Web 2.0 Ireland

Ireland’s top SEO guy, Richard Hearne of Red Cardinal, recently announced an amazing offer.

Quite simply:

• 5 websites will each receive a free Conversion Rate Optimisation campaign worth €3,000;
• Red Cardinal will cover the costs of design and development, and pay all fees for a professional MVT software suite;
• Each campaign will be used as a case-study for a new venture Red Cardinal is launching;
• The offer is open to all Irish websites.

All details over on his blog.

He also has a follow-up post here if you want to know more about Conversion Rate Optimization.

Facebook recently announced their new

FBFund.

The fbFund is a $10 million seed fund managed by Founders Fund, Accel Partners, and Facebook.

After the recent Facebook Developer Garage Ireland we should see plenty of entries from Ireland.

Delighted to hear that the KK crew are finally having an OpenCoffee at 11.30 this morning in the Kilkenny Cafe located downstairs in Market Cross Shopping Centre.

They join Cork, Limerick, Dublin, Waterford, Belfast and Galway as an OCC location. 

If you are based anywhere in the South-East, it’ll be worth checking out. We have people driving 30+ miles to Cork OCC on a regular basis, so hopefully they’ll have attendees from Wexford, Waterford, Carlow, Tipperary, Offaly etc.

I had a pleasure of attending LeWeb last week – and here are the top 10 takeaways

Meeting Irish in attendance
Very low Irish presence – Pat Phelan from Maxroam, Conor O’Neill from Loudervoice [who also covered event for ReadwriteWeb]
- Brian Bastible and colleagues from IDA

Connecting with People
Lots of great folks attending from the US, UK, Germany, France and Spain.

Old School is best school
Got to meet and chat with Dennis, Doc and JP.

Glimpse of future
Dave Morin – facebook connect, Marissa Mayer – Google, and Susan Wu – Virtual Goods

Startups – no Irish… come on !!
Startup Competition – some interesting startups – and very worthy winner – some Web2Ireland companies would have done well at this event….

Failure – true stories
Morten Lund was one highlight of the event – off the cuff – very honest in his story.

Funding is hard in Europe
Lots of VCs in attendance [none from Ireland] – and the VC panel was interesting – see video. Key themes – build products that VCs will use [Fred Wilson, Martin Varsasky, Jeff Clavier] – and they don’t really believe Govt intervention @ funding is key [more on that later] – and NO doesnt mean NO.

Go Big or Go Home
Lots of usual talk @ valley versus Europe and can we build a big European web company.

Annual LeWeb bitch fight
Great fun from the sideline

Next Year
Rumour has it that the International D Conference will happen in Dublin next year

And no doubt LeWeb 09 will be another enjoyable event.

Last week was the last Open Coffee for Cork for the year. It was assumed that people wouldn’t be free to attend a last Open Coffee on the 19th. This is a poll to see if anyone would be interested in attending. It could be a demo slot for someone if they would like to show off a new or existing app or it could be a social one in Luigi malones.

Will you attend an Open Coffee in Cork on Friday morning, the 19th of December?
( polls)

Ruth Spencer from The European Journalism Centre (EJC) contacted me to let us know about The European Blogging Competition they are launching in Brussels from 25th to 27th of January coming.

The theme is TH!NK ABOUT IT and the focus of the competition is the European Parliament Elections 2009. EJC wants to offer a platform for journalism students, aspiring journalists and bloggers to express their views on European topics as well as to report and cover the elections.

They want to have three bloggers from each country attending the launch event and will cover the travel costs. The timeline is:

• Launch event: 25 January, 2009 – 27 January, 2009
• Blogging: 1 February, 2009 – 9 June, 2009
• Competition results: 12 June, 2009

If this is of interest to you, read all the details and apply at www.thinkaboutit.eu

If you are wondering what this has to do with Web2Ireland, I’d simply say that the direction the EU takes over the next few years, particularly in how it deals with a global recession, will have direct impact on start-ups here.

Short.ie is a free URL shortening service allowing you to truncate long unfriendly web addresses into a short and easy to use URLs, perfect for email, IM, Twitter and Texts.

This isn’t the first URL shortening service but it’s definitely my favourite for one main reason, the data it provides about the URLs I have shortened. When I shorten a URL, I can see how many people have clicked on the links.

Of the many URL shortening services that exist, the majority provide super short URLs but I haven’t seen any that provide numbers on how many people clicked on my links. This can be very handy. You could send out a text or a mail shot and see how many people are clicking on your links.

Or how about shortening your email address? Your email address is probably short enough already but it could be a great way to fool those email harvesting bots trawling your site for your email address.

Short.ie is an open collaboration between Iarfhlaith Kelly, David Coallier and myself. We have been adding new services to it, building out on the original idea. So far, here’s what we’ve got:

• Regular URL Shortening
• Custom URL Shortening
• Click Tracking
• View All Shortened Links (per user)
• Content Recommendations
• An API
• A Firefox Plugin
• A bookmarklet for IE and FF.

We’re also working on:

• Connecting people who link to the same things
• RSS feeds per registered user
• Displaying popular links on the homepage
• Displaying most influential users on the homepage (once we get avatars setup)
• Improving the content recommendation engine
• Promoting short.ie any way we can

So far there are over 50 registered users ( Shorties? ) with over 700 URLs shortened and over 5,000 clicks of those URLs! See the chart below for this weeks usage.

We’d love it if you could help spread the word. We’ve got a lot of plans for Short.ie, so if you haven’t already seen it, start shortening some URLs or  follow Short.ie on Twitter.

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A never-ending conversation I have with other start-ups is how get their name visible, build profile and eventually get covered by one of the main Tech News sites.

One way of kicking that off is to make sure your company is profiled on CrunchBase. We’ve recently started using the plug-in here on Web2Ireland to give extra context to stories. And ye know what? The TechCrunch guys love that we are.

It really is gratifying to know that the efforts made by the start-up community in Ireland are recognised by the guys in Silicon Valley. So what you waiting for, sign up now!

Stella Power just let us know that Drupal Ireland is organising a day long conference on the open source Drupal CMS. It’s taking place this Saturday (15th November) in DIT, Kevin St, Dublin 2 and will run from 9:30am to 4:30pm.  Registration is free but please sign up here so they can gauge numbers.

In case you’re not already aware, Drupal is a powerful open source content management system which allows users to easily publish, manage and share a wide variety of content on the internet.  There is a great
demand for people who know this software and demand is growing.

Drupal’s many features and add-ons allow it to be used for a variety of website needs; including for marketing, internal communications, informational websites, and for social networking purposes.

The event is being organised by the Drupal Ireland user group, which is a volunteer membership group.  The group is comprised of developers who use Drupal everyday; who contribute to Drupal core,  documentation and maintain popular modules.  If you’re interested in attending, more information on the sessions and the schedule can be found at http://groups.drupal.org/node/15895.

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.

Some further information about the Oriel house location over on my own blog.

See you there!