Web 2 Ireland

Loic Le Meur – founder and ceo of Seesmic – hangs out with Lenny from Polldaddy on Loic TV

Check it.

The Roomex guys in Dublin have kindly offered all our readers out there an extra discount on their hotel bookings. Head on over to http://web2.roomex.com/ between now and 5pm on Wednesday to avail of the offer. A big thanks to Jack Donaghy for this.

To complement our lovely new design we thought it might be cool to get a logo to go with it too. This wouldn’t just be for the site but also for events etc.

David Lenehan from PollDaddy came up with the very smart idea on Twitter of running a competition with prizes. Within minutes we had several offers for those prizes. So we’d like to announce the competition now.

The rules are simple, just send us a sample of your logo(s) in one of the standard bitmap formats by Friday May 2nd to web2ireland DOT editor AT gmail DOT com. We will then publish a post showing them all and a poll allowing you to vote on them. The design with the most votes after one week wins!

The winner will not just get lots of publicity here and a permanent credit on the site but they will also win the following:

• One year of PollDaddy Pro sponsored by PollDaddy
• A copy of Microsoft Expression Studio sponsored by Microsoft Ireland
• A year of Blacknight VPS hosting sponsored by Blacknight Solutions

Many thanks to David, Martha, Clare and Michele for the brilliant prizes!

Tubbercurry’s finest Edmund Gray of Omni and Microsoft’s Claire Dillon have made contact regarding the upcoming DDD event in Galway. For the last few years, the UK Microsoft developer community have been running their extremely popular Developer Developer Developer (DDD) events up and down the UK. Now, this popular event is coming to Ireland for the very first time! The Galway Microsoft Technology User Group are delighted to invite you to the first ever Developer Developer Developer community event in Ireland (aka the 'Craggy Island Techfest' .

DDD Ireland website
When? Saturday, 3rd May 9am (with related activities continuing on Saturday night and Sunday
Where? Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, Dublin Road, Galway
Why? Expert speakers; 20+ sessions to choose from; small groups for in-depth topic coverage; plenty of opportunities to network with visiting experts.
Cost? Free you just have to get yourself there!

This event is being run by the community, for the community no Microsoft speakers allowed! The speaker line-up has many TechEd and DevWeek regulars as well as up and coming new speakers from the UK and Irish .NET developer community! Speakers will also be joining us from BASTA! and JustCommunity’s NRW conferences.

The event is all about developers learning, sharing and interacting with each other in a relaxed informal atmosphere. With 6 tracks and over 20 sessions from experienced speakers in the .NET community, this event is jam-packed with quality content. Small sessions sizes ensure you can dig deep into your favourite topics with the experts. In addition to all the general sessions, Dominick Baier and Christian Weyer (both from thinktecture ) and Daniel Fisher and Michael Willers (both from devcoach ) will be delivering a full day of WCF in depth training (WCF In Action and Distributed Apps using AJAX and WCF). After the event on Saturday, join the speakers for a trip into Galway's Spanish Quarter for some more geek-talk and some Galway craic. On Sunday, the organisers are also holding a 'Geek Walk and Talk' trip to Craggy Island (Inis Oirr).

All previous DDD events have filled up in record time, so, if you are interested, be sure to register as quickly as you can!

Irish Indo has a piece on Cuill – founded by Louth man Tom Costello.

Also check recent Techcrunch coverage on Cuill and their $25m funding round.

The folks at Pigsback are busy.

Check this video for the launch of Pigsback Canada

We’ve been posting the blog updates to Twitter for months but completely forget to mention it here. If you want all the latest Web2Ireland news directly into your Twitter feed, then you just have to add @web2ireland as a friend.

You can alternatively get the updates via Jaiku, Friendfeed or Facebook

Vinny Glennon of UseAMap and JustRoutes has now launched a nice news aggregation site

In his own words:

I wanted to create a site which solely focused on News. My intention is to be able to see the breaking news throughout the day from each country at a glance, without overloading my RSS Reader. The end result is 4topnews.com which picks up the news from all over the world.

I’m with Vinny on the RSS overload thing. Most general news sites simply generate too many stories in their feed every day. I currently use NetVibes to check out the top headlines a few times a day but I’ll be trying this out too.

The blog is at blog.4topnews.com

The Genesis Enterprise Project had their annual awards ceremony on Monday night. it@cork has all the details. I’m really happy to see several ex-Motorola people amongst the winners. It proves the point that multinationals leaving Ireland is not the end of the world, it’s an opportunity.

I’m looking forward to seeing some of this batch reach the heights of previous winner Comnitel/Vallent.

Winners included:

• Pat Lucey & Colm Horgan from Aspiracon
• Sorcha McDonnell of Mediterranean Flavours
• Prionsias Collins of EuropeanIrish.com
• Dan Hayes & Brendan Fidgeon from Tapasol
• Dr John Hanrahan from Glantreo