Aislinn Mahon explains how The New Market Entrants Team is currently supporting some of Enterprise Ireland’s most exciting and forward thinking music technology start-ups.
The New Market Entrants Team in the UK office is running an exciting event to highlight the level of innovation present amongst the strong cluster of fast growth music technology start up companies in Ireland.
The Global Digital Music Industry
The global music industry is adapting to the digital age at an accelerated rate, and new models for creating, consuming and accessing music are constantly being introduced into new markets. This digital landscape provides both opportunities and challenges for record labels, producers and artists. The Internet makes the distribution of music faster and easier to access, but issues of piracy have risen here. There is a strong feeling in the industry that artists should be rewarded financially for their work in the digital environment, just as they have always been in the physical world.
Ones to Watch
We know that Ireland is home to some of the most exciting and forward thinking music technology start-ups that are focused on driving opportunity and addressing the challenges faced by the music industry. Thought leading companies such as 45sound, Seevl, Whole World Band, Soundwave Analytics, Mobanode, Huggity, Riffstation and Ticketfriend are but a few of our shining stars.
 Kevin Godley, Founder and John Holland, CEO of Whole World Band The Innovation in Music Technology Showcase is being run by The New Market Entrants Team at the end of May in Dublin. Leading UK music technology representatives from companies such as Mobile Roadie, MINT Digital and Music Ally will hear about the impact of digital technology on the future of the music industry and learn about new ways of driving revenue in their business in the surroundings of The Sugar Club, one of Dublin’s most creative music venues. Topics on the day will range from digital fan engagement strategies to collaborative content creation and music discovery to mobile festivals.
 Cathal Furey, CEO of 45sound, pictured in the company’s brand new office on South William St, Dublin Watch this Space!
In the UK, digital revenues stand at one third of music industry income – an important statistic when one considers that this surpasses those of other creative industries (e.g. film, books and newspapers). There is a mood of optimism in the UK music industry, and Enterprise Ireland sees this as an end market opportunity for our client companies to capitalise on.
Contribute to the conversation #IrishMusicTech.
For more information on Enterprise Ireland’s activity in the UK music industry, contact Aislinn Mahon @ Aislinn.Mahon@Enterprise-Ireland.com or connect with her @ Aislinn_Mahon.
Digital Music, Enterprise Ireland UK, Music Technology, New Market Entrants Team, start up
Enterprise Ireland wishes to determine the level of interest among our client companies to attend Microsoft WPC (July 7-11), VMworld (August 26-29) 2013.
Each of these events
- deals with technology internal to your company
- targets companies in the US and worldwide market
- gives you an opportunity to sell your products both directly and through partnerships
- offers access to networking events
Company participation at these events may be part-funded by Enterprise Ireland (subject to eligibility – eligibility will be assessed on a first come first served basis, by the extent of previous EI support for similar events, etc). More details on potential funding will be available at a later date.
If you are a client of Enterprise Ireland and are interested in attending either of these events as part of an Enterprise Ireland group, please fill out this Expression of Interest form before Thursday 28th March.
Few marketing techniques give you more impact than video content. In the US 183 million people watched more than 37 billion online videos in September 2012 — and that’s just one of a host of compelling statistics about the power of video you can see here .
Most tellingly, B2B companies using video have experienced in annual sales increase of up to 36%, according to Brightcove.
Where do you start if you want to tell your story through video? In the Irish market here are the three main options to choose from, in increasing order of cost:
Option 1: Screen capture €
Screen capture is the most cost-effective way to get some video content onto your company’s YouTube channel. Using a free tool like www.screenr.com and a microphone-equipped headset, you can talk your way through a presentation on your desktop, recording your voice as if you were giving the presentation to a roomful of people. Your voice and what’s showing on your desktop will be recorded as video. Screenr allows you to resize the area of your desktop that is captured, letting you frame out anything you don’t want to show, like other open tabs on your browser or your bookmarks. Once you’ve finished, you can download the recording; or if you already have a YouTube account, click “publish to YouTube.” YouTube will then give you code to let you embed your video as a blog post on your website. While Screenr is free, your time is money, and it could take you one to two hours to create a finished product you are happy with.
Option 2: Customer success stories on video €€
You can have a finished corporate video for between €1500 and €5000, but filming your M.D. talking about your products isn’t the way to go. Instead, work with a video production company to capture your customer success stories. Video your happiest customers talking to camera about the problem you solved for them, and how you’re different from other providers they’ve worked with. A scriptwriter or director typically pre-interviews the person to be filmed, then pieces together a narrative and a rough shot list, for use on the day of filming.
Option 3: Animation €€
This is at the high end of budget, in the €5,000 to €10,000 range, but the impact can be impressive, at a price point not dissimilar to the cost of printing and distributing a traditional glossy brochure. If you have a complex product or service to explain, like the software that Drogheda-based Armac Systems sells to the global aviation sector, animation in particular does a great job at helping your target market grasp what you do. The usual process is to work with an agency or scriptwriter to develop the concept and the voiceover, and then move into production. A typical way to approach an explanatory animation is to show the old and problematic way of doing things, followed by the new way, ending with a clear call to action. Animations can easily be localised for international markets: when recording the voiceover artist’s script in studio, a second artist and translated script in your target market language can be recorded for a small incremental cost.
