Web 2 Ireland

Paddy has pulled together a great line up of speakers, including old Web2Ireland friends Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier and others.

Last of the Early Bird Tickets on sale with a few opportunities to sponsor at event by calling David on +353 1 4429284

Profitero, a Dublin HQ startup, was one of the recent winners of SeedCamp

Profitero is an easy-to-use solution that monitors competitor prices for online retailers, benchmarks their prices against competition and suggests activities to make their price competitive.

The founders, Kanstantsin Chernysh & Alex Usikov are both originally from Minsk, Belarus. Profitero founders are serial entrepreneursin online retail and SEO with strong mathematical backgrounds and expertise in high-performance algorithms, product classification and data mining.

The team had the following thoughts on Seedcamp:

We have worked a lot with Seedcamp mentors in July – September. On one hand, we experienced excitement from investors and mentors about our ideas and technology. On the other hand, we found some good advice on retail problems and product areas to focus on.

The team are working with a variety of UK retailers that have already signed up for the service, like Debenhams, Warehouse Express, The Hut Group, House of Fraser, CleverBox and others.

This a guest post by Keith Bohanna co-founder of dbtwang. Keith is an experienced internet consultant/trainer to many Irish organizations, and is involved with numerous initiatives @ startups in Ireland. Keith participated in the first iGap Programme promoted by Internet Growth Alliance & Enterprise Ireland

——————

Between November 2009 and April 2010 15 Irish internet businesses were brought through 6 days of workshops and coaching to force them to refine and focus their business models and commercial propositions.

It worked really well and this post give you our take on it as one of the participants.

First of all we had to pitch for the place – last year over 40 businesses went for the 15 places and you can expect that to go up significantly this Autumn when the call for iGAP 2 goes out as each of us as participants are passionate advocates of the programme and process.

Having been awarded a place we turned up at the first of 6 day long workshops. Key differentiator here between this and some other programmes – the majority of the workshops were lead by an experienced entrepreneur based in either the UK or the USA.

So we experienced:

Jonathan Dillon – Strategy and Value Proposition

Coming out of a background of Yahoo Strategic Partnerships and Acquisitions he now works with technology businesses across 3 continents.
His session was about the broad focus of our businesses – the market we were after, our growth ambitions and our positioning.

This was the first time I had heard the acronym BHAG – Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

Ed Bussey – Monetisation and Revenue Models

Ed is a serial entrepreneur who has been successfully involved in figleaves.co.uk and then ZYB. He now runs Clash Media.
He spent the day working through the various models open to internet and technology businesses and then helped us explore the likely parameters around how each model works in reality – ie how we should manage our expectations and assumptions when forecasting.

Justin Knecht – Customer Centric Service and Product Design

Justin straddled the academic and entrepreneurial worlds at the time with a post in the Centre for Design Innovation in Sligo and a flegling start-up – Perfect Pints. Since then he has committed full time to the world of self employment!

He explored the fuzzy world of brand and services with us and forced us to consider the practical impact of customer touch points as we continued to design and implement our services and solutions.

Sean Ellis – Marketing & Customer Acquisition

Sean was the closest thing (next to Jonathan) to a consultant on the programme – but he has some pedigree. An advisor to businesses such as KISSmetrics and Performable he is one of a number of A list bloggers in the area of lean start-ups and metrics.

With his session being in January we missed the day (we were attending the NAMM trade show in LA). He covered the key need to focus early and often on customer needs – with the Product/Market fit being crucial. So you establish exactly what people want and will pay for before you start expensive marketing and sales campaigns.

Oren Michels – Internet Business Development

Oren runs Mashery – an API enabler and general powerhouse in San Francisco. He has also founded businesses (WiFinder) and been involved at senior level in Feedster.

He gave us a great grounding in Business Development – helping to position it in terms of sales and also providing a process by which business partnerships could be identified, flitered and negotiated.
He also said that API's are essential! Which is very likely true for any internet business intent on scaling

Brian Caufield – Preparing for Funding

Brian has been a VC (Trinity VC), a founder (SImilarity Systems) and an angel investor. He was also the programme lead for iGAP.

He laid out the reality of funding in Ireland – how the game is played at each stage, what exactly those stages are and what to expect as you move through each of them.

Thats some detail – what was the outcome? Based on the output (a 10 minute pitch session to a panel of entrepreneurs in front of 50 people) I can honestly say that every single one of us as participants could see major improvement in each others propositions.

