Web 2 Ireland

Jolt Online Gaming announced the release of Utopia Kingdoms, the successor to the legendary Utopia online game. In Utopia Kingdoms, players compete within the Utopia universe to establish and expand their kingdoms across the land.

Check out the press release

You can play Utopia Kingdoms for free in any Internet browser on PC, Mac or any other operating system. There's nothing to download and there are thousands of players already there. Why not join in and see how well you would rule?

Delta has invested €1.5m [from its €100m fund] in Branded Payment Solutions Limited – which is a MBO from Payzone of its Open Loop Gift business.

According to this disclosure – In September 2008 Payzone entered into an agreement to dispose of its Open Loop Gift business. The business was sold to Branded Payment Solutions Limited, a company controlled by Tim Murphy, the group's outgoing COO for €420,000 payable in 2010 – 2013 with a further contingent elements. The terms of the sale provide that the group commit to payment of certain expenses related to the business up to 31 January 2009.

Mike Butcher has a piece on TC UK in relation to Number of European tech investment deals drops by a quarter

Based on information provided by Calibre One – Ireland is ranked well down the table

Irish Investments listed in documents provided by Calibre One

Q4
3-Oct Cúram Software 2,699,520 Enterprise Ireland
17-Oct Movidia 14,307,138 Celtic House Venture Partners, Capital-E, Emertec Gestion,
AIB Seed Capital Fund, Enterprise Ireland
30-Nov RedMere Technology 7,000,000 Enterprise Ireland
Total Invested – 24,006,658

Q3
9-Jul Corvil 12,000,000 Vesbridge Partners, ACT Ventures, APAX Partners
15-Jul MUZU TV 8,000,000 Oyster Technology Investments
8-Aug MobileAware Ltd Undisclosed Nauta Capital and Cross Atlantic Capital Partners
10-Aug EpiSensor 1,429,400 AIB Seed Capital Fund, Enterprise Equity Venture Capital Group,
Enterprise Ireland, executive chairman Gary Carroll and his family
12-Aug CommProve Undisclosed Endeavour Vision
17-Aug Chip Sensors Ltd. 1,429,400 Enterprise Ireland and the Bank of Ireland Kernel Capital Partners Fund
21-Aug Luzern Solutions 3,573,500 Delta Partners
26-Aug Boards.ie Undisclosed Daft Media
30-Aug decaWave 2,287,040 Enterprise Ireland, private investors
1-Sep EpiSensor 1,429,400 AIB Seed Capital Fund, Enterprise Ireland, Gary Carroll, Brendan O’Malley
15-Sep CommProve 14,000,000 TVM Capital and Endeavour, TLcom Capital
17-Sep Percana Group Undisclosed International Financial Data Services
18-Sep PCH International 21,155,120 Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Focus Ventures
Total invested 65,303,860

But I go to The Irish Venture Capital Association (IVCA) website to check their Venture Pulse we get a different set of data.

Q4 2008 – 24 Investments – € 68,611,000.00
Q3 2008 – 11 Investments – € 70,810,000.00
Q2 2008 – 24 Investments – € 60,162,000.00
Q1 2008 – 20 Investments – € 43,330,000.00

Total – 79 Investments – € 242,913,000.00

[compare to €226m in 2007]

Check

2008 TechPulse
2007 TechPulse

Web2Ireland has also obtained some information on early stage investing via the Seed Capital Scheme and Business Expansion Schemes.

2008 – BES/SCS Investments – €53m
2007 – BES/SCS Investments – €111m

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Summary is that Irish VC investment focus appears to be on non-internet, capital intensive industries [medical, etc] and later stage.

Given that Ireland has only 6 funds who participated in EI €175m Programme – which raised in total €275m – the 2008 Investment of €243m has no doubt forced the Irish VCs to lobby some of the €500m promised by Government.

From a Web2Ireland perspective the situation remains the same – a total lack of early stage funding in the 250k to 2m range. Related to this is an open letter from one of the main Angel investors in the internet space in the UK/Europe – Robin Klein to the UK Govt.

Despite it been April 1st – we’re serious in our attempts to get a Seed Fund in Ireland.

We blogged on before onEircom Innovation Fund – but Quick reminder on eircom innovation fund 2009 – Get your idea in before April 30th [tip to Damien]

Full details on the eircom Labs page.

Areas to consider for a pitch:

* Content (e.g. video, short films, animations, UGC)
* Movies and TV (e.g. programme recommendations, listings application, information aggregation, content search, fan communities, recommender systems, discovery tools e.g. data visualisations))
* Games (e.g. Flash games, game communities, platforms, multiplayer games, persistent worlds, avatar-based social networks, game creation tools, ratings, reviews, gambling)
* News (e.g. personalised news gathering, news aggregation, news submission tools, communities of interest, domain-specific news services)
* Music (e.g. Internet radio, streaming / OD services, search / recommendations / personalisation, community tools)
* Sport (e.g. communities, results aggregation, fan communities, results prediction, betting, games)
* Widgets (e.g. any widget(s) based on the above or additional categories)

Irish-headquartered music video site Muzu has struck a major video and ads deal with U2's music label Universal – as per report from SiliconRepublic

Muzu TV allows fans to create, watch and share music-video playlists. Users can create video playlists from thousands of videos and embed them on their social- networking sites.

LouderVoice for Business has added PuddleDucks, Ireland's leading online retailer of children's and adults outdoor clothing, to its list of customers.

Customers can now read product reviews by previous purchasers and can also submit their own. These reviews appear on each product page along with highlights on the home page of the PuddleDucks website. Reviews empower customers to help each other find the right product for their needs. Recent surveys have shown that over a third of respondents rated peer opinions such as recommendations and reviews as the most useful aspect of an Internet-shopping site.

In addition to appearing on the PuddleDucks shopping site, the reviews are aggregated to the LouderVoice reviews website and its mobile phone applications. This doesn’t just make PuddleDucks more visible to search engines, it also enables a widely distributed conversation about its products.

On the 23rd and 24th of April, Digital Circle, in conjunction with the Digital Media Forum and Create Ireland, are holding Ireland’s first iPhone developers’ workshop in both Dublin and Belfast.

This free event gives you the chance of meeting iPhone developers and interacting with offical Apple engineers.

There will be sessions on iPhone development, user interface, marketing and business aspects, as well as a ‘Hack Room’ for you to go ahead and try out what you learn during the sessions.

This is the must-attend conference for anyone innovating with Apple technologies in Ireland.

Signup at DevDays 2009

According to IDA Ireland – “Big Fish Games, Inc., that the company is opening a European Headquarters at City Gate Business Park at Mahon in Cork City. Big Fish Games is the world's leading online destination for interactive entertainment, including downloadable, community and massively multi-player online games. The new office will focus on multilingual European customer support, games testing and localisation, and is expected to create up to 100 new jobs over the next three years. Recruitment is already underway for people with localisation skills and the capability to communicate effectively with its customers, particularly in French, German and Spanish.”

Positive news for Ireland – and for the community.

The main Irish property site daft.ie has partnered with eBay.

Check out Irish Property

Maybe the start of more meaningful classifieds activity in Ireland by eBay…

Irish gaming company Jolt Online [previously known as OMAC] have launched Legends of Zork

30 years after its first conception, Zork is back!

Dylan Collins, founder and CEO of Jolt had this to say in press release

We've designed LoZ to be as accessible as possible, hoping to appeal to both original Zork fans (and there's enough of them working on this that we should know what we're talking about), while also trying to bring in a whole new generation of players