Web 2 Ireland

EI has announced the 10 winners of this round of the Internet & Games Competitive Start Fund. Each start-up gets €50k for 10% equity stake by EI. 120 companies applied.

The winners are:

• Tribal City Interactive – Games including iPhone/Android. Yay Alan!
• Decisions For Heroes –  Emergency response team management and analytics (and winner of the IQPrize). Yay Robin!
• Redwind Software – Game engines for mobile trivia games
• Cellplay Networks – Social gaming
• Jlizard – Cloud-based service for managing log data
• Plendi – Automating receipt processing
• Scurri – Helps consumers to discover affordable shipping
• Calom Technologies-  Video delivery platform based on open web standards
• Franklyweb – Subscription based clothing product range (URL?)
• UnitedWeSave – Consumer web service for group buying around household bills

Digital Mines, a new Irish Cloud Computing provider, has just announced a funding round of €750,000. This includes Delta Partners first investment from their Bank of Ireland start-up and Emerging Sectors equity fund. Enterprise Ireland and existing investors were also part of the round.

The company is run by Ed Byrne is who well known to everyone in the web space in Ireland. Ed was General Manager of Hosting 365, which was sold last year to SunGard AS.

The whole idea behind Digital Mines is to take the power and usefulness of cloud services such as Amazon AWS and make them accessible to business users. Currently most cloud offerings required far too much technical knowledge. Digital Mines takes all of that and turns it into a set of one-click operations.

The Delta investment is not just important for Digital Mines, it is also sends a strong message that the Seed Funds in Ireland are out there investing in new and exciting companies despite all the doom and gloom. You can expect to see many more announcements from Shay and the team in Delta in the coming months.

Here are two of the Decks that were presented at the recent Facebook Garage in Gateway Ireland.

RightRental:

Local Social:

Excuse the blatant pimping but I thought it was worth mentioning the IIA Event that is on this Thursday afternoon in the Burlington in Dublin. It’s called “8 More Ways to Sell Even More Stuff” and the focus is on Content, Analysis and Store Format.

Yours truly is one of the speakers with my LouderVoice hat on and I’ll be digging into how Customer Reviews are the lynchpin of Social Commerce.

To be absolutely brutal about it, Ireland is years behind the US and UK in the adoption of newer approaches around e-commerce. I hope the material at this event will make a lot of people wake up to the possibilities.

If you are already selling online or you are thinking about it, then you will hear about what is important now and in the next two years. At €99.99 (€79.99 for IIA Members), it’s a steal.