• Paul McNulty on starting his own Technology Business

If you wish to attend, please contact marian.roberts@enterprise-ireland.com

Martin Perez contacted us this week about a new site called Jobsket.ie in which he is involved. It’s an online service to host and value CVs/resumes.

The first half of it is that you upload a CV and they render it with a Flash viewer so you can send the URL to anyone without requring any desktop tool. You can also embed a widget with a thumbnail of your CV on your blog or website.

The twist is that they also value the CVs. Their application connects to several job sources and extracts information about salaries on the jobs market. They combine that information with the information available in people’s CVs so that they can give an estimate of the market-value of any given CV. This also enables them to extract trends on the jobs market such as “does a Java programmer earn more than a Python programmer?”.

They are in Beta invite-mode at the moment and you can add your email address over on the site if you’d like to try it out.

The details of the it@cork event have been announced. It is on April 20th in The Cork International Airport Hotel from 2-5pm and is titled “Moving to the Cloud – How businesses are scaling IT and saving money simultaneously”.

There is a superb speaker line-up as follows:

• Pol Mac Aonghusa, CTO Emerging Technology Incubation Center, IBM on “Emerging Technology in the Cloud! Real Life Examples”
• Kevin Noonan, Independent Developer on “Castles in the Cloud: Developing with Google App Engine”
• Jon Mountjoy, Salesforce.com on “Cloud Computing in Practice: Fast Application Development and Delivery on Force.com”
• AJ McKee, Rush Hour Analytics on “Knocking on Heavens Door – The Business Reality of Doing Business in the Cloud”
• Simone Brunozzi, AWS Evangelist on “Amazon Web Services”

The cost is €60 for non-members and free for members.

The crew in Sligo are kicking off an OpenCoffee and it’s about time! That area is a real hub of business and web activity so it should be very popular.

The first one is on April 2nd in the Clarion Hotel in Sligo Town at 11am. All info over on the blog.

Best of luck to the organisers, we look forward to hearing lots more about it.

Seedcamp is holding an event in London on 20th April aimed at Irish and UK start-ups, called Mini Seedcamp London. It will be bringing together 20 of the best seed stage web tech startups with experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and developers from all over Europe to participate in a day of intense mentoring, panel discussions and presentations.

Applications are open now and the closing date is midnight on April 6th. All the details, including how to enter, can be found here.

Finalists Announced from Dublin Workshop : Innovate!Europe.

These eleven companies will now advance to the Master Class, to be held in Zaragoza, Spain May 4-6. Congratulations go to:

Byte Surgery/Decisions for Heroes tools to enable emergency rescue personnel and volunteers to collect and analyze data at emergency scenes

Emergence SaaS application that provides real-time risk management across a range of corporate business functions

iFoods Ltd/LookandTaste.com professionally-produced and user-generated digital video library of recipes; online video glossary of food and kitchen terms

IGoPeople software that socially connects consumers and businesses to better build brands and enable consumer involvement in marketing

Locle location-aware social networking tools to identify people and places on mobile devices

LouderVoice SaaS application that enables customers to review products and provide feedback on business sites

PutPlace cloud storage platform for consumer PC- and Web-based digital media and information

Revahealth online directory of health clinics, providing a detailed and normalized view of services and medical personnel

Sentry Wireless security for mobile phone devices by providing a firewall on a SIM card. First product is a service that insures the privacy and safety of children when using mobile phones

Toddle provides easy-to-create email marketing campaigns for small businesses, leveraging the tools with which customers are already familiar: Outlook and a browser

TouristR interactive online travel planner that allows users to plan, book and share their travel with an innovative search tool

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Now Innovate!Europe are looking for other Europe's top startup – and the deadline to apply is March 23rd.

Innovate!Europe will be hosting Going Global workshops and networking meetups in Europe and Israel from March 30th – April 8th – check calendar

Start-ups will receive mentoring and feedback from Guidewire Group's renowned analyst team on how to improve your pitch and hone the skills you need to compete in fast-paced markets like Silicon Valley.

Best of all, there is no cost to apply or to participate in the Going Global workshops.

Start-ups in the workshops held so far have raved about the experience. Conor O'Neill of LouderVoice, called it pure gold and said it was the most impressive start-up workshop I have ever encountered.

If you want to participate in the competition but can¹t attend one of the workshops, fill out the form anyway.

If you’re selected, Guidewire Group’s analysts will conduct a phone interview with you.

Note: You don't need to be a workshop participant to attend one of the networking meetups. The meetups are also open to investors, journalists and other members of the entrepreneurial community. However, an RSVP is required as space is limited.

Facebook recently announced their new

FBFund.

The fbFund is a $10 million seed fund managed by Founders Fund, Accel Partners, and Facebook.

After the recent Facebook Developer Garage Ireland we should see plenty of entries from Ireland.