Another event-related post: I think it’s a great sign of the vitality of the Irish software ecosystem that we’re seeing more and more events aimed at bringing together various groups within the industry.  People are hugely interested in meeting up to share ideas and to network, and more often than not in more social, informal settings: this reflects well on the Irish software and technology scene, and will hopefully continue to attract positive international attention towards Irish companies.

It’s fitting then that the Irish Software Association has decided to launch its own series of events: dubbed “TechBrew”, the goal is to provide a more casual networking opportunity for software companies, and to provide management and technology leaders with a forum to discuss and debate the challenges they face. The first TechBrew meet-up is scheduled for  October 14th, and will feature a discussion on the topic of SaaS.

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The TechBrew format is as follows: the first part will follow the evening’s theme, offering three or four people a soapbox for 10 minutes each (no slides allowed!) and provide everyone with the opportunity to contribute. The soapbox is for expressing an opinion or requesting help to resolve a challenge you are facing. The remainder of the evening will be dedicated to informal networking where you can chat and chew over a brew. Jonathan Siegel and Jonathan Boylan are both confirmed for the October soapbox, so it should make for a good session.

Full details and registration (courtesy of EventElephant) are available here.

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Following on from the success of the Open Jam event back in April, Enterprise Ireland are delighted to be hosting the third Irish Open Spaces Coding Day (IOSCD). Similar to the Open Jam session, the aim of the IOSCD is to bring together a community of talented and passionate software developers, who enjoy discovering new techniques and technologies, and sharing their ideas with others. The day will be very hands-on, with plenty of code being written and demo’d, and there’s a special treat for those interested in developing for mobiles: Martha Rotter from Microsoft Ireland will be dropping by with some Windows Phone 7 phones for you to play with and test out your apps (more details here).

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The IOSCD takes place this Saturday, September 11th in the Enterprise Ireland offices in East Point. I’m always interested in supporting events like these that showcase the depth and strength of the Irish software community, and in particular events like IOSCD that can help bring together groups of people who would not normally have the chance to meet and work together. For further information about the event please contact the Dublin ALT.NET team, and you can register for the day here.

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It seems like there’s a ‘must-attend’ event on in the web/tech space every second day at the moment. The autumn schedule is rapidly filling up events, with everything from blockbuster headline acts  such as The 2010 Cloud Computing Summit, to the ultra-niche Ruby Ireland Meetups. It can be difficult to keep track of and schedule all of the various events, which is why I was excited to see a bit of a crowd-sourcing effort to make our lives a bit easier in this regard.

Instigated by Stewart Curry (Design Director at X Communications), the Web Events in Ireland Google Calendar is a list of upcoming conferences, workshops and seminars focussed on the web development and design space.

Stewart has kindly added me as an admin on the calendar, so if there’s an upcoming event in this space that you’d like to add please let get in touch.

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Good news on the online marketing front in Ireland, with two new courses in this space announced in the past week. Dublin City University and the Digital Marketing Institute have both announced post-graduate courses in Digital Marketing, targeting marketing professional who are facing the challenges of operating in the always-on, hyper-connected world of communications.

Both courses offer advice and tips on the practical aspects of Digital Marketing, such as search engine optimisation and marketing, marketing for mobile devices and the social media channels, while also highlighting the importance of defining an encompassing marketing strategy for the digital space, to allow Irish companies make the most of the opportunities presented.  If utilised correctly, online channels can deliver a sustained marketing and sales presence in a cost-effective manner for Irish companies looking to export their goods and services overseas.

For more information on these courses, please see the links below.

• Graduate Certificate in Digital Marketing, DCU Business School
• Post Graduate Diploma in Digital Marketing, Digital Marketing Institute

Update

Just saw that the Irish Internet Association (IIA) have also launched a Diploma in Digital Marketing in conjunction with Irish Times Training. The IIA are currently seeking candidates for this FETAC accredited course, register online here.

