Web 2 Ireland

I love posting good news and this is just wonderful to hear. Niall Harbison and the crew at iFoods have just announced a €400k investment.

It proves that great businesses with a world class team can still secure serious money. We’ve been fans of the iFoods concept since day one. They are going to be serious players in the food web-site niche. eMarketer did an article on this during the week.

According to comScore, food sites attracted 45.6 million unique visitors in September 2008, up 10% from 2007more than double the rate of total Internet growth in the US.

Whilst the funding environment is very very tough right now, we are still seeing glimmers of light in the gloom.

The latest is dbTwang, a site for guitar owners, which closed its Angel round yesterday. Keith Bohanna and co-founder Fintan Blake-Kelly worked for many months with new director Gerry McQuaid (ex-O2) to raise the funds.

They are using Contrast for the design of dbTwang and Lunar Logic in Krakow for the development, aiming for early closed beta around the 3rd week of February.

If you have any good news on the funding front, drop a line to web2ireland DOT editor AT gmail DOT com

Ruth Spencer from The European Journalism Centre (EJC) contacted me to let us know about The European Blogging Competition they are launching in Brussels from 25th to 27th of January coming.

The theme is TH!NK ABOUT IT and the focus of the competition is the European Parliament Elections 2009. EJC wants to offer a platform for journalism students, aspiring journalists and bloggers to express their views on European topics as well as to report and cover the elections.

They want to have three bloggers from each country attending the launch event and will cover the travel costs. The timeline is:

• Launch event: 25 January, 2009 – 27 January, 2009
• Blogging: 1 February, 2009 – 9 June, 2009
• Competition results: 12 June, 2009

If this is of interest to you, read all the details and apply at www.thinkaboutit.eu

If you are wondering what this has to do with Web2Ireland, I’d simply say that the direction the EU takes over the next few years, particularly in how it deals with a global recession, will have direct impact on start-ups here.