Web 2 Ireland

Paddy has pulled together a great line up of speakers, including old Web2Ireland friends Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier and others.

Last of the Early Bird Tickets on sale with a few opportunities to sponsor at event by calling David on +353 1 4429284

Profitero, a Dublin HQ startup, was one of the recent winners of SeedCamp

Profitero is an easy-to-use solution that monitors competitor prices for online retailers, benchmarks their prices against competition and suggests activities to make their price competitive.

The founders, Kanstantsin Chernysh & Alex Usikov are both originally from Minsk, Belarus. Profitero founders are serial entrepreneursin online retail and SEO with strong mathematical backgrounds and expertise in high-performance algorithms, product classification and data mining.

The team had the following thoughts on Seedcamp:

We have worked a lot with Seedcamp mentors in July – September. On one hand, we experienced excitement from investors and mentors about our ideas and technology. On the other hand, we found some good advice on retail problems and product areas to focus on.

The team are working with a variety of UK retailers that have already signed up for the service, like Debenhams, Warehouse Express, The Hut Group, House of Fraser, CleverBox and others.

It’s been around three years since we launched our website RevaHealth.com and during that time the most common response to hearing the name was “Aviva Health?” or “Vivas Health?” or some other brand name that rhymes with Reva. We knew we were onto a loser and that we’d have to change the name eventually, but we kept putting it off.

Finally, with traffic growing past the 500,000 per month point we decided we’d have to bite the bullet and after quite a lot of discussion we settled on WhatClinic.com. We figure it’s easy to remember, hard to mistake (the spelling) and it tells people exactly what the website is about – helping you to choose a clinic. Hopefully you agree.

As ever we’re trying to help people find clinics in their local area, like dentists in Dublin, and further afield, like cosmetic surgery clinics in Turkey. Most of our traffic comes from the UK, Ireland and the US, but in the last month alone we’ve had visits from 193 countries or territories according to Google Analytics, another reason why the new, simpler name became so important.

If you’ve any thoughts about the new name or the service in general, or you’ve re-branded yourself recently, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Geraldine LE MEUR has just announced the annual Le Web Startup competition. This is one of the most important ways you can get your start-up in front of a European audience of tech media, influencers and investors. Previous Irish entrants include Cloudsplit, LouderVoice, Pixenate and Touristr.

There is expected to be a much stronger than usual Irish contingent heading over this year. Do your start-up a favour and enter before October 15th.

The Start-Up Competition will take place on Dec 8, 2010 and there is no fee to participate. They will select the best 16 applications to demonstrate their products on a dedicated stage throughout the day.

The 3 winners of the competition will then have a chance to present their companies on the LeWeb main stage, during a special session on December 9.

Selected Startups will get 2 passes to the conference for team members who will demo on stage and a DemoPod in a lounge dedicated to the Startup Competitors.

This a guest post by Keith Bohanna co-founder of dbtwang. Keith is an experienced internet consultant/trainer to many Irish organizations, and is involved with numerous initiatives @ startups in Ireland. Keith participated in the first iGap Programme promoted by Internet Growth Alliance & Enterprise Ireland

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Between November 2009 and April 2010 15 Irish internet businesses were brought through 6 days of workshops and coaching to force them to refine and focus their business models and commercial propositions.

It worked really well and this post give you our take on it as one of the participants.

First of all we had to pitch for the place – last year over 40 businesses went for the 15 places and you can expect that to go up significantly this Autumn when the call for iGAP 2 goes out as each of us as participants are passionate advocates of the programme and process.

Having been awarded a place we turned up at the first of 6 day long workshops. Key differentiator here between this and some other programmes – the majority of the workshops were lead by an experienced entrepreneur based in either the UK or the USA.

So we experienced:

Jonathan Dillon – Strategy and Value Proposition

Coming out of a background of Yahoo Strategic Partnerships and Acquisitions he now works with technology businesses across 3 continents.
His session was about the broad focus of our businesses – the market we were after, our growth ambitions and our positioning.

This was the first time I had heard the acronym BHAG – Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

Ed Bussey – Monetisation and Revenue Models

Ed is a serial entrepreneur who has been successfully involved in figleaves.co.uk and then ZYB. He now runs Clash Media.
He spent the day working through the various models open to internet and technology businesses and then helped us explore the likely parameters around how each model works in reality – ie how we should manage our expectations and assumptions when forecasting.

Justin Knecht – Customer Centric Service and Product Design

Justin straddled the academic and entrepreneurial worlds at the time with a post in the Centre for Design Innovation in Sligo and a flegling start-up – Perfect Pints. Since then he has committed full time to the world of self employment!

He explored the fuzzy world of brand and services with us and forced us to consider the practical impact of customer touch points as we continued to design and implement our services and solutions.

