Web 2 Ireland

Our roving Web2Ireland reporters popped down to Trinity College on Tuesday for the cmypitch event

An excellent event, with 10 start-ups pitching in front of 5 Dragons and a room full of investors, with short snappy 4 minute pitches were the order of the day followed by 4 minutes grilling from the Dragons.

The dragons were
- James Carroll of Investor First
- the very well known Brian Caulfield
- Maurice Roche of Delta Partners
- but the real stars were Pat Brazal and Eamonn Fallon who were invariably spot on with their feedback.

Getting successful entrepreneurs like these as angel investors in your start-up is one sure fire recipe for success. Kudos also to Maurice Roche who led very admirably from the VC angle. It was good to see the most active house in town, Delta, participating.

On to the start-ups which included some overseas entrants, which we think is a good idea as home grown talent needs to know there’s much competition out there for those investment dollars.

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Event Elephant offers online tools to make organising conferences easier. Eamon O’Brien started out with a very text based pitch but kept the best wine till last with great product shots towards the end.

Sentry Wireless gave a great pitch focused on their SMS spam guard for the Asian market with some great partners, including Acision, lined up. A very polished performance from Matt Norton.

Soko Health led with a video pitch, which works well for one person at a PC but not for a room full of investors who come to hear you and not a recording. Product become much clearer with Dragon questioning which Aidan McKenna handled admirably.

Learn 2 Lingo led by Shira Rubin is an online web cam based language school that focuses on partnering (not competing) with their bricks & mortar language school brethren. They have also inked some large corporate deals, notably with Lonely Planet and Lovells. Dragons seemed to get tripped up here on scaling, but we thought this was the best pitch of the night. Suspect they need to meet the Hostel World guys?

Intelligent Comms presented their Telecom Expense Management Platform for large corporates. Walter Tyser led on this one.

Eplixo offer video conferencing on the mobile via premium SMS pricing. Gerard Brandon battled hard with the dragons to assure them background mobile noise/reception was not a usability issue.

Rocudo presented their online re-mix solution to release the inner DJ in you. Chicken and egg scenario loomed large here but Culann MacCabe batted well on that score.

Headway Software announced the second coming of their code base management solution. Chris Chedgey was very confident that this time around, they had a winner.

Simchronise presented on their solution for mobile back-up again focused on the Asian market. David Inglis and the team have much sector experience, so one to watch.

Alan Mulcahy closed with Spirit of Ireland, and thankfully declared upfront that they are not looking for investment at this time, as their needs are great – need €9 billion to flood the Ring Of Kerry and make one giant Hydro Electric plant with a bit of wind power thrown in too!

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Dragons in the end voted Event Elephant as the most investable, so congratulations to Eamon O’Brien and his team.

Entrepreneurs, get you to cmypitch.ie and upload your pitch.

Best of luck to Emmet Kilduff and team as their stated objective of getting more angel investors participating in the Irish market is one which we whole heartily support.

Last year at the IWTC keynote event – the view was that all investment monies were going to commercial properties in the likes of Berlin – and where was our “Ron Conway” – who actually sold his first business to CBT – and then went onto to make hundreds of angel investments including the likes of Google, etc.

On twitter recently we asked “Who are the top 10 Irish Angel investors ?”

Response – 3 names so far. Ray Nolan, Paddy Holohan and Pat Lynch. [we welcome any more names/suggestions]

Related to Angel investing in Ireland, cmypitch.ie is hosting an event Dublin on 22nd September 2009. The “Dragons” are Pat Brazel, Brian Caulfield, Eamonn Fallon and Maurice Roche.

The uber-connected Irish Opportunist, Paul Walsh, has recently joined forces with Angels Den, and Paul will soon be announcing some exciting new initiatives for the Irish market.

To cap it off, Chris Horn, in today’s Irish Times, has an excellent piece on the Smart Economy – Strategy

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In what sectors can Ireland win? Digital media, renewable energy and novel telecommunications come to mind. But whatever sector, civil servants should not guess what is going to be hot in the years ahead; rather the State agencies should follow and endorse those angels and founders who put their own money, business experience and commitment to work.

Any suggestions on how to grow the Angel investing scene in Ireland ? please comment….

Head on over to cmypitch, have a poke around and maybe write a few words about them.

Fergus covered them here last week. And I covered them on the Cork OpenCoffee blog too.

cmypitch, founded by Irishman, Emmett Kilduff, has just launched in Ireland

“It will connect entrepreneurs with investors. cmypitch.ie provides businesses with the unique opportunity to upload their own video pitch onto the secure platform, for a registered network of investors to watch and inform their investment decisions. In addition, entrepreneurs can learn how to become “investor ready” by watching video tips from the best Irish (e.g. Eddie Jordan, Ray Nolan) and international (e.g. Doug Richard, James Caan) entrepreneurs and by downloading the best ‘how to’ guides.

For investors, cmypitch.ie has the potential to open up all of Ireland’s best investment opportunities and makes identifying the most attractive deals more efficient. Investors can save valuable time, allowing them to not only assess the business opportunity but also the people behind the proposition. Pitches can be filtered by size, sector and rating – all key considerations for investors. Investors can also receive email alerts when a new pitch is added that matches their preferred criteria.”

cmypitch.ie will also hold regular offline pitching events called “cmypitch Live”, where entrepreneurs get the unique opportunity to pitch to a room full of investors. Events like these will offer entrepreneurs the opportunity to complement their video pitch with more traditional face-to-face pitching and networking.

cmypitch.ie has been endorsed by some very successful Irish entrepreneurs: Eddie Jordan (F1), Philip Lynch (IAWS, One51), Patrick Brazel (former Chairman of Irish Software Association), James Morris (Windmill Lane, TV3) and Tony Kilduff (Kindle).

cmypitch.ie has already signed several partners: Bank of Scotland (Ireland), Deloitte, The Irish Times, Microsoft and William Fry.