Web 2 Ireland

The lovely people down at WCDP (West Cork Development Partnership) in Clonakilty, have just announced an all-new Tech Conference called OFFSITE.

I’m really pleased they are doing this, and not just because I’m one of the speakers. There is a huge amount of tech activity happening in Munster but all of those companies rarely get a chance to meet and share ideas, knowledge or problems.

OFFSITE aims to get us all in the one place for a day and do exactly that. In addition to great speakers like Jerry Kennelly, John Dennehy, Donal Cahalane and Ger Keohane, they are also experimenting with a BarCamp session where anyone can offer to speak on anything in the tech sphere. Like all BarCamps, no self-pimpage will be allowed.

The other great aspect of the event is cost. Not €1900, not €900, it’s just €40 to cover those bits that WCDP isn’t allowed to sponsor. That includes lunch and coffee breaks.

Head on over and register. It’s on Thursday 27 September in the Celtic Ross Hotel, Rosscarbery, just a few miles from Clonakilty.

I hope we see people from across the country attending. This could be the start of something special.

I somehow missed this completely until one of the Science Gallery people sent it on. In a nutshell, from their site:

As part of Science Gallery’s HACK THE CITY exhibition and festival we will be running a 10-day IDEA LAB between 14-23 June 2012 in partnership with Dublin City Council and IBM. The HACK THE CITY: IDEA LAB will focus on rapidly developing products and services that address current and future city needs.

I’m an enormous fan of the Hack The City concept. It pushes every single one of my buttons. Again, they express it better than I ever could:

HACK THE CITY is Science Gallery’s 2012 flagship exhibition and festival. The goal of the programme is to rethink our cities from the ground up through the spirit and philosophy of the hacker ethos – to bend, mash-up, tweak and cannibalise our city systems, to create possibilities, illustrate visionary thinking and demonstrate real-world examples for sustainable urban futures. HACK THE CITY draws on Dublin city’s history of innovation by transforming the city itself into a nimble “playground” and live urban hack lab.

The exhibition and programme focuses on hacking for good. Through the modification and repurposing of existing resources, our aim is to explore alternatives, which purposefully challenge existing hierarchies and consider tools for public good and social wellbeing.

This isn’t just for developers, it’s for designers, hackers, artists, activists and anyone with an interest in improving their city.

They are specifically looking for solutions that address the following:

1. Dereliction
2. Crowd Sourcing Public Data
3. Safety and Wellbeing
4. Open Data Transport Services

Ideally they want small teams of 2-3 people with a mixed skill set to apply but it is really open to anyone with the ideas and the skills to implement those ideas in an incubation environment.

Travel to Dublin and accommodation during the Idea Lab will be provided. Teams will be hosted in Dublin and provided with a team stipend of max €1500 to work on their ideas. This stipend will cover fees; day-to-day living expenses and core materials needed while developing the idea in Dublin.

You have until Tuesday 8th May 2012 to get your proposal in.

Lots more info over on their site.

I think this is a phenomenal opportunity, so please get your thinking caps on and submit proposals.

I don’t know if there is any lower age limit but most Secondary School students will be on summer holidays at that stage. I can imagine some very edgy ideas coming out of that age group.

Do it.

I just found out the details of the Techovate conference that is on in Wexford Opera House next Wed/Thu. It’s about the intersection of technology and business, a subject dear to my heart.

You’ll hear from execs in Microsoft, Google, IBM, Facebook, CISCO, LinkedIn and others. More importantly, unlike some other conferences, you’ll actually get to talk and network with them.

The programme is jam packed and covers a wide range of topics. Plenty of learning and sharing to be had. A one day ticket is only €175, which is a bargain compared to a lot of the event gouging that is going on at the moment.

A big thank you to Paul O’Mahony for doing these at #twittertd and apologies for the delay in posting them here. Lots of great stuff to listen to.

The Irish Software Developer Network (ISDN – love it!) is running an event this Thursday all about automated web testing.

In this talk, John Ferguson Smart will look at the advantages of using Selenium 2/WebDriver for your web tests, and see what Thucydides brings to the party.

It kicks off at 6.30pm at the TCube, 32-34 Castle St, Dublin. Free beer and pizza too.

All the details and info about the live stream over on IrishDev.

I heard about Dubin Startup Weekend at Twitter Teatime this week and Ma?gorzata Hrasimowicz has sent on the details.

I really like the tagline of  ”No Talk, All Action. Launch a Startup in 54 hours.”

The idea behind the Startup Weekends is to get a broad mix of developers, designers, marketers, biz people etc to work together and turn ideas into a workable business in 2 days.

It’s a non-profit org based in Seattle and they have had weekends like this all over the world.

All the deets are over on the website. Head on over and register, it looks like it’ll be a fab couple of days and it’s on in the cool Google offices.

Tea Time is a weekly staff meeting held at Twitter offices on Friday afternoons. Every Friday  the company gets together, greets new hires, talk about what happened that week and take Q&A. Anyone in the company can talk about what they did that week.

Web2Ireland has a very big readership in the UK both from UK startups and also from an ever-growing number of Irish startups who have either moved there completely or keep a strong presence there, particularly in London.

So I thought that audience might be interested in a Running Lean Workshop that is being held in London on Wednesday. It is being run by Ash Maurya, who is very well known for taking the quite academic and Enterprisey nature of much of the Lean material out there and turning it into a practical guide with more of a consumer web focus.

We have been using his book and one-page biz-plan methodology as part of the LaunchPad programme in NDRC and we’re big fans. We’ll be attending the workshop in Dublin.

So if you want to run your startup on Lean principles but want to get beyond principles, this should be perfect for you.

It’s £149.00 for the day and that includes a copy of the book. You need to register here.

Venue is Main Lecture Theatre, University of Arts – London College of Communication, Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6SB.

Wednesday 9th November from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

In a world of early adopters, one of my few claims to fame is that I started using Mozilla when it was pre-Alpha around M7, wayyyyyyy back in June 1999. I never looked back as it went through all its growing pains and then shifted sideways to Firefox.

To me, Mozilla saved the Internet. As Netscape disappeared up its own bum post-acquisition and Microsoft applied their stranglehold, Mozilla built the future. You wouldn’t be using Firefox, Chrome or Opera today if it wasn’t for Mozilla, you’d be using Internet Explorer 6.00001.

Whilst I think Firefox has become a pig of a product (1GB RAM for 4 tabs after 24hrs? C’mon!), like the Mozilla suite that begat it, and I really don’t know what it’s doing on Android, it remains incredibly important to the open internet ecosystem. For example, there isn’t a web developer out there who doesn’t worship at the feet of Joe Hewitt for creating Firebug. And it wouldn’t exist without Firefox.

Ok, so bit of a nostalgic ramble there. Back to the topic at hand. David McNamara contacted us to let you all know about a Meetup they have arranged for tomorrow Tuesday:

The Mozilla Foundation is trying to establish a community in Ireland to encourage grass roots support in the open web in this country.

Do you want to know more about Mozilla, the organisation behind the groundbreaking Firefox browser? Do you want to become involved in the global Mozilla movement? No coding skills required, though folks with them are of course welcome. Come along and find out more. It will be an evening of presentations and discussions, with drinks and snacks provided.

Time: 02 November · 18:00 – 22:00
Location: The Odeon (Upstairs), 57 Harcourt Street, Dublin

As we announced over on the HushVine Blog, we have created an Android Twitter tracking app for DWS7. But for those of you who want the big screen experience, we’re thrilled to make it available here too. It auto-updates every minute, is tracking lots more than a hashtag and you can tweet from it too.