In a previous post Conor wrote about applying for Seedcamp. From the poll it seems a good number of people would like a little help filling out the application form (including myself) and some are available to lend a hand from their own experience of applying last year.
A room has been arranged in Oriel House Hotel in Ballincollig, Cork for Thursday August 7th starting at around 9am.
It will be quite informal, the aim it to get practical advise from each other on answering some of the questions on the form to highlight your business or idea as best as possible.
I’ll have print outs of the questions with me on the day. Anyone who’d like the them before hand, heres a link to the the Seedcamp application PDF.
Conall O’Morain from the Sunday Business Show on TodayFM left a comment on the Argolon blog to let me know about their edition this Sunday. It’s all about “Starting Your Own Business”. As Conall said:
We will have advice from Enterprise Ireland, the CEBs and one of the country’s wisest business advisers with us as well.
If you are thinking about the leap, maybe this will be the trigger to do something about it? 10.30am this Sunday and streamed live here.
Pix.ie is a beautiful photo-sharing site with many unique features which put it way ahead of the competition. Whether you are a cameraphone snapper like me or a pro, they have lots that’ll appeal to you. If you like what you see, why not join the push.
Gordon Murray of eWrite has come up with a brilliant suggestion for SeedCamp. He thinks we should crowdsource some of the applications. Of course, this exercise will also help those who want to apply for SeedCorn and other similar competitions.
There are plenty of people who have experience in filling out application forms for the likes of Incubation Programmes, EI Grants, the SeedCorn competition etc. Why not use that expertise to help those applying to SeedCamp who may never have dealt with this sort of thing before?
So yet another call for interest. If there are sufficient numbers in Cork then Gordon will arrange a meeting room in the Oriel House Hotel in Ballincollig for a morning. Those who want to apply and those who want to help can come together, figure out a strong message for each applicant and hopefully help them do better in the process.
If it works well, there is no reason this can’t be repeated in Dublin and elsewhere.
Usual story, fill out the poll (this one is for Cork only!) and ideally leave a comment or mail Gordon (gordon AT ewrite DOT ie) with some info about yourself. This is a very short term thing so the poll will close on Friday.
Whilst today is possibly not the best day ever to discuss cloud computing/storage, given the S3 problems last night, we’re doing another call on interest in attending a session on this in the near future.
Both the Amazon sessions in Dublin and Cork were very strongly attended so the interest seems to be there in general. However there are also a wide range of offerings out there from IBM, Salesforce and of course Google. Salesforce had their recent conference here which covered the Force.com Platform as a service and I’ve been talking to the IBM guys in Ireland who have their cloud computing centre in Mulhuddart.
I know many people were excited when the Google App Engine was announced. For some reason there seems to be a very strong Python dev community here with lots of startups using Django too, so the fit is quite strong.
So two questions for you this morning. First, if there was a full day session covering the cloud by one of these vendors, would you be interested in attending and what would you like to hear about (biz, tech, mix, heavy API drilldown)? Secondly, let us know in the comments what you are up to in this area.
We don’t like to sit on these ideas, though, because we really want people to work on them. So we’re trying something new: we’re going to list some of the ideas we’ve been waiting to see, but only describe them in general terms. It may be that recipes for ideas are the most useful form anyway, because imaginative people will take them in directions we didn’t anticipate.
The full list…
1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom.
2. Simplified browsing.
3. New news.
4. Outsourced IT.
5. Enterprise software 2.0.
6. More variants of CRM.
7. Something your company needs that doesn’t exist.
8. Dating.
9. Photo/video sharing services.
10. Auctions.
11. Web Office apps.
12. Fix advertising.
13. Online learning.
14. Tools for measurement.
15. Off the shelf security.
16. A form of search that depends on design.
17. New payment methods.
18. The WebOS.
19. Application and/or data hosting.
20. Shopping guides.
21. Finance software for individuals and small businesses.
22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid.
23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia.
24. A buffer against bad customer service.
25. A Craigslist competitor.
26. Better video chat.
27. Hardware/software hybrids.
28. Fixing email overload.
29. Easy site builders for specific markets.
30. Startups for startups.
I know a few web2ireland startups are tackling some of these ideas - would love to do a follow up post to categorize those companies - please let us know what “number” you fall under.
Joe Drumgoole let us know that the outcome of the Tuesday Push on PutPlace far exceeded expectation:
For us it increased our number of visitors on average four fold for the week in which we were pushed. This converted to double the previous weeks registrations. We weren’t running any other campaigns so I attribute that all to the Tuesday push….Basically one of the most cost effective marketing exercises we have done this year.
And your reason for not signing up for the push is?
As many of you know, the first BarCamp in Ireland was held wayyyy back in September 2006 in Cork. It is still remembered as a wonderful day and I met many of the people I now know well for the first time there. Since that event in Webworks there have been further ones in Waterford, Dublin, Galway, Belfast, Kilkenny and Limerick.
Recently it was suggested to me that we have another one in Cork in January. I lobbed the idea out at an OpenCoffee to discover that there was tons of pent-up demand for a BarCamp and that January was too far away.
A further conversation with John Handelaar at the hugely successful and very barcampy OpenCoffeeClub BBQ got me all jizzed up about having one sooner too.
The next BarCamp is PodCamp II in Kilkenny on September 27th so I’d like to propose the next Cork one for the November timeframe. Sufficiently long after PodCamp but not too close to Christmas.
Please use the PollDaddy poll below to indicate levels of interest and, if it is there, I’m sure we can arrange something down here
UPDATE: I can’t see how to edit a poll after it is published but one great suggestion has been made, which is to offer “Any Saturday in November” as an option. If that’s what you’d prefer, just enter it in “Other”
31st of July 2008 by Gordon Murray
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