Web 2 Ireland

The Dublin Web Summit is hosting an event at

Trinity College Dublin
on Thursday, February 04, 2010
from 5:30 PM – 11:30 PM – this includes a networking event

Chris Newmark (founder of Craigslist) & Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) , who are regular keynotes at the world’s largest technology conferences, will be talking about the lessons & direct experiences in scaling their companies, which have had huge impacts on global commerce and communication.

Chris Horn will reflect on his experience building succesful global companies from Ireland. He will also touch on the broader issue of innovation and Ireland, as well as prospects & opportunities for Irish entrepreneurs over the coming decade.

Sign up for tickets here

OK, they aren’t really but Sligo is actually their first commercial office outside of the US. The coverage of the PollDaddy acquisition has been amazing in a few short hours. Here’s just a sample:

• Matt’s Blog
   
• PollDaddy Blog
   
• WordPress Blog
   
• Toni Schneider’s Blog (with nice mention of Fergus)
   
• Donncha from the People’s Republic branch of Automattic
   
• Mashable
   
• Techcrunch USA
   
• ReadWriteWeb

It’s currently top story on Techmeme.

Lovely picture of the crew on Donncha’s blog:

Congratulation to Lenny aka David Lenehan and Eoin Gallagher on Polldaddy team – and Toni, Matt and Automattic team.

Polldaddy is the default online poll service for leading blogs, social networks and websites – and the acquisition by WordPress parent – Automattic – makes total sense – and the team dynamics is brilliant.

Only 2 developers [Lenny and Eoin] on polldaddy – which was initially incubated within Infacta.

It was spun out as a seperate entity late in 2007 – with angel investment provided by Infacta and Polldaddy founder, Jonathan Hill.

Polldaddy also recruited Scott Rafer as an advisor in 2007 – and Scott played no small part in assisting the project in getting to its current scale.

The Polldaddy is great validation for Web2Ireland – especially given the level of investment, the operations, and the acquisition result.

Given the recent news on Facebook setting up in Ireland – it perhaps set a new model for the IDA/EI – International operations get setup via acquisition [which is what Israel have done for years].

To add more context in terms of WordPress scale – see this post from Fred Wilson on Facebook vs WordPress – and the Polldaddy numbers will drive this further forward.

Disclosure: I’m a personal friend of Lenny, Jonathan and Scott

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