5th of August 2009 by conor
Another superb video by Michael Clyne, this time of Colm Long’s talk. The Facebook stats for Ireland are staggering.
Hot Facebook.com Money Making Applications plus U2, XBOX, DS, WII and Facebook Advertising Options presented by Colm Long from Path Pacific on Vimeo.
26th of July 2009 by conor
When Michael Clyne of PathPacific.com offered to record the second Irish Facebook Garage, we had no idea what to expect. It certainly wasn’t this.
Facebook Live Music Mashup App – Gig Monkey (Mobile Phone, Last FM, Bebo, Amazon, iLike, Facebook) – Facebook Garage Ireland from Path Pacific on Vimeo.
Wow, amazing work on the GigMonkey talk Michael. We can’t wait to see the other segments!
p.s. We’re just turned on the Disqus commenting system here. It is much more powerful than the built-in WordPress one, particularly when it comes to showing the distributed conversation on sites like Twitter about your posts. Let us know if you have any problems with it. It syncs with the built-in system so if there are any issues, we can just turn it off.
11th of July 2009 by conor
We’re a little slow with the news but it’s still worth mentioning and giving some extra background. Robin Blandford of D4H won the €10k IQPrize last Wednesday and Plink won the audience award of €1k for their elevator pitch.
As one of the judges I can honestly say it was both a privilege and a joy to listen to all 8 pitches on Wednesday. Making the final decision was very very difficult due to the quality of all of them.
If you are an investor, I recommend you study each of the 8 very closely. It is our belief that several of them will have massive exits in the next 1-2 years. All of the others will have very successful businesses and I look forward to being a customer.
The most important aspect of the IQPrize which seems to be impossible to get across to those in power was that it was entirely bottom-up with no cherry-picking or high-potential-labelling or expert-selection or jobs-for-the-boys or who-you-know or what-you-have-done-in-the-past.
Anyone could enter. Anyone.
And because of that we saw the depth of the entrepreneurial spirit in Ireland and the eagerness and hunger to build great businesses as the Zombieconomy collapses around us.
The other critical thing we saw was that many of the applicants had amazing ideas or technology but didn’t have the business background needed to make it a huge success. Incubation programmes like Genesis and Hothouse are critical here but perhaps many of those who benefited from the the boom of the past few years might like to give something back? They could offer to do more than mentoring and actually come on board with some of these businesses and help them go global. CEOs and VPs of Sales in particular could help enormously.
In 249 biz plans there were maybe 5 lunatics. I hope at least one of those proves to be a visionary and we just didn’t see it.
If you didn’t make the final 8 this year, tighten up your biz plan and have another go when the next event like this appears. There will be some feedback later in the summer from the judges overall on what worked for us and what didn’t in terms of biz plan. It was interesting that despite our wildly diverse backgrounds, we usually agreed on those points. Hopefully that will help everyone who applied to build a newer better kick-ass plan.
Well done to D4H, well done to Plink and well done everyone who applied.
7th of July 2009 by conor
The IQPrize pitching and judging will run from 9am-5pm tomorrow. Good luck to all the finalists.
The winner will be announced at a party afterwards which is on from 7pm-9pm in the Source Bar, Level 5, Guinness Storehouse. Each of the finalists will give their elevator pitches before the winner is giving the giant cheque. All attendees can also vote in the People's Choice award where one of the shortlist can win an extra €1,000.
If you’re interested in coming and seeing who wins the €10k prize please RSVP to coryann.joseph@iqcontent.com.
4th of July 2009 by conor
The first Facebook Garage was so popular we had to have another one pretty soon after. On Thursday we had 150+ people crammed into a room in the Radission SAS to hear 5 speakers talk about different aspects of their experiences with Facebook.
It opened with Sean O’Sullivan from Rococo presenting their GigMonkey App. Plenty of technical meat in there about the various challenges they faced and some interesting comparisons with Bebo.
Robert Mao then gave a broad overview of build FB Apps/Connect and hosting them on Google App Engine.
I spoke about our integration of Facebook Connect into the LouderVoice reviews widget.
After the break, Flavien Charlon took everyones breath away with his description of the growth of My City. He currently has close to 500k active monthly users on this Facebook App. His talk covered everything from technical issues to growing a userbase and monetizing.
Finally Colm Long who runs Facebook EMEA gave us an insight into where Facebook was going, theeir approach to ads and the shocking growth figures for Facebook in Ireland. One important point that he highlighted was what a small company Facebook is (~900 people). So when development slows in one area e.g. Groups, it is only because they are resource strapped.
Michael Clyne took video footage of the entire event which we hope to post here next week. If you have any photos or videos, please post links to them in the comments.
25th of June 2009 by conor
The inaugural Techcrunch Europe Award nominees have been announced and there are plenty of Irish companies in there. It’s a public vote, so head on over and keep the flag flying for a lot of great apps and businesses.
The awards are particularly gratifying because there are so many businesses that are new to me in the list. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in Europe. Now if only an Irish VC could dazzle everyone and become worthy to join the 2010 nominees.
The Irish are (and let me know if we’ve missed any):
23rd of June 2009 by conor
After the resounding success of the first Facebook Garage here, it’s about time we had another.
The theme this time is “Hands on with Apps, Connect and Pages”
It’s a super line-up of speakers:
The event is on in The Digital Exchange, Crane Street, Dublin (other side of High Street from Hub) from 4pm-6pm, Thursday 2nd July.
Whilst it is a free event, you must register over on Eventbrite.
11th of June 2009 by conor
The Press Release on the IQPrize has just gone out and the important bits are as follows.
On July 8th, the final candidates will make a Dragon's Den type presentation to the judges, followed by a public event where the candidates will be able to make a short elevator pitch to the audience. The People's Choice Award of €1000 and the Grand Prize of €10,000 for the overall winner will be announced at the end of the night.
To add my 2 cents as a judge, I was honestly blown away by the quality of all the biz plans I reviewed. I expected that there’d be lots of badly thought-out, lunatic fringe stuff but I was completely wrong. 90% of what I read could make a feasible business.
Selecting the final 8 was bloody difficult because there were so many great ones submitted. I fully expect to see a ton of those who submitted plans running highly successful businesses over the next few years. I hope they all go straight to their County Enterprise Board or Enterprise Ireland and give them the same plans they sent us.
I don’t know who will win the prize but those 8 businesses could easily generate €100m+ revenues between them.
Here’s hoping IQContent are getting non-stop calls from EI and the CEBs to get access to all the other fantastic plans.
Video from Damian Bannon of the Announcement:
More coverage from Villa81:
14th of April 2009 by admin
On the 23rd and 24th of April, Digital Circle, in conjunction with the Digital Media Forum and Create Ireland, are holding Ireland’s first iPhone developers’ workshop in both Dublin and Belfast.
This free event gives you the chance of meeting iPhone developers and interacting with offical Apple engineers.
There will be sessions on iPhone development, user interface, marketing and business aspects, as well as a ‘Hack Room’ for you to go ahead and try out what you learn during the sessions.
This is the must-attend conference for anyone innovating with Apple technologies in Ireland.
Signup at DevDays 2009
21st of March 2009 by conor
Enterprise Ireland is doing an information evening on starting a tech business in Letterkenny on 25th March.
It looks like a very useful session with speakers on:
If you wish to attend, please contact marian.roberts@enterprise-ireland.com