Sean Ellis – Marketing & Customer Acquisition

Sean was the closest thing (next to Jonathan) to a consultant on the programme – but he has some pedigree. An advisor to businesses such as KISSmetrics and Performable he is one of a number of A list bloggers in the area of lean start-ups and metrics.

With his session being in January we missed the day (we were attending the NAMM trade show in LA). He covered the key need to focus early and often on customer needs – with the Product/Market fit being crucial. So you establish exactly what people want and will pay for before you start expensive marketing and sales campaigns.

Oren Michels – Internet Business Development

Oren runs Mashery – an API enabler and general powerhouse in San Francisco. He has also founded businesses (WiFinder) and been involved at senior level in Feedster.

He gave us a great grounding in Business Development – helping to position it in terms of sales and also providing a process by which business partnerships could be identified, flitered and negotiated.
He also said that API's are essential! Which is very likely true for any internet business intent on scaling

Brian Caufield – Preparing for Funding

Brian has been a VC (Trinity VC), a founder (SImilarity Systems) and an angel investor. He was also the programme lead for iGAP.

He laid out the reality of funding in Ireland – how the game is played at each stage, what exactly those stages are and what to expect as you move through each of them.

Thats some detail – what was the outcome? Based on the output (a 10 minute pitch session to a panel of entrepreneurs in front of 50 people) I can honestly say that every single one of us as participants could see major improvement in each others propositions.

We had heard them all in the opening sessions in November and by 21st April every business was more clearly focused with much a stronger value proposition and a compelling reason to invest in them. That is a very tangible outcome – it makes each of us much more likely to succeed by virtue of positioning, focused effort and better communication.

Specifically for dbTwang we may well have received the prize for best improved pitch. We started with wooly aspirations (in the hairy Aran Knit category) around a social network for guitar lovers and aspirations towards premium content.

We are about to launch in August (just waiting on that elusive merchant account) a premium service called Guardian which will help musicians and guitar enthusiasts protect their guitars from loss. It addresses a specific pain in the marketplace and is a very clear proposition with strong positioning.

Thanks are due to the guys in the Internet Growth Alliance – Colm Lyon, Ray Nolan and Dylan Collins principally – whose experience of successful startups helped them formulate a programme which is directly relevant to helping high potential startups become global faster and more successfully. They managed to get the attention of Enterprise Ireland where Ray Walsh and Jennifer Condon carved out funding and Sarah Buckley ran things.

Final point worth noting – while the programme is aimed at High Potential Startups not every participant who started iGAP 1 had HPSU status. That might change this time round in iGap 2

Apply now for iGap 2

TribalCity launched iphone game Into the Twilight which has reached number 1 in its category in 15 countries in its first three weeks on the App Store.

You can grab the game here

They have a series of games coming out for smartphones and Facebook over the next few months, according to co-founder Alan Duggan.

The new fund is focused on software and biotech. Like many incubation-style setups, the amounts involved are €50k with 3-months of Genesis/Hothouse style support and training. Hopefully there will also be a Y Combinator approach to rolodexes and introductions.

The first round of investment will open for applicants in October this year, with the first four successful entrepreneurs being announced before the end of the year.

All the details over on their blog. Thanks to Gordon McConnell Deputy-CEO of the Ryan Academy for letting us know.

Stockbyte founder, Jerry Kennelly has just announced his new startup – Tweak.com

Tweak is an online self-service design library which makes tweakable press advertising and marketing collateral available to users at the touch of a button. Simply change colour, copy, photos, logos and Calls to Action, to create a compelling piece of advertising and marketing.

Check this video out (25 mins in)

CEPIC: Jerry Kennelly: Secrets of His Dramatic Exit from REELDEALHD on Vimeo.

tip: James Corbett and Learnpipe

We ran an online poll for a few weeks to find Ireland’s top angel investor – looking for the “Ron Conway” in Ireland. HBan also had a little competition to find the Top Angel

Brian Caulfield is the Top Angel investor in both the Web2Ireland poll, and also by HBAN (coincidence !!)

Bill Liao, serial entrepreneur, co-founder of Xing and philantropist has just indicated that he wants to bring TechStars to Ireland!

If you don’t know what TechStars is, in their own words:

Get your startup funded and off the ground while learning from the best. Get up to $18,000 in seed funding for your new company, plus the chance to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the program. At the end of the three month program, it’s your company. TechStars is the best way to get your new company off and running and on a path to success. TechStars companies get 40+ educational opportunities during the program. Learn from over 50 highly accomplished mentors.

I’ve only met Bill briefly and have his book Stone Soup on my desk waiting to be read. His energy and positivity is infectious. Given what he has achieved both in business and through his work in Neo/WeForest, I have no doubt TechStars is going to happen and deliver results for the startup community here.