Web 2 Ireland

Big congrats to the MAXROAM team for landing the only Irish Award in the Europas last night. They won the Best Hardware or Gadget Startup award for the MAXROAM Roaming SIM.

The full list of winners is here.

Two Irish companies announced deal with Global impact.

Hostelworld.com, the leading provider of online reservations to the budget, independent and youth travel market recently announced the launch of its Travel Store which includes the TravelnRoam mobile SIM powered by MAXRoam.

Now when travellers make bookings in over 20,000 hostels and budget hotels in 170 countries worldwide, they have the opportunity to further save on their travelling bills with a TravelnRoam mobile SIM.

Pat Phelan, Cubic Telecom CEO, makers of MAXRoam said: “We’re absolutely delighted to partner and align ourselves with HostelWorld.com, a massive online success and a brand that’s respected worldwide.

Everyone from business people to backpackers travel the world and TravelnRoam can be there on their phone saving them considerable amounts on their incoming and outgoing calls. If it’s making a business call or in a hostel in China taking a call from Mum back home, we’re there watching that bill for you.”

Santina Doherty, VP of Commercial Development at Hostelworld.com said We're excited to launch our partnership with TravelnRoam. Hostelworld.com is global market leader for hostel and budget accommodation and TravelnRoam will provide a winning solution to our customers when they travel and roam, reducing call costs and staying in touch.

Pat Phelan pinged us earlier to let us know about their latest deal – Buzzroam, which is a strategic partnership between Global Roaming Solutions Ltd (Hong Kong) and Cubic Telecom (Ireland).

“Buzzroam is the only GSM SIM card available in Asia which not only allows you to access cheap voice and data roaming using one dedicated international number, but also gives you the ability to forward your regular mobile number to your Buzzroam SIM card. Using strategic partnerships in over 200 countries around the world Buzzroam has the potential to save thousands of dollars on the cost of roaming charges just about anywhere in the world.”

Pat and the team at Maxroam / Cubic Telecom have just announced a deal with the international charity organisation, the Mission to Seafarers, according to the Irish Examiner

The service known as SeaRoam and will be made available to the 1.7 million seafarers worldwide at 250 ports.

Qik and MaxRoam. If you travel and if you like video, then you’ll be a very happy bunny this morning.

Cubic Telecom have just announced announced a partnership with Qik to bring massive savings to Qik users who love to stream video while travelling.  The Qik SIM also provides big savings on voice calls, email, web browsing and texting while they travel. I love their tagline:  ”Go mobile, not broke”.

Just picked up from Pat Phelan, founder and CEO of Maxroam’s blog on the news that MAXroam has partnered with Dopplr

Congratulations to Pat and team – and no doubt this is the first of many white label partnerships we will see from them in 2009

Press Release below…

Cubic Telecom partners with Dopplr to help travelers save thousands on roaming mobile user

MAXroam, the mobile roaming product from Cork-based Cubic Telecom, will be available in Dopplr’s online travel shop. Dopplr is an online service for smarter travel that helps the world’s most frequent travelers meet up with their trusted friends and colleagues around the globe.

Today Dopplr announced an online store with MAXroam as one of the key products. The store, which is available to all Dopplr travelers, contains a number of special offers on products and services to make travel better.

Speaking about the partnership, Cubic Telecom’s CEO Pat Phelan stated “We’re delighted to be working with Dopplr. MaxRoam’s SIM card will enable Dopplr travelers to save a minimum of 70% on their mobile travel bills.”

Within nine months of its launch in September 2007, MaxRoam had saved travelers more than $1 million on their roaming mobile bill and almost $1.7 million to date. These savings will now be extended to Dopplr members with a Dopplr SIM and website to manage their mobile usage while traveling.

About Dopplr – www.dopplr.com

Dopplr is an online service for smarter travel. Dopplr helps you make more of your travels by sharing your future trips privately with friends and colleagues. The service then highlights coincidences, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Tokyo when you will be there too. You can use Dopplr on your personal computer or mobile phone. It links with many popular online calendars and social networks.

About Cubic Telecom

Cubic Telecom is one of the world’s first and largest suppliers of travel SIMs, which abolish high roaming fees that are usually charged by incumbent Mobile Network Operators (MNOs).

