The Startup 2.0 Competition has been around for a few years now and has always bubbled up some interesting companies that are not on the usual tech blog circuit. This year is all about Mobile and they are looking for the best Mobile Startups and Apps across Europe.
EI has announced the 10 winners of this round of the Internet & Games Competitive Start Fund. Each start-up gets €50k for 10% equity stake by EI. 120 companies applied.
Digital Mines, a new Irish Cloud Computing provider, has just announced a funding round of €750,000. This includes Delta Partners first investment from their Bank of Ireland start-up and Emerging Sectors equity fund. Enterprise Ireland and existing investors were also part of the round.
The company is run by Ed Byrne is who well known to everyone in the web space in Ireland. Ed was General Manager of Hosting 365, which was sold last year to SunGard AS.
The whole idea behind Digital Mines is to take the power and usefulness of cloud services such as Amazon AWS and make them accessible to business users. Currently most cloud offerings required far too much technical knowledge. Digital Mines takes all of that and turns it into a set of one-click operations.
The Delta investment is not just important for Digital Mines, it is also sends a strong message that the Seed Funds in Ireland are out there investing in new and exciting companies despite all the doom and gloom. You can expect to see many more announcements from Shay and the team in Delta in the coming months.
Excuse the blatant pimping but I thought it was worth mentioning the IIA Event that is on this Thursday afternoon in the Burlington in Dublin. It’s called “8 More Ways to Sell Even More Stuff” and the focus is on Content, Analysis and Store Format.
Yours truly is one of the speakers with my LouderVoice hat on and I’ll be digging into how Customer Reviews are the lynchpin of Social Commerce.
To be absolutely brutal about it, Ireland is years behind the US and UK in the adoption of newer approaches around e-commerce. I hope the material at this event will make a lot of people wake up to the possibilities.
If you are already selling online or you are thinking about it, then you will hear about what is important now and in the next two years. At €99.99 (€79.99 for IIA Members), it’s a steal.
The Facebook Garage on Wednesday was an absolute thrill to be a part of. We had 140 sign-ups so, using our normal measures around free events, we expected 50-60. In fact it peaked at over 90 people! Luckily the lovely Gateway Ireland building was easily able to accommodate everyone.
We have a bunch of people to thank:
Louise Byrne from Gateway Ireland who took care of absolutely everything. It wouldn’t have happened without her
John McColgan for giving us the use of the building
Niamh Walsh and Will Peat who helped Louise throughout the day
Alan Duggan for helping to control the flood of arrivals
Colm Doyle and the Facebook Ireland crew for all their support and the schwag
Brynn Holland, Julia Lam and the Facebook US crew for all of their support and the Garage Pack
Everyone for turning up
And of course…..
The Speakers:
The Garage opened with Richard Delevan of BetaPond talking about Facebook Places
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URI4BobgTtE
This was followed by Ben Arent and Jonathan Siegel providing insights into the the challenges around different sign-up flows and abandonment on RightRental.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a5Jgvb1W_g
Then we had David Johnston from OWJO talking about f-Commerce and in-Tab stores.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0UqvIYkB6U
Sebastien Sicot from Bluecube Interactive gave some genuinely surprising stats on competitions, engagement and incentives.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX-A8k3F3-o
Sean O’Sullivan from Rococo Software talked about Local Social and how proximity adds a layer of personalisation to location
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHeqeQXGH3k
Finally Colm Doyle from Facebook gave a run-down on Places, Credits and the latest news on the Platform. Of course if we’d had the Garage on Thursday we’d have been there all night with questions on the changes to Pages
As I said at the end of the event, we want as wide a range of people speaking at the Garages as possible. Whether you are a lone developer or a large company doing interesting, useful or fun things on the Facebook Platform, we want to hear you speak.
Why not contact web2ireland.editor@gmail.com now if you think you’d like to speak at the next Garage.
The plan in 2011 was to do one Garage per Quarter but the feedback on Wednesday was that you want them more often. So we’ll aim to have the next one much sooner. Keep an eye on Web2Ireland.
The event will bring together people with different skillsets to build prototype web/mobile applications which could form the basis of a commercial opportunity; more specifically, the event will bring together software developers, graphics design folks and business strategists. During the event, the participants divide into teams, each of which builds a basic prototype of their concept and develops ideas on how it could form the basis of a startup.
Startup Weekends take place all over the world and are generally considered to be a place to learn about the startup world, get to know folks who are interested in doing something in the space, bounce around some ideas and, importantly, try to turn some of them into reality. Some of the teams formed during startup weekends have gone on to much bigger and better things, e.g. Foodspotting and memolane.
The event has been held once before in Dublin – May 2010 – and was a fantastic success: of the 6 teams that were formed throughout the weekend, 4 of them subsequently went on to enter the NDRC Launchpad incubator to bring their ideas from some basic concept prototype developed over the course of the weekend to a working system with a potential commercial case. (More info here).
The response to the weekend so far has been great – ticket sales have been strong and we’re expecting the event to sell out. Tickets for non-technical folk – people who have neither developer nor graphics skills – have sold out already and the amount of technical folk in attendance is increasing steadily.
We’re reaching out to developers and/or graphics design folks who are interested in the startup scene – it promises to be a great weekend, with some great people, great ideas and great energy and who knows, it might be the place where some great Irish startups are born!
Tickets are on sale here. There is a modest cost for participation which mainly covers the catering during the event. Further information can be found here.
I met Mike from supply.ie yesterday and was hugely impressed by this new business which only launched in December. The premise is simple: put up a spec for a printing job on the site, it automatically sends it to all the relevant suppliers they have in the system and a percentage of those quote for the business. You then pick the quote which makes most sense to you.
Easy Peasy.
When Mike told me about some of the cost savings he has seen, I was pretty shocked. But it’s about more than that, it’s a massive time saver. We got a big print job done last year and it took huge effort ringing around, waiting for callbacks, sending the job spec etc etc. Supply.ie deals with all of that for you.
The service is free during the pilot period and well worth a look.
23rd of May 2011 by conor
7th of 