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My attention was drawn to this great case study recently, it’s a great example of the direct benefits our use of Social Media can bring.

One of our client companies recently launched an innovative new application for the iPhone called Snap2Travel. Using image recognition software, the Snap2Travel application allows users to take a photo of a travel brochure page, and instantly offers photos, videos and availability information directly to your phone (more information here). This service launched recently in partnership with the German travel operator Der Tour, and Manus Rooney in the Düsseldorf office wrote a blog post about the application on the Irish Business Network blog. The blog post was very brief, containing a few sentences about the service, and congratulating the team on getting the product to market.

What makes this case interesting is the effect this blog post had on the company’s search engine results. Generally speaking, Google (by far the world’s most popular web search engine) gives content from blogs more weight than content from regular static websites, as it considers that regularly updated content will have more relevance than a website which changes less frequently. In the case of Snap2Travel, the ‘blog effect’ is immediately clear: the image below is the result of searching for ‘Snap2Travel’ on the Google.de website (grabbed on the 20th April 2010).

The blog post from Manus (highlighted in red) is the second result, while the announcement from Snap2Travel (blue) and Der Tour (green) are 5th and 8th respectively. Given that recent studies have shown that most web users ignore everything past the 3rd search result, this is an extremely positive outcome, and shows how we can effectively use Social Media tools to promote our clients and raise their profile on the Web.

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The Enterprise Ireland eBusiness Unit’s use of the Twitter micro-blogging platform got a recent thumbs-up from the good folk at ENN (see “Web Pick”), so I thought I’d provide a bit more detail on what we’ve been up to that might warrant such praise.

The eBusiness Unit host and maintain an online discussion forum / mailing-list dedicated to all things Web-related. The purpose of the forum is to provide a friendly and practical space where participants can feel comfortable asking questions and raising issues that are important to them, regardless of their level of knowledge of eBusiness. The forum has been existence for a number of years, and has quite an active community, discussing (often heatedly!) topics ranging from recommendations for Content Management Systems, to domain registration issues, and that old reliable, Search Engine Optimisation.

(more…)

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From today’s Irish Times, great piece on how this Limerick-based company used LinkedIn to complete a private fundraising drive, raising €162,500 in just over a week, Obama-style. Goshido is delivered by Coclarity, an EI client who are also on iGAP.

Seven hundred e-mails were sent to potential investors through LinkedIn earlier this month, generating 200 replies by phone, e-mail and Twitter. The company raised €162,500 in just eight days.

Mr Hannigan, who joined the company in October and has taken one of the investment slots, called the response “an amazing result”.

He said it showed Irish businesses could exploit the potential of LinkedIn, which was about more than just contacts and recruitment.

“I’m blown away by it and it gives the lie to people who say social networking is just about Facebook.”

Full article is here http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2010/0122/1224262838183.html

Update: This news story is getting attention outside of Ireland.

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I recently had the opportunity to meet with James Lawn, the CEO of Polecat, an EI-supported High Potential Startup (HPSU). James visited us at our East Point offices to demo Polecat’s primary product, MeaningMine, a web-based market intelligence platform, as well as to discuss some opportunities for growth.

The platform works by scanning over 200,000 articles and four million plus blog posts daily, and helps companies build an accurate picture of how their marketing message is being received in the online sphere, as well as gain a deeper understanding of what is being said about given topics. What particularly caught my attention is that MeaningMine is semantically analysing this unstructured data using domain-specific ontologies and Natural Language Processing techniques; in essence, the platform attempts to understand the meaning of what is being said online, creating more relevant results which (hopefully) will lead to better decisions. Very Web 3.0

The technology is partly based on the excellent work carried out by Professor Pádraig Cunningham and his team at the UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics, and was licensed to Polecat in conjunction with NovaUCD. I think this is an excellent example of collaboration between the Irish business and academic worlds, leading to the development of a market-leading product, something we will hopefully see much more of in the future.

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