When you post your video onto YouTube, please don’t omit the essential step of writing relevant descriptive information — this is vital for helping your service to be found through YouTube search or another search engine. A detailed description of your video allows potential buyers to zero in on your video, no matter how niche your product or service. Hubspot has created a good guide to optimising your video descriptions on YouTube for search engine visibility.
If you have your eye on a range of international markets, it’s possible to set up a dedicated YouTube channel for each, as retail giant Lidl has done for territories like Spain, Poland, Germany and so on. YouTube is localised in 43 countries and available in 60 languages, so there is ample opportunity to reach the market you’re looking to penetrate.
What are your experiences of online video? Are there good examples of business-to-business video marketing you could share?
Sheila Averbuch is a former business journalist and managing director for the content services agency ENNclick .
Watch the Dublin Web Summit ‘Live’ here on Wednesday 17th & Thursday 18th October 2012.
Over 200 international speakers and 3,000 plus attendees from 50+ countries will descend on Dublin. This event is sponsored by Enterprise Ireland. There are 5 concurrent sessions which you can watch live from 9:15am - Main Event, Cloud Session, Digital Marketing Stream, Developer Stream and Interviews.
For the first time there will be a dedicated Digital Marketing Stream .
Digital Marketing Stream Schedule
Wednesday
09:15 – Cillian Kieran, Founder & CEO of Folio & CKSK
09:30 – Alan Coleman, CEO of Wolfgang Digital
09:45 – Andrzej Moyseowicz, Strategy & Innovation Director at Saatchi & Saatchi
10:00 - Ronan Harris, Senior Director at Google
10:15 - Joshua March, Co-founder & CEO of Conversocial
10:30 – Hubert Grealish, Global Head of Brand Communications at Diageo
10:45 – Mark Henderson, General Manager of LivingSocial Ireland
11:00 - BREAK
11:30 - Niall Harbison, Co-founder of Simply Zesty
11:45 - Dharmesh Shah, Co- founder & CTO of Hubspot
12:00 - Stephen O’Leary, O’Leary Analytics
12:15 - Joe Stepniewski, Co-Founder of Skimlinks
12:30 - Jon Myers, Commercial Director at Marin Software
12:45: Silje Vallestad, CEO & Founder of Bipper
13:00 - LUNCH
14:00 – Gregor Poynton, Political Director (UK) at Blue State Digital
14:15 – Alexis Dormandy, Founder & CEO of LoveThis
14:30 – Mark Dewings, Brand & Marketing Communications for SoundCloud
14:45 – Aubrey Sabala, VP of Marketing & Communications at Sailthru
15:00 – Scott Belsky, Founder & CEO of Behance
15:15 – Mark Kornfilt, Co-founder of Livestream
Thursday
09:15 - Joanna Lord, VP of Growth Marketing at SEOmoz
09:30 - Caroline Ghosn, Founder & CEO of The Levo League
09:45 - Maya Baratz, Senior Product Manager at ABC News
10:00 - Bas Van Den Beld, Founder & Chief Editor of State of Search
10:15 - Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite
10:30 - BREAK
11:00 – Sarah Wood, Co-founder & COO of Unruly Media
11:15 - Rachel Tipograph, Director, Global Digital & Social Media at Gap Inc.
11:30 - Kathryn Parsons, Co-founder of Decoded
11:45 - Jan Rezab, CEO of SocialBakers
12:00 - Cindy Gallop, Founder of Make Love Not Porn & IfWeRanTheWorld
12:15 - Brian Wong, Co-founder & CEO of Kiip
12:30 - Omid Ashtari, Director of Business Development at Foursquare
This is a guest post from Andrea of BatCat Games, who is utting together the Dublin GameCraft event. For more news follow Andrea on Twitter @RoundCrisis. This is the follow up to the successful event in Feb – more on the previous event at Zombies, Students and Professional Games Developers welcome in DIT
What is it?
Dublin GameCraft is a game-jam held in the city centre. What that means is that around one-hundred game developers (designers, writers, coders, artists, sound engineers and so on) come together in teams or as lone-wolves and try to make a game from scratch in twelve hours.
At the start of the day the judges announce a theme and then you’re let loose to make the most fun game you can think of based on that. Use any technology, any equipment and any number of people you want to squeeze onto your team; essentially do whatever it takes to turn that theme into a fun game inside of your twelve hours!
When is it?
The next GameCraft is being held on Saturday the 17th November from 9am to, well, to the end of the day (twelve hours of developing, followed by some mingle and judging time).
Where is it?
November’s gathering is kindly being hosted by the folks at http://www.engineyard.com/
How do I find out more?
The internet! Come find us at http://dublingamecraft.com/, like us at https://www.facebook.com/dublingamecraft or follow us over at https://twitter.com/DublinGameCraft
How much does it cost?
Nothing! Thanks to our kind sponsors, such as Digit Gaming, Microsoft, BatCat Games and BitSmith –Games, all you have to do is register (which you can do from the website) and bring along whatever gear you want to use on the day (laptop, desktop, whatever).
