Web 2.0 Ireland

We’re a little slow with the news but it’s still worth mentioning and giving some extra background. Robin Blandford of D4H won the €10k IQPrize last Wednesday and Plink won the audience award of €1k for their elevator pitch.

As one of the judges I can honestly say it was both a privilege and a joy to listen to all 8 pitches on Wednesday. Making the final decision was very very difficult due to the quality of all of them.

If you are an investor, I recommend you study each of the 8 very closely. It is our belief that several of them will have massive exits in the next 1-2 years. All of the others will have very successful businesses and I look forward to being a customer.

The most important aspect of the IQPrize which seems to be impossible to get across to those in power was that it was entirely bottom-up with no cherry-picking or high-potential-labelling or expert-selection or jobs-for-the-boys or who-you-know or what-you-have-done-in-the-past.

Anyone could enter. Anyone.

And because of that we saw the depth of the entrepreneurial spirit in Ireland and the eagerness and hunger to build great businesses as the Zombieconomy collapses around us.

The other critical thing we saw was that many of the applicants had amazing ideas or technology but didn’t have the business background needed to make it a huge success. Incubation programmes like Genesis and Hothouse are critical here but perhaps many of those who benefited from the the boom of the past few years might like to give something back? They could offer to do more than mentoring and actually come on board with some of these businesses and help them go global. CEOs and VPs of Sales in particular could help enormously.

In 249 biz plans there were maybe 5 lunatics. I hope at least one of those proves to be a visionary and we just didn’t see it.

If you didn’t make the final 8 this year, tighten up your biz plan and have another go when the next event like this appears. There will be some feedback later in the summer from the judges overall on what worked for us and what didn’t in terms of biz plan. It was interesting that despite our wildly diverse backgrounds, we usually agreed on those points. Hopefully that will help everyone who applied to build a newer better kick-ass plan.

Well done to D4H, well done to Plink and well done everyone who applied.

The IQPrize pitching and judging will run from 9am-5pm tomorrow. Good luck to all the finalists.

The winner will be announced at a party afterwards which is on from 7pm-9pm in the Source Bar, Level 5, Guinness Storehouse. Each of the finalists will give their elevator pitches before the winner is giving the giant cheque. All attendees can also vote in the People’s Choice award where one of the shortlist can win an extra €1,000.

If you’re interested in coming and seeing who wins the €10k prize please RSVP to coryann.joseph@iqcontent.com.

Head on over to cmypitch, have a poke around and maybe write a few words about them.

Fergus covered them here last week. And I covered them on the Cork OpenCoffee blog too.

The first Facebook Garage was so popular we had to have another one pretty soon after. On Thursday we had 150+ people crammed into a room in the Radission SAS to hear 5 speakers talk about different aspects of their experiences with Facebook.

It opened with Sean O’Sullivan from Rococo presenting their GigMonkey App. Plenty of technical meat in there about the various challenges they faced and some interesting comparisons with Bebo.

Robert Mao then gave a broad overview of build FB Apps/Connect and hosting them on Google App Engine.

I spoke about our integration of Facebook Connect into the LouderVoice reviews widget.

After the break, Flavien Charlon took everyones breath away with his description of the growth of My City. He currently has close to 500k active monthly users on this Facebook App. His talk covered everything from technical issues to growing a userbase and monetizing.

PPT will be posted later.

Finally Colm Long who runs Facebook EMEA gave us an insight into where Facebook was going, theeir approach to ads and the shocking growth figures for Facebook in Ireland. One important point that he highlighted was what a small company Facebook is (~900 people). So when development slows in one area e.g. Groups, it is only because they are resource strapped.

PPT will be posted later.

Michael Clyne took video footage of the entire event which we hope to post here next week. If you have any photos or videos, please post links to them in the comments.

cmypitch, founded by Irishman, Emmett Kilduff, has just launched in Ireland

“It will connect entrepreneurs with investors. cmypitch.ie provides businesses with the unique opportunity to upload their own video pitch onto the secure platform, for a registered network of investors to watch and inform their investment decisions. In addition, entrepreneurs can learn how to become “investor ready” by watching video tips from the best Irish (e.g. Eddie Jordan, Ray Nolan) and international (e.g. Doug Richard, James Caan) entrepreneurs and by downloading the best ‘how to’ guides.

For investors, cmypitch.ie has the potential to open up all of Ireland’s best investment opportunities and makes identifying the most attractive deals more efficient. Investors can save valuable time, allowing them to not only assess the business opportunity but also the people behind the proposition. Pitches can be filtered by size, sector and rating – all key considerations for investors. Investors can also receive email alerts when a new pitch is added that matches their preferred criteria.”

cmypitch.ie will also hold regular offline pitching events called “cmypitch Live”, where entrepreneurs get the unique opportunity to pitch to a room full of investors. Events like these will offer entrepreneurs the opportunity to complement their video pitch with more traditional face-to-face pitching and networking.

cmypitch.ie has been endorsed by some very successful Irish entrepreneurs: Eddie Jordan (F1), Philip Lynch (IAWS, One51), Patrick Brazel (former Chairman of Irish Software Association), James Morris (Windmill Lane, TV3) and Tony Kilduff (Kindle).

cmypitch.ie has already signed several partners: Bank of Scotland (Ireland), Deloitte, The Irish Times, Microsoft and William Fry.

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)

This week’s Tuesday Push is collab.ie.

It describes itself as follows:

Collab is a simple, easy to use, free online tool to help bring ideas and skillsets together. If you have an idea and you need to find a person or people to work with you or if you want some feedback on a project you are considering collab is for you.

Posting the ideas to Twitter is a nice touch and allows those who are actively looking for projects to work on to keep an eye on what is being suggested.

If you like Collab, why not help the push and write a blogpost yourself?

After the resounding success of the first Facebook Garage here, it’s about time we had another.

The theme this time is “Hands on with Apps, Connect and Pages”

It’s a super line-up of speakers:

• GigMonkey Facebook Application – Developer Story. Sean O’Sullivan – Rococo
• Facebook – Opportunities for businesses. Facebook 101 @ Pages, Advertising, Apps.Colm Long, Facebook EMEA
• Build Facebook Connect enabled applications with Google Apps Engine”. Robert Mao
• Facebook Connect – the experience. Muzu.tv
• Growing pains: get prepared when your facebook app go rocket high. Sharing the real story of MyCity. Flavien Clarlon

The event is on in The Digital Exchange, Crane Street, Dublin (other side of High Street from Hub) from 4pm-6pm, Thursday 2nd July.

Whilst it is a free event, you must register over on Eventbrite.

The Mobile Industry Review has a review on Locle

“I’m particularly impressed that roughly 70% of available European mobile handsets are capable of using Locle at the moment. Since it doesn’t strictly rely on GPS — falling back to Cell-ID for most handsets — it means that, theoretically, if you were wanting to deploy a location based social networking service in, say, India (for example), the first thing you should do is call up Pieter at Locle and do a deal with them.”

Great Video from Robert Scoble with Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures on his new Building43 startup

Ties in with Ron Conway, godfather of Angel investing in the valley – and his new “investment theme” – persistent/real time data. As per Techcrunch piece “has a goal to invest in 40-50 companies in the next 18 months. His focus will be companies exploiting “real-time data,” which he calls “the next billion dollar market opportunity.” Conway is already an investor in Twitter and Facebook, two companies solidly in the real-time space.”

Check out this video with Ron on AllThingsD