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.

The Europas, the TechCrunch Europe Awards 2010 for European tech companies, will be held on November 19 in London. Entrants have been initially populated from their startup database,  Crunchbase, but everyone can vote in all the categories here.

If you want to suggest a company, including your own, that you think should be included, then leave a comment in the relevant category. Unlike many Irish awards, it isn’t pay to play.

This is a really great opportunity to get your start-up some visibility with the heavy hitters in Europe.

The inaugural Techcrunch Europe Award nominees have been announced and there are plenty of Irish companies in there. It’s a public vote, so head on over and keep the flag flying for a lot of great apps and businesses.

The awards are particularly gratifying because there are so many businesses that are new to me in the list. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in Europe. Now if only an Irish VC could dazzle everyone and become worthy to join the 2010 nominees.

The Irish are (and let me know if we’ve missed any):

• Decisions For Heroes, Best Social Innovation (which benefits society), (Vote Here)
• Mobanode, Best Mobile Startup, (Vote Here)
• LouderVoice, Best Web Application Or Service, (Vote Here)
• Joe Drumgoole, Best Startup Founder(s), (Vote Here)
• Dial2Do, Best Mobile Startup, (Vote Here)
• Locle, Best Mobile Application, (Vote Here)
• MuzuTV, Best Entertainment Application or Service, (Vote Here)
• CoClarity, Best Enterprise/B2B Startup (Vote Here)
• MaxRoam, Best Mobile Application, (Vote Here)

Mike from Techrunch did an interview with Eoghan from Contrast at recent FOWA Dublin

Interview: Contrast – the guys behind Qwitter who have global ambitions.

Techcrunch France editor – and LGiLab VC in Israel – Ouriel Ohayon has a great piece on Can governments become good VCs?

This topic came up in VC discussion at last week’s LeWeb – and Ireland was mentioned as an example.

Enterprise Ireland in a June press release provided an update on the 2007-2012 Seed and Venture Capital (VC) Programme

To date €148.75m has been committed to 8 Seed & Venture Funds.

Of these, 6 have completed first closings, including

- Delta Partners [100m fund]
- AIB Seed Capital Fund [30m fund]
- Atlantic Bridge Ventures
- Kernel Capital Partners [70m fund]
- Fountain Healthcare Partners – not for technology – life science fund.
- NCB Ventures – [75m fund] – closed its fund in November.

€275m funds readily available – and from EI press release – 8 funds [2 funds still to close] have succeeded in raising in excess of €500m for investment in early stage and growing companies.

Enterprise Ireland announced that €30m is remaining and is now available for co-investment – and a recent advertisement in the FT is targetting UK VCs for partnership.

Given the recent UK news @ Government funds for NESTA, the UK's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, will oversee a £1bn emergency venture capital fund aimed at pre-revenue technology start-up firms – and the follow on discussion – We’d like to hear from Web2Ireland companies who have raised monies from these EI backed funds [make sure you update your Crunchbase details]

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.

A never-ending conversation I have with other start-ups is how get their name visible, build profile and eventually get covered by one of the main Tech News sites.

One way of kicking that off is to make sure your company is profiled on CrunchBase. We’ve recently started using the plug-in here on Web2Ireland to give extra context to stories. And ye know what? The TechCrunch guys love that we are.

It really is gratifying to know that the efforts made by the start-up community in Ireland are recognised by the guys in Silicon Valley. So what you waiting for, sign up now!

Based on numerous requests for information on Web2Ireland companies [in a structured format] – we’re going to add support for Crunchbase on web2ireland.org

To get this done we need

1. Companies to submit information to Crunchbase
2. make sure you enter in location details
3. tag as web2ireland
4. update all sections – including funding – and references to likes of EI
5. leave a comment on this blog post – when you’ve got it all completed

On Web2Ireland we will

1. add live data to replace http://web2ireland.org/companies/
2. use Crunchbase widget in our blog posts

Ammado, which combines social networking with charitable giving, linking the non-profits with people who want to support them, has unveiled its online donation system – Ammado Giving Circle.

The sbpost has more coverage interviewing its founders Peter Conlon and Anna Kupka – which includes some interesting quotes and comments

“founders claim will help it become ''one of the biggest internet companies in the world''…..''We have created microphilanthropy,…”kept Ammado under wraps for the past three years, while its technology was built from scratch. The company now employs about 70 people at its headquarters in Dublin, regional headquarters in Singapore, and in 11 other locations, including Amsterdam, Washington, Dhaka in Bangladesh and Novi Sad in Serbia.”…..”For donations of that type, Ammado charges a 10 per cent processing fee, so a company wanting to donate €1,000, for example, would make a total payment of €1,100. Kupka said the system could be used to increase employee motivation and allow companies with staff from different countries indirectly to make donations to charities outside Ireland.”

Last week at TC50, a competitor launched – Causecast. – which had very positive reviews.

Update: Anna from Ammado – has provided a comment – which provides more information around Ammado donations – which is very welcome.

“Just to clarify: for individuals ammado charges 5% per donation. These 5% stay in the ammado foundation and help us to cover the cost which are very substantial as we have build a global micro-payment platform, accepting 33 currencies and nearly every payment method around the world (further payment methods are being added).

The 10% you have mentioned are an administration fee for an employer solution: we encourage employers to boost employee motivation by allocating a certain amount – let's say €10 per employee – to all their employees and allow them to allocate the amount to whatever nonprofits they wish. The employee could therefore give 1 Euro of these 10 to their old school in Belarus, 2.50 Euro to a charity in their hometown, 2 Euro for Amnesty in Ireland etc. It can be sliced down to as little as 4cent. That's why we call it micro-philanthropy. Everyone can build their own giving portfolio and if you wish to, people can show whom they are spporting by displaying their ammado Giving Circle (we also have a bebo applicaton for the circle). Cheers, Anna”

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

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