Web 2 Ireland

Make sure to use the hashtag #demobar

I recommend that everyone who is signed up for Tuesday’s DemoBar stop eating now. It’s gonna be jammed! The interest level has been incredible. The following fab startups will be demoing on the night:

• Gruupy
• Digital Mines
• OnePageCRM
• DataHug
• Tunepresto
• LocalSocial
• Feedhenry
• Plendi
• Haunted Planet

See you all on Tuesday from 6:30 PM 9:30 PM at the Ely Gastro Pub, Dublin. Don’t forget that the Guardian Tech Weekly team will be there too.

Thanks again to Enterprise Ireland who will be sponsoring the evening.

Big congrats to the MAXROAM team for landing the only Irish Award in the Europas last night. They won the Best Hardware or Gadget Startup award for the MAXROAM Roaming SIM.

The full list of winners is here.

We all know that Cork makes the finest BarCamps of them all Now it’s time for BarCamp Cork IV, in 3D. Or, actually, in Webworks, the site of the first and second BCCs.

November 20th

If you love technology and startups and want to share, talk or learn, come on down. It’s free and no-one will try to sell you anything.

DataHug didn’t just win at the Dublin Web Summit recently, they also nabbed the Emerging category in the Munster region for the All-Ireland Seedcorn competition this week. This is one of the biggest start-up competitions on the island and I think we can expect great things from the guys in the final.

I shot over a few question to Ray and Connor about the company, their backgrounds and the product.

How long have you been around?
Since November 2009

Is this your first startup?
J1Summer.com was founded by Connor back in 2002.

What are your backgrounds
Ray: Over 6 years global experience as a Manager working for Accenture, in architecting and delivering large scale technology business critical technology projects. Deep experience in planning, estimating and managing large geographically dispersed development teams (50+). Electronic Engineer who placed top of his class (UCD) and went on to complete a research Masters involving MIT Media Lab

Connor: Over 6 years at PA Consulting, Connor sold and delivered million dollar projects for Thomson Reuters, Pfizer, Estee Lauder, British Airways and Dubai World. Diverse experience working for global leading clients with a speciality in Knowledge Management and User-Centric design. He has a first Class honours degree from Computer Science (UCC)

You seem to be not just in Ireland? US too?
Connor lived in Washington DC for a number of years and I lived down in Australia. The company has a base in DC and connections in San Jose but we came home to be based here in Ireland and we plan to grow the company in Ireland initially.

Did we hear there was a Cork connection?
Connor is the official company langer J, with me being from Dublin. My fiancée is from Cork so I am not your typical Barry's tea knocking jackeen.

Any background in Webapps or coming at it from biz opportunity side?
With our technical backgrounds, we both have developed web applications in the past. We spotted the business opportunity whilst working in Consulting and lived the pain of managing relationships every day. We were then fortunate to be able to develop it ourselves and bootstrap it in the current climate.

Any immediate results from DWS4?
We have trial partners in the States, UK and Ireland who are providing us with alpha feedback in advance of our public beta launch. A lot of positives have been taken from that and the number wishing to sign-up for our beta trial.

How are you currently funded?
Bootstrapped to-date with support from Endeavour (Jerry Kennelly), EI and the iGAP programme. The Spark of Genius prize will go a long way to helping us grow at pace. We are currently actively looking to close a seed investment round.

Numbers of alpha testers?
We have 6 trial clients, clocking up over a million relationships through the system.

Beta this month?
Planned for the end of this month.

Anything you can share on the tech?
Cloud SaaS Solution, built on MS Azure platform. Supports IMAP, Google OAuth and Exchange Web Services connectivity

Pure Enterprise play or other angles you are looking at?
We are initially targeting SME business between 5 500 employees involved in professional services or sales. We will then target the larger professional services firms.

Initial target geography?
Ireland, UK, US in that order.

One-liner on #DWS4 and F.ounders?
The Dublin Web Summit & F.ounders was yet another fantastic event organised by Paddy Cosgrave to help put Ireland on the map for web technologies and start-ups. The line-up of speakers were fantastic

The finals for the IBM SmartCamp are in Dublin on November 16-18.

This is the culmination of 18 months effort involving over 650 applications, 200 mentors and 8 cities in Europe, Israel and North America. The event is happening in Dublin as part of Innovation Dublin Week which in turn is part of a global series of activities under the Global Entrepreneur Week program led by the Kauffman Foundation.

Martin Kelly, Partner – Venture Capital Group IBM EMEA, who is one of the driving forces at IBM behind this initiative, is interviewed in this short video clip