Web 2 Ireland

A friend of mine in London met some people selling Viagra over the 'net last week. Last year they claim to have made £750,000 clear profit with a team of three people, and all through deft manipulation of their meta-data to get them up the Google rankings. And there we all are worrying about business models. When I hear stories like this, I do wonder whether I am making my business life more complicated than it needs to be, but in the spirit of openness, here's what we're doing so you can judge for yourself:

Whatever happened to Tablane? Some of you may remember the browser we released a couple of years ago and our aspiration to make Internet research more productive. It’s still the only browser with a five star user rating on Download.com, but, we've taken in just €100 in revenue from our TClipper tool and decided to go in a different direction. We are now collaborating with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute of NUI Galway using some of their semantic smarts to build a new type of document search platform. It's all very buggy and alpha at the moment, but it's interesting. Hats off to the Border Midlands and West Assembly for helping to fund this through their voucher scheme.

InTimeMedia, our mobile technology business, has been doing steady work for the BBC and is looking for investment and new customers. We got Innovation Partnership funding with Enterprise Ireland back in April which was handy. We've created an excellent framework for application development and can literally script new applications in minutes, plus our ability to synchronise apps with broadcast programmes has big wow factor. But the broadcasting industry in the UK has been in a flap over dodgy phone-ins, and corporate restructuring which slowed things. It looks like we're coming out of that now, and we've started approaching the Irish market too, so fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, have you been to Foretal.com? This exciting venture has had its technology developed in Ireland, funded by angels, but licensed its IP to an operational company in Malta. Why? Because Malta has the best on-line gaming regulatory framework, and boy, is it rigorous. Foretal — a portal, foretelling the future — is a social site for people with an interest in the future. You can make predictions, and vote on the predictions of others. You can do this for free or for cash. We opened it up after two years of development last week. Your registrations and comments would be much appreciated. It's very exciting, and potentially a customer for the platform we're developing with DERI. Check it out.

Lastly, we've just completed a left field project for Somerset House in London in conjunction with two artists Langlands and Bell. It's called Superactivei2i and involves a 3D model of the courtyard of Somerset House, links to flash movies, avatars, chat features and 'see what I see' functionality whereby someone can control what someone else is seeing in their browser. We used Westport based AMT3D to laser scan the courtyard and build the model, while Norwegian company myVR supplied the cutting edge 3D streaming technology. Best to use IE7.0 with pop-ups turned on for best effect (and doesn't work on the Mac yet).

Probably be easier to sell Viagra wouldn’t it!?

From Techcrunch – Intel To Acquire Havok. Another great Irish company getting bought.

Congratulations to the founders, Stephen and Hugh – great vision and technology in a very competitive market.

Location: Bandon, Co Cork
Founders: Conor O’Neill (CEO), Catherine O’Neill (COO)

LouderVoice.com is a web-site for finding, writing and sharing reviews. It enables everyone from Bloggers to MySpacers and SMSers to get their opinions and expertise read by a larger audience in their own language.

Company: TouristRepublic

Location: Enterprise Acceleration Centre – Limerick

Team: Jan Blanchard (founder) / Conor Wade (designer/developer) / Wannita Phanchana (illustrator)

Products: TouristR (new version at DemoBar) and TripPlanr (in development)

TouristR is a social network website that lets users find and share travel stories. At Tourist Republic, we believe the best way to find out about a place is to read stories from people who have been there. The real experts aren't the professional writers, they're the people who plan, book and create trips themselves.

TripPlanr will allow users to build trips. It will use content from TouristR to suggest destinations but also anticipate transport, accommodation, activities, places to visit and automatically generate relevant itineraries. TripPlanr will model trips based on personal preferences and preferences from like minded profile.

Location: Dublin

Team/Founders: Ivan McDonald/Sean O’Sullivan

mysay.com provides a voice service for communities of all sizes and shapes: teams, audiences, families, work colleagues, classmates, online social networks.