We had heard them all in the opening sessions in November and by 21st April every business was more clearly focused with much a stronger value proposition and a compelling reason to invest in them. That is a very tangible outcome – it makes each of us much more likely to succeed by virtue of positioning, focused effort and better communication.

Specifically for dbTwang we may well have received the prize for best improved pitch. We started with wooly aspirations (in the hairy Aran Knit category) around a social network for guitar lovers and aspirations towards premium content.

We are about to launch in August (just waiting on that elusive merchant account) a premium service called Guardian which will help musicians and guitar enthusiasts protect their guitars from loss. It addresses a specific pain in the marketplace and is a very clear proposition with strong positioning.

Thanks are due to the guys in the Internet Growth Alliance – Colm Lyon, Ray Nolan and Dylan Collins principally – whose experience of successful startups helped them formulate a programme which is directly relevant to helping high potential startups become global faster and more successfully. They managed to get the attention of Enterprise Ireland where Ray Walsh and Jennifer Condon carved out funding and Sarah Buckley ran things.

Final point worth noting – while the programme is aimed at High Potential Startups not every participant who started iGAP 1 had HPSU status. That might change this time round in iGap 2

Apply now for iGap 2

Stockbyte founder, Jerry Kennelly has just announced his new startup – Tweak.com

Tweak is an online self-service design library which makes tweakable press advertising and marketing collateral available to users at the touch of a button. Simply change colour, copy, photos, logos and Calls to Action, to create a compelling piece of advertising and marketing.

Check this video out (25 mins in)

CEPIC: Jerry Kennelly: Secrets of His Dramatic Exit from REELDEALHD on Vimeo.

tip: James Corbett and Learnpipe

We ran an online poll for a few weeks to find Ireland’s top angel investor – looking for the “Ron Conway” in Ireland. HBan also had a little competition to find the Top Angel

Brian Caulfield is the Top Angel investor in both the Web2Ireland poll, and also by HBAN (coincidence !!)

HBan are looking for the top angel in Ireland. We’ve previously covered this topic before – “Who is the Irish Ron Conway ?”

HBan didn’t list anyone, so we compiled our own, based on recent activity, and any tech entrepreneur who had a significant exit in last 10 years

At yesterday’s Gateway Ireland, this cool video was shown

With the likes of EA Games setting up in Galway, Zynga, Crowdstar, etc together with the native scene, Jolt Online, Demonware, Havok and others, we have a very vibrant Gaming scene.

Thanks Dylan for video.

We would love to know what’s happening @ Apps within the Irish ecosystem. (iphone, android, facebook, etc – any type of app. )

Please complete this short survey, so we can profile some cool applications, companies and developers.

We asked for some input via twitter – and we would only end up with Amp & Crogall (Thanks Ross & Peter)

————–

AMP – online marketing service for Music Industry

Crogall – online music store for small bands/labels to connect with their fans

Abaltat – compose royalty free music

BalconyTV is a leading daily online viral music show that features bands, musicians and other variety acts on balconies around the world.

i-tab – the i-Tab straps on to the end of a guitar and scrolls through the lyrics and chords of a song (see recent Irish Times Coverage)

dbTwang – a social network for people who love guitars!

Echodio – platform for syncing, protecting and sharing your digital media collection. (Y Combinator Alumni)

Rocudo – online music community in which Fans discover and remix music in an innovative interactive format

DownloadMusic.ie – Independent Irish Music Chart – Pay for music by text

Muzu – Watch, Create and Share Music video playlists

Tapadoo – Firepit – creating apps for bands on tour.

RSR/Tunetrak – audio fingerprint technology – NRDC launchpad company

Sonic Academy – learn to make music online.

Trezur – they make apps that “turbo-charge” your digital music collection

Grab Radio is here to revolutionise the way you listen to radio on your iPhone.

diddlyi – social network around Irish Dancing & Music Community

===================

Any more that can be added to the list ?

Carsonified have just announced a StartUp Pass for FOWA Dublin 2010 – May 14th 2010

The Startup Pass includes
3 tickets for the price of 2 – All 3 tickets must be booked at the same time
Free FOWA Dublin micro sponsorship (worth €100)
Your link + 140 characters, emailed to all attendees one week before the conference
Automatic entry into the Start Up Pitch panel
5 lucky winners will get to pitch their web app to the panel of speakers and audience
Your company name and url displayed throughout the breaks on the main screen
A great way to get your web app known and talked about

There are only 20 packages available – book now to avoid disappointment