Web 2.0 Ireland

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