Web 2 Ireland

Loic Le Meur – founder and ceo of Seesmic – hangs out with Lenny from Polldaddy on Loic TV

The Roomex guys in Dublin have kindly offered all our readers out there an extra discount on their hotel bookings. Head on over to http://web2.roomex.com/ between now and 5pm on Wednesday to avail of the offer. A big thanks to Jack Donaghy for this.

To complement our lovely new design we thought it might be cool to get a logo to go with it too. This wouldn’t just be for the site but also for events etc.

David Lenehan from PollDaddy came up with the very smart idea on Twitter of running a competition with prizes. Within minutes we had several offers for those prizes. So we’d like to announce the competition now.

The rules are simple, just send us a sample of your logo(s) in one of the standard bitmap formats by Friday May 2nd to web2ireland DOT editor AT gmail DOT com. We will then publish a post showing them all and a poll allowing you to vote on them. The design with the most votes after one week wins!

The winner will not just get lots of publicity here and a permanent credit on the site but they will also win the following:

• One year of PollDaddy Pro sponsored by PollDaddy
• A copy of Microsoft Expression Studio sponsored by Microsoft Ireland
• A year of Blacknight VPS hosting sponsored by Blacknight Solutions

Many thanks to David, Martha, Clare and Michele for the brilliant prizes!

Irish Indo has a piece on Cuill – founded by Louth man Tom Costello.

Also check recent Techcrunch coverage on Cuill and their $25m funding round.

The folks at Pigsback are busy.

Check this video for the launch of Pigsback Canada

We’ve been posting the blog updates to Twitter for months but completely forget to mention it here. If you want all the latest Web2Ireland news directly into your Twitter feed, then you just have to add @web2ireland as a friend.

You can alternatively get the updates via Jaiku, Friendfeed or Facebook

We pleased as punch to unveil our new design for the Web2Ireland site. A major thank you to James Gallagher who did all the work for us. We’ll be adding a few tweaks here and there in the coming days.

James is hiimjames on Twitter, you should add him.

Now if only there was someone out there who would do us a logo

Hot Dublin based startup dial2do demod their product at CTIA this week. Dial2Do is a spin out from Rococo.

Its a great way to connect with services such as twitter, email, etc.

Information week has coverage CTIA: Dial2Do Uses Voice Prompts For Hands-Free Users — Wireless — InformationWeek

Rumour they are working on a cool twitterfone related project…

PutPlace, provider of automated, real-time back-up, publishing and sharing services for digital data, today announced the successful conclusion of a funding round and the strengthening of its board.

Industry veterans Pat Lynch and Michael O’Callaghan join existing board members Joe Drumgoole (founder) and Brian Caulfield. The funding round was a co-investment between existing and new investors and Enterprise Ireland. Katherine Lucey has also joined the management team as COO.

Pretty impressive line-up – and not to forget Justin Mason [Spamassin creator] is also at Putplace

Mike O’Callaghan (Chairman)
Michael O’Callaghan is COO at Babelgum, where he is responsible for the company’s business operations as well as infrastructure and network operations. Before joining Babelgum, Michael was Vice President and General Manager of Oracle’s European Development Centre in Dublin and Chairman of Oracle’s main operating company in Europe. Prior to Oracle, Michael established and led Microsoft’s European Product Development Centre in Ireland and in total has over twenty five years industry experience in indigenous and multi-national companies. Michael holds a B.E. from University College Cork.

Brian Caulfield (Board Member)
2007 recipient of the Irish Software Association “Technology Person of the Year”, Brian is a Computer Engineering graduate from Trinity College Dublin. In 1992 Brian co-founded Exceptis Technologies where he was CEO and CTO. Exceptis developed dispute management software for the electronic card payments sector that was sold to blue-chip banking customers in Europe, the United States and Asia. Exceptis was sold to Trintech Group (NASDAQ: TTPA) in November 2000. Brian has co-founded two other venture capital backed software start-ups, Similarity Systems and Prediction Dynamics. More recently, Brian has worked with Trinity Venture Capital, representing them on the boards of AePONA and SteelTrace.

Pat Lynch (Board Member)
Pat founded Microtech Cleanroom Services in 1998 having previously worked in senior financial roles with US multinationals Seagate Technology and Summit Technology. Pat is a serial investor in high-potential technology start-ups and has significant experience in bringing companies to scale.

Katherine Lucey (Management Team)
Katherine has a strong track record in international software marketing. Most recently, she led the execution of an aggressive marketing plan for SteelTrace that resulted in a doubling of revenues, quarter-on-quarter. SteelTrace was sold to Compuware in 2006. She previously worked with Openet Telecom and the Irish Software Association.