Web 2 Ireland

This is the sort of news I love reporting. We now have an App School in Ireland. Over the course of 5 days you can learn how to build iPhone Apps. Run by SQT Training, Patrick Collison and Damien Mulley, this will give you all the skills you get to get your App built and launched. At only €1500 for the week, that’s a bargain considering how much traditional programming training courses cost. The first course is on in the Castleknock Hotel Dublin from July 20-24.

One of the best courses I ever did was back in 2006 when Ryan Carson presented his one day workshop, “A-Z: How to Build a Web App”. Because it wasn’t just about tech but also about all the pitfalls in trying to launch an App, it enabled us to avoid many common mistakes. My sense is that App School could do the same.

As I said on Twitter earlier, I believe that iPhone & Android development could be to techie teenagers what the ZX Spectrum, C64 and BBC Micro were to my generation. I am what I am today because I got a Speccy when I was 14. I taught myself Basic, Forth and Z80 assembler. I even had games published in magazines. Imagine being 15 years old and having people download your App from the iPhone App Store or Android Market. The buzz!

I want to see the next generation of people coming out of technical course in third level education with at least one mobile app and one webapp in their portfolio. The days when Java skills got you a job in a bank are over.

Well done everyone involved in getting App School launched. Looking forward to seeing what the Alumni develop.

Competition is _always_ a good thing and I’m excited to see the launch of the Irish Web Awards by Damien Mulley. The existing events in Ireland have served a particular niche for several years but there is a rich range of sites out there that never get a look-in, mainly by virtue of cost, lack of mainstream profile and perhaps because they are not commercial.

Nominations will open soon and I already have a bunch of names in my head for the various categories. The event is on October 11th in the Radisson SAS Dublin. Hopefully we’ll see plenty of nominations made by all those across the road in UCD.

Sponsorship slots are still available with the anchor sponsor being Moviestar.ie

Damien Mulley gets community like very few other people in the industry. His ideas are always worth listening to and, more importantly, worth acting on. He has just kicked off a real corker called The Tuesday Push. Every second Tuesday, a startup is selected from those who put themselves forward and lots of us blog about them on the same day.

It’s one of those simple but potentially incredibly powerful ways of getting us all noticed. There is nothing nefarious about it, no PPP in the background or Google gaming. Just write in an honest way about a new start-up every two weeks. The posts will be even more useful to everyone if they contain constructive criticism and ideas rather than puff-pieces.

We would encourage those who read but don’t write to Digg/Stumble/Delicious the posts they really like. And obviously if you are a startup, register your interest in being covered.

The first start-up to be covered is the brilliant PutPlace. I’ll be doing my review of it later over on Argolon. Damien has already done his. We’ll also do aggregated posts here on Web2Ireland with links to all the coverage.

If you don’t mind me pimping LouderVoice too much, you can also make use of us to help spread the word. Just add the tag “review” and the tag “rating=N” (where N is from 1-5) to your posts. If you then register your blog’s RSS feed as a “FlagTag” feed on LouderVoice, we’ll pick those posts up and they’ll get indexed very quickly as reviews on Google. If you don’t have/want a blog, just write the review directly on LV and we’ll link it to all the others.

This initiative will only work if the community gets behind it. So instead of thinking “what a good idea”, go review PutPlace, now!