It’s very simple: you phone a number and can hear what members of your community have had to say, and you can leave an update yourself, so that they can hear you. Whatever you say is instantly available on the web.

You grab and customize a widget that we provide and stick that in your social network page, or your blog, or your own website. Then whenever you leave an update over the phone, people can instantly hear it on the web, and they can “phone the widget” to join in the conversation.

Location: Dublin (Shortly moving to Hothouse Incubator)

Team/Founders: Daniel Becker and Garry Kelly

Product:
GlowDay power embeddable surveys, from simple one question polls to
complex multi page questionnaires. Surveys are delivered either as
widgets or hosted pages. Survey Designers have full control of layout
and presentation and can include images and videos for added impact. A
survey can be shared for others to use or improve. Results can be
analyzed and compared to results gathered by others. Our Service is Free.

Conor has all the details on the Intruders.tv launch in Ireland.

Congratulations to Conn and his team at Edgecast Media for this hook-up.

We are also delighted that Intruders.tv Ireland are a media partner for Web2Ireland DemoBar – and no doubt we will see plenty of interviews from the forthcoming event in Dublin

TouristR launched their open Beta on Friday at Copenhagen.
With Tom, Jan was the 2nd Web2Ireland person to give a presentation at Reboot 9.0.
“I’m now a new Reboot fan. It was informal, relaxed and the ideal scene to launch our public beta.” Read more insider Reboot stories on Jan’s blog and also an article by Marie Boran from Silicon Republic on the recent launch.

Joe Drumgoole has just announced the private beta of PutPlace. The more Joe has told me about it, the more I like it.

As they say themselves:

Whether it’s Flickr, YouTube or Blip.tv, PutPlace is software that will find, organize and publish your digital life to the Web so that you can share it with friends.

Update 29/1/07

The title of my post shouldn't say 'open source'. 'The Betavine Portal' is not an open source portal. All application owners will continue to own the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) for their applications. The Portal however, will have a section dedicated to open source. Nothing has changed since I wrote my original post and its entire contents remain true.

I would like to apologise if I've caused some confusion.
——————-
Vodafone is looking to stimulate the development of new applications in the mobile and internet industry through a new community portal. And I’m lucky enough to be the first to tell people

The Portal called Betavine, has been scheduled for a *soft* launch on January 31st 2006 and I've agreed to help seed interest within the community.

I've just posted this on my blog but thought it was worth posting here in case we have some new mobile applications amongst us.

I was lucky enough to take part in a workshop alongside Andy Tiller from Shozu, Hakon Martinsen of m-spatial and Tom Hume, from Future Platforms to help Vodafone put together their requirements. It was interesting to see how they had put most of it together already, demonstrating their understanding of the open source community.

If you want to take a sneak preview and take part in a field trial between now and the 31st (possibly longer), then get in touch and I'll give you login details.

If you own a mobile application this is a great way to get free feedback and exposure.

About the Betavine portal

It's a research and development space run by Vodafone Group R&D. It aims to encourage collaboration in the area of mobile and internet communications.

As a user you can:
* Download and test applications
* Comment and contribute on the forums and blogs

As a developer you can
* Create your own projects and host applications
* Blog about your projects
* Interact with your users and the Betavine community

On the Betavine Portal, interaction between developers and testers provides a testing ground for the latest concepts and technologies. New technologies are tested in real-world conditions, key technologies are identified and winning concepts come to the fore.

It's an open community that self-regulates. You are free to register and contribute to discussion threads and create or comment on blog entries. As a developer you can create a project space to upload your application, showcase your work and engage the Betavine testing community.

For students it's a chance to be involved in developing mobile applications through internships, 'externships' and competitions. Winning projects will be featured on the student page, and taken further through collaboration with the Betavine community.

Like featured projects and applications, the Betavine Web site itself is in continual beta testing by its users. Suggest new Web site features and discuss in the forum thread. Betavine's developers take their lead from the Web site community.

To participate in a beta trial before it's made public on January 31st 2007, get in touch with me.

This is a great opportunity to be one of the first to have an application on the portal.