The company offers a 100% white label platform where MVNOs can customize everything as their own, including having their own branding of SIMs and web portal, plus customized audio prompts and short-codes.

MVNOs can set up multiple sub-distributors, each with their own discrete pricing, and customization, through Cubic’s innovative new offering.

I had a pleasure of attending LeWeb last week – and here are the top 10 takeaways

Meeting Irish in attendance
Very low Irish presence – Pat Phelan from Maxroam, Conor O’Neill from Loudervoice [who also covered event for ReadwriteWeb]
- Brian Bastible and colleagues from IDA

Connecting with People
Lots of great folks attending from the US, UK, Germany, France and Spain.

Old School is best school
Got to meet and chat with Dennis, Doc and JP.

Glimpse of future
Dave Morin – facebook connect, Marissa Mayer – Google, and Susan Wu – Virtual Goods

Startups – no Irish… come on !!
Startup Competition – some interesting startups – and very worthy winner – some Web2Ireland companies would have done well at this event….

Failure – true stories
Morten Lund was one highlight of the event – off the cuff – very honest in his story.

Funding is hard in Europe
Lots of VCs in attendance [none from Ireland] – and the VC panel was interesting – see video. Key themes – build products that VCs will use [Fred Wilson, Martin Varsasky, Jeff Clavier] – and they don’t really believe Govt intervention @ funding is key [more on that later] – and NO doesnt mean NO.

Go Big or Go Home
Lots of usual talk @ valley versus Europe and can we build a big European web company.

Annual LeWeb bitch fight
Great fun from the sideline

Next Year
Rumour has it that the International D Conference will happen in Dublin next year

And no doubt LeWeb 09 will be another enjoyable event.

Maxroam launches V2 – with its MaxRoam service = on its 12 months anniversary – Congratulations to Pat and his team

Some details from Pat’s blog

12 months ago today we launched MAXroam at TC40, today in honour of that event we launch MAXroam V2
So what's new?
Firstly and most importantly
Data roaming from 0.005/kb
USA Roaming from €0.39 per minute
These are two huge milestones for us, USA as it the most visited country by global cellular customers and Data as its the last frontier for the rip-off operators.
* New, more user friendly design
* Improved online store allowing you to buy more than one SIM per order
* New videos guides to help you use MAXroam better
* New blog
* More options for airtime amounts with 3DSecure and Verify By Visa I don't see any issues
* Improved Call Billing
* Auto Top Up Never run out of credit, set a minimum level of credit and top up by a specified amount
* Data from 0.005/kb
* USA Roaming from €0.39 per minute
* Coverage now in 175 countries with over 450 partner carriers

Send on any news tips to us at web2ireland.editor AT gmail.com

. MUZU TV – Dublin based startup just launches [Thanks Joe for note]. From their site “Your Music Network – Where bands, artists, festivals, venues, broadcasters, music magazines and more broadcast their music TV on the web.”

Techcrunch meetup – some updates from Mike Butcher on Thursday.

PutPlace gets some readwriteweb love – on their Public beta

Maxroam drives lower phone call prices – and gets ready to launch version2.0

TripPlanr from Jan and his team at TouristRepublic – get coverage on SiliconRepublic – in partnership with Deri – good example of co-operation with research institutes in Ireland.

Pitch Robin Klein – from TAG - see video with Loic

Interesting mobile social service – Locle – especially given latest m&a activity @ plazes and zyb. Rumour has it that a well know telecoms disruptor is an advisor.

SeedCorn Competition – has a record prize fund of €280,000 – which makes some other global startup competitions look small in comparison.

Events – Salesforce mashup/developer/platform event in Dublin – Tour De Force – June 30th

Follow us – We're on twitter – http://twitter.com/web2ireland

Just saw over on Pat Phelan’s blog that MAXroam has saved their customers over a million dollars in roaming charges since they launched. That’s one hell of an achievement in nine months.

I still remember them blowing everyone away at TC40. They so should have won the grand prize there even if the billionaire Marc Andreessen didn’t understand why anyone would want to save money on roaming mobile charges

Now if only Pat could do something about roaming data, I’d be forced to marry him.