Web 2 Ireland

FeedHenry has just announced a new platform in partnership with VMware’s Cloud Foundry and it’s pretty awesome.

If you aren’t familiar with FeedHenry, they provide a powerful hybrid cross-platform mobile application solution. You can build mobile Apps simultaneously for 5 different platforms using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. But just as importantly, it comes with a Server-Side API which allows you to move complex integrations and code onto their sever infrastructure which delivers just the data the App needs. You end up with faster more responsive Apps which can wire into anything on the web, no matter how complex or legacy.

Up until now that Server bit was FeedHenry’s own. Originally based on Rhino, they now offer Node.js. So you can build all of the server side in JavaScript.

The addition of Cloud Foundry is a huge win for the Waterford-based company. Now you build your Apps as usual but deploy the server part to the extremely impressive Cloud Foundry infrastructure. It makes use of Cloud Foundry’s Node.js support and you can deploy with the FHC command line or in the browser-based Studio GUI.

I’ve been a big fan of FeedHenry for a long time and also a fan of Cloud Foundry since it launched. It’s like your two favourite people getting engaged. Now to find the time to build something using both!

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.

With two very smart founders at the helm, Barry Nolan and Oisin Hurley, Vigill is a new startup that could disrupt customer relationship management in the mobile world.

Vigill allows enterprise systems and humans to converse and self-serve in mobile applications. Vigill is a cloud platform that enables companies to connect, interact and self-service their customers through their mobile applications. At its core Vigill’s proposition involves presenting concise, time sensitive information, allowing the user to respond and/or perform a task quickly, efficiently and conveniently – leveraging the power of smartphones (alerting, authenticating, interacting, locating, and interacting).

To crack the market, Vigill will make it easy for developers to white-label integrate ‘conversation engines’ into their mobile apps – similar to the likes of Twilio or UrbanAirship.

A low key startup, Brandtone, founded by some ex-Digicel management, who provide Mobile Marketing services in global markets for the likes of Unilever, Kelloggs and Kimberley-Clark , recently secured funding from Verlinvest, Unilever Ventures and Enterprise Ireland

Check out this video of a Campaign for client Unilever in South Africa

The team better known as Contrast in Ireland, have a potential killer-app on their hands.

Intercom is a next-gen CRM for SaaS businesses, who find it hard to connect with their customers, resulting in abandoned trials, low upgrades, churn.

1. identify users they need to reach out to,
2. research those users (social plus account info),
3. contact them (in-app or e-mail, automatically or manually),
4. track the relationship over time.

It’s really clever, as I’ve seen it used on a new startup, where its allowing them to track users, and ultimately i think it will enable companies to model the business like what Andrew Chen did in this Freemium Business Model xls.

It looks like the team have HQ’d this venture out of San Francisco. They are based in a building managed by Jonathan Siegel who recently moved back to the US from Ireland.

Steven Collins and Hugh Reynolds are quietly working on a Hat trick of exits.

First – Havok. Sold to Intel.
Second – New Game Technologies ta Kore. Sold to Havok.
Third. Swrve.

Swrve's real-time personalization allows design, product and marketing teams continually test and adjust their games, maximizing engagement across an unlimited range of players.

They recently closed a $2.7million funding round from Investors include: Intel Capital, SV Angel, Mochi Media founders, Playfish founders, the AIB Seed Capital Fund Limited Partnership, the Bank of Ireland Start-up Accelerator Fund, the AIB Seed Capital Fund, Enterprise Ireland and other angel investors.

Prediction: 2012 exit to likes of Xbox/MSFT, etc.

John Collins broke the story on Friday in the Irish Times, with others following (obviously no credit given to John). The rumour mill was in overdrive for last few months re: a deal for Newbay.

Congratulations to Paddy Holohan and team – it was a tough 9 years of hard work to get a decent exit for the business…. and where it all started off is still live at Foneblog

We all know what unmitigated disasters Digg V3 and later were. In a world of Twitter and Facebook they kept thinking it was still 2007. When V3 launched I said that it should have been built around the popular stories on Twitter since that’s what people are really interested in, rather than the closed coven of Digg power-users. So I was thrilled to see the recent launch of NewsWhip which does exactly that.

The site is an aggregation of popular news based on sharing and RTs across Twitter and Facebook. So there is no gaming, no moderation, just a smart algorithm bubbling up the hot news right now. They give a score to a news story by measuring how many Tweets, Likes, Shares, and other interactions it gets.You can filter by the location you are interested in and various categories and sub-categories.

At the moment the front page is showing some stories on the possible return of Arrested Development. That makes me very happy indeed.

For a great snapshot of interesting news across the realtime web during the day, I think the guys have nailed it.

Later this year, .XXX domains will become available and obviously an important aspect of this is to ensure that unsuitable content is not accessible to minors. Paul Walsh’s MetaCert has been working on this problem for the past few years and has just signed a large deal with ICM Registry who will be selling the domains.

MetaCert has a range of cloud-based labeling technology and certification products which sites can use to show visitors information about their content, their malware scanning practices, how they treat consumers’ privacy, whether they offer free or paid-for content and more.

I’ll be installing one of their products on all my kids’ PCs and that’s the Firefox Add-On. It goes way beyond the built-in features of IE9 and will be available on all browsers soon.

Huge congrats to Eamon Leonard, Orchestra and the EchoLibre team on the Engine Yard news.

Full details on TechCrunch.