Web 2 Ireland

And do something useful for the community/country.

NDRC’s Inventorium is running Ireland's First Open Data 18 Hour Challenge.

NDRC, Crane St, Digital Hub, Dublin 8
Monday 4 July – Starts: 12.00, Finishes: 21.00
Tuesday 5 July – Starts: 09.00, Finishes: 21.00

Register Here

I absolutely love seeing this happen. Looking forward to seeing some great apps.

We got an email from Mark Frawley of Irish start-up Parsity. They have created a very nifty site called nametoolkit.com. It takes the simple concept of checking domain name availability and adds intelligent suggestion features. As anyone who has used the GoDaddy suggester knows, this is an area that needs a lot of improvement.

I just used it to try and come up with a domain around “Facebook Killer”. I like their suggestions! I think I’ll be using this site a lot in the coming months.

Kernel Capital has just announced that they have invested €500k in Waterford-based FeedHenry, a spin-out from the TSSG group in Waterford Institute of Technology.

FeedHenry enables you to build cross-platform mobile applications using just HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. Two of their really cool features are:

• the fact that you don’t need N SDKs to build for N platforms because they do the build for you in the cloud
• and they have a powerful server-side JavaScript component to reduce the load on the client and to enable you to access things like SQL DBs, enterprise web services etc

If you are building a web-app and you don’t have a strong story in at least Android and iPhone, stop now and figure it out before you proceed any further. In fact, maybe you should be building for mobile first?

Web developers who know their way around JS should have a look at FeedHenry. Your existing skill-set is all you need to build an app. They have a free Developer tier and you can build for up to 8 mobile platforms.

There’s been an awful lot of spoof and nonsense written about the cloud in the past few months. As for the hilarious predictions on the number of people who will end up employed in the area in Ireland…….

But the positive reality on the ground is that more and more companies are using some form of cloud hosting. Given that the Web2Ireland readership is definitely in the early adopter bracket, we wanted to get some sense of what you are all using. Is it mainly generic servers like AWS or are people moving more towards platform specific hosting like Heroku or Google AppEngine? Is anyone using Azure in anger? What about IBM? Feel free to use the poll and leave a comment.

If there is enough interest, we may follow it up with a more detailed why/what/when survey.

[polldaddy poll="5121095"]

Who doesn’t remember last year’s Spark of Genius Competition won by Data Hug which resulted in major publicity for the guys. We’re all looking forward to it coming out of private beta.

Well DWS is at it again, this time with ESB Electric Ireland, and they have a €40k prize fund of cash and services.

2011 judges include Brian Caulfield of DFJ, Shay Garvey of Delta and Mark Roden of Ezetop. Shortlisted companies will pitch at the Dublin Web Summit on October 27th.

Applications will open from June 10th and we’ll let you know here when they do.