Web 2 Ireland

Congratulations to Ivan, Sean and Dial2Do team on closing their Series A Funding from the Sean Melly led Powerscourt Capital Partners and Enterprise Ireland.

John Collins has a lot of the details of the deal in the Irish Times

Some highlights from deal

- Success follows Success – Ivan’s previous company Eware – provided Sean Melly and other Angels with nice exit
- White Label model for Dial2Do gaining major traction for team (more news on that later !!)
- Ivan and Sean managed to successfully spin-off Dial2Do from Rococosoft, whilst also raising new capital for Rococo

A business breakfast hosted by Mason Hayes+Curran, in association with the Irish Software Association and the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), about the legal challenges and commercial possibilities of the Semantic Web, the next evolution of the World Wide Web on Wednesday 25th November between 8.00 9.45am. This is a must attend event for anyone in the technology sector as well as those in business and the public sector who use the Internet to interface with their clients and the customers they serve.

Having maintained its position as a world leader in attracting foreign direct investment from the world’s leading technology companies, Ireland must now position itself as a strategic leader in researching and developing new technologies with leading technology companies. Through the work of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUIG, Ireland has become a central player in developing the protocols and technologies which will play a central role in the development of what are now know as semantic technologies.

Further information about the event can be found here

What: Business breakfast on the legal challenges and commercial possibilities of the Semantic Web

Where: Mason Hayes+Curran, South Bank House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4

When: Wednesday 25th November 8.00 9.45am

Web Reservations International (WRI), owner of the Hostelworld.com and boo.com has today announced its acquisition by affiliates of private equity investment firm, Hellman and Friedman LLC.

Last month, we reported a €275m price tag for WRI.

Congratulations to the team, and to founders Ray Nolan & Tom Kennedy, as well as early Angel investors Paddy Holohan and Paul McGuinness

Plink are a small Irish start-up developing image-driven search engines (you take a picture of something, and we recognise the object in the picture).

Their app PlinkArt just made the finals of Google’s Android Developer Challenge

The Plink Art app is a visual search engine for art – take a picture of a painting and our system recognises it and returns the history of the painting, info about the artist, etc. Right now it recognises tens of thousands of famous paintings. We’re working on building it into a next-generation museum tour guide.

The overall winner of the Google contest is determined by public vote. Anyone with an Android phone can download the “Android Developer Challenge 2″ app (just scan this barcode to get the app) to test out and rank the entries.

Maybe with last week’s launch of the first Irish Android handset (HTC Hero from Meteor), we could get some home-team support for Plink App.

Joe Drumgoole from Cloudsplit has just announced that they are finalists in the startup competition of Le Web in Paris in December.

This is a great achievement for Joe and Eamonn Leonard and we’ll be live-tweeting and blogging the entire event from the day before to the day after.

We know of at least one Irish company that secured investment after their appearance at Le Web in previous years. Let’s hope we hear similar from the guys.

Outvesting.org, the online campaign which has raised a €5,000 fund through donations on Twitter is now seeking applications from Irish entrepreneurs. The entire fund will be gifted, no strings attached, to one lucky start-up after a review and voting process.

“We simply asked people to pledge €50 each in the hope that one hundred others would do likewise. Those pledges came rolling in and over the course of four weeks were converted to donations amounting to the target €5,000″, said John Keyes, one of those behind the project.

Applications can be submitted to the Outvesting.org website until November 21st and the winner will be announced on December 7th. Those who donated to the fund will review applications and vote on the start-up with best potential.

“There’s obviously a groundswell of opinion that entrepreneurs should do more to help ourselves at this time of banking and economic crises. We just tapped into the generosity and goodwill that exists within the start-up community in Ireland”, said James Corbett, the other half of the Outvesting team.

Congratulation to John and James for a brilliant idea – and best of luck to all the entrants.

Created for obsessive-compulsive designers, Build is no ordinary web conference. From internationally renowned speakers to a jam-packed social calendar, Build is bringing the best of the web to Belfast this week.

The conference brings together the very best knowledge and resources on hot topics including the evolving web, seductive design, passion, expertise, usability and a richer typographic web.

Internationally renowned speakers include renowned American web design consultant and author Eric Meyer, EveryBlock co-founder and previous interactive designer for Apple, Wilson Miner and lead designer for Virb.com, Ryan Sims. They will be joined over the course of the event by Cardiff-based author and design consultant Mark Boulton, CEO of one of the UKs largest web development studios, Clearleft’s Andy Budd and celebrated Belgium-based user interface designer Tim Van Damme.

The workshop day sees Andy Budd presenting a full-day session on Guerrilla Usability Testing in addition to homegrown talent the Web Standardistas speaking on HTML 5 and CSS 3 as well as Phil Strain from Belfast-based user experience lab Ecliptic speaking on Accessibility 2.0.

The conference is also accompanied by a small programme of fringe events, including an evening lecture from London design studio Airside and a screening of the Gary Hustwit documentary film, Objectified.

Full information, tickets and registration are available at http://buildconference.com.

At the recent Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards, quite a few Web2Ireland companies were represented.

Daft Media achieved the top ranking in this year's Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards.

Others included Lincor Solutions, Newbay, Car Trawler, IQ Content, Exoftware, DirectSki, Newsweaver, Saadian, Hosting365, etc.

Check out the Top 50 here

Facebook officially opened their EMEA HQ in Dublin today.

Currently Facebook employ 70 people, and they intend to double the workforce over the coming year (see vacancies), under the leadership of Colm Long, who has provided great support for the Facebook Garage Ireland initiatives

Facebook also has over 1m users in Ireland – which is pretty impressive.

Cork based, MPSTOR, developer of data storage management products today announced that it has raised €1.5m in new investment, led by the Bank of Ireland Kernel Capital Fund and Asian Investment firm Winning Tack.

The company today also announced the appointment of Mr. Kevin Haverty as its new CEO with immediate effect. Mr. Haverty was previously CEO of Mentec International Ltd.

MPSTOR is based at the Cork Institute of Technology's Rubicon Centre and also has an office in Dublin.