Web 2 Ireland

Our roving Web2Ireland reporters popped down to Trinity College on Tuesday for the cmypitch event

An excellent event, with 10 start-ups pitching in front of 5 Dragons and a room full of investors, with short snappy 4 minute pitches were the order of the day followed by 4 minutes grilling from the Dragons.

The dragons were
- James Carroll of Investor First
- the very well known Brian Caulfield
- Maurice Roche of Delta Partners
- but the real stars were Pat Brazal and Eamonn Fallon who were invariably spot on with their feedback.

Getting successful entrepreneurs like these as angel investors in your start-up is one sure fire recipe for success. Kudos also to Maurice Roche who led very admirably from the VC angle. It was good to see the most active house in town, Delta, participating.

On to the start-ups which included some overseas entrants, which we think is a good idea as home grown talent needs to know there’s much competition out there for those investment dollars.

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Event Elephant offers online tools to make organising conferences easier. Eamon O’Brien started out with a very text based pitch but kept the best wine till last with great product shots towards the end.

Sentry Wireless gave a great pitch focused on their SMS spam guard for the Asian market with some great partners, including Acision, lined up. A very polished performance from Matt Norton.

Soko Health led with a video pitch, which works well for one person at a PC but not for a room full of investors who come to hear you and not a recording. Product become much clearer with Dragon questioning which Aidan McKenna handled admirably.

Learn 2 Lingo led by Shira Rubin is an online web cam based language school that focuses on partnering (not competing) with their bricks & mortar language school brethren. They have also inked some large corporate deals, notably with Lonely Planet and Lovells. Dragons seemed to get tripped up here on scaling, but we thought this was the best pitch of the night. Suspect they need to meet the Hostel World guys?

Intelligent Comms presented their Telecom Expense Management Platform for large corporates. Walter Tyser led on this one.

Eplixo offer video conferencing on the mobile via premium SMS pricing. Gerard Brandon battled hard with the dragons to assure them background mobile noise/reception was not a usability issue.

Rocudo presented their online re-mix solution to release the inner DJ in you. Chicken and egg scenario loomed large here but Culann MacCabe batted well on that score.

Headway Software announced the second coming of their code base management solution. Chris Chedgey was very confident that this time around, they had a winner.

Simchronise presented on their solution for mobile back-up again focused on the Asian market. David Inglis and the team have much sector experience, so one to watch.

Alan Mulcahy closed with Spirit of Ireland, and thankfully declared upfront that they are not looking for investment at this time, as their needs are great – need €9 billion to flood the Ring Of Kerry and make one giant Hydro Electric plant with a bit of wind power thrown in too!

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Dragons in the end voted Event Elephant as the most investable, so congratulations to Eamon O’Brien and his team.

Entrepreneurs, get you to cmypitch.ie and upload your pitch.

Best of luck to Emmet Kilduff and team as their stated objective of getting more angel investors participating in the Irish market is one which we whole heartily support.

Tags: cmypitch, web2ireland

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Irish Web2.0 News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.