Why come along?
Well, you’ll get an intensive day of experience. You may even get a game out of it. You’ll be surrounded by folks from the industry (organisers, judges and other participants) with whom you can network. Heck, two companies formed because of last Gamecraft; you could be next! Also, while the judges judge you can mingle and show off your day’s work. And of course, prizes!
 Following on from the success of the Dublin Web Summit in 2011, the 19th of March will see two of the best know web events for start ups join forces for the first time. GeeknRolla and the Dublin Web Summit, are merging to create the London Web Summit.
TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher will co-curate the Summit with Paddy Cosgrave of the Dublin Web Summit. With a focus at the summit on Trends in Local, Social and Mobile, Growth and Investment Strategies for Start Ups and Insights on Cloud and Data, speakers at the Summit include an array of exciting speakers including Matthew Prince Founder, CloudFlare, Jason Goldberg, Founder of Fab.com, Mark Read, CEO of WPP Digital, Jessica Powell, CMO of Badoo and many more.
“We’re really delighted to be teaming up with the Dublin Web Summit lads. They’ve managed to do it again and put together a fantastic lineup of incredible speakers. Hopefully we’ll have a bit of that Irish magic in London for the London Web Summit”
-TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher
There is a lot of buzz around the event with over 350 people registering to attend within the first 3 days of registration. Paddy Cosgrave encourages Irish startups to get get over to the event:
“We’re offering Irish startups an opportunity to exhibit at the London Web Summit and we’ve seen quite a number of investors sign up, people from Accel, Atomico, Balderton, Index, Graylock and many more, so its a great opportunity to meet some of the top investors in London. For any startups under two years old we’re also running a startup competition to find the top five startups who’ll present in front of an audience of 800 at the end of the day.”
For more information about the event and the opportunity to showcase your company as one of Europe’s hottest start ups, see the startup competition entry.
Enterprise Ireland will be supporting the event and the London Web Summit have agreed a rate of £995 + VAT to any Irish companies who wish to exhibit at the event.
To avail of this special exhibition rate, please contact the London Web Summit directly on bronagh@websummit.net
Trade fair support from Enterprise Ireland may be available to Enterprise Ireland client companies only (subject to eligibility) up to the value of 50%. For more information, Enterprise Ireland clients need to discuss their eligibility with their Development Advisor directly.
For general information, please contact Claire Bodys on Claire.bodys@enterprise-ireland.com
Animation, App, Casual Gaming, Games, Gaming, Media, Phil Campbell
This is a guest post from Andrea of BatCat Games, who is also involved in putting together the Dublin GameCraft event. For more news follow Andrea on Twitter @RoundCrisis. More on what EI is doing in Ireland with the Games and Software Companies is here.
On Febraury 25th 2012, a collection of hobbyist, student, independent and professional game developers will be placed together in a room in DIT and gently coaxed into a game development frenzy. There will be sweat, there will be tears, there will most likely be zombies, and after eight hours of intensely profound game development acrobatics, there will be games.
 http://www.movieposterdb.com/poster/d1ac1b8d Dublin Gamecraft is a single-day game jam event that has been put together to encourage Irish game developers to gather in one place in order to create a game from scratch in just eight hours. Choice of platform, development tools, and team size is completely unrestricted. Use whatever you’re most comfortable with. Teams are allowed and encouraged, and can even be created on the day, although this will cut into your game development time. This is a bring-your-own-hardware event.
After exactly eight hours, you can submit your masterpiece to our panel of industry experts, who will come up with a list of their favourite entries. We hope to have some fantastic prizes for the best games, including, but not limited to, the respect and admiration of your peers. Breakfast and lunch will also be provided courtesy of our generous sponsors, Open Emotion Studios, JetBrains and Swrve.
If you don’t want to create a game on the day, come along just for the networking. You might gain some new contacts, or learn a new trick or two.
We’re really excited about this event. There’s a real buzz around the game development scene in Ireland recently, which is evident in the large number of registrations we’ve received already. We hope that game jams like this one can help our burgeoning local industry into the global limelight. Hope to see you all there.
Event, Potential Exporters
This is a guest post from Teresa Dillon of the Science Gallery, Dublin. Teresa is looking for good Irish Software and Service Companies to take part in ‘Hack the City’ – an exhibition running from June to September. It could be a great showcase for your new App, Service, Mashup or Startup, with potential funding available to help you realise the concept for the event.
Currently more than half of the world’s population lives in towns and cities. This trend is expected to continue. Between 2025-2030 of the approximate 8 billion people who will live in the world 5 billion will live in cities. Yet the majority of our city infrastructures are based on inherited historical layouts and systems.
Science Gallery’s 2012 flagship exhibition and festival Hack the City will rethink our cities from the ground up through the spirit and philosophy of the hacker ethos – to bend, mash-up, tweak and cannibalise our city systems, to create possibilities, illustrate visionary thinking and demonstrate real-world examples for sustainable urban futures. It will capitalize on Dublin city’s history, legacy, population and infrastructure, transforming the city itself into a nimble “playground” and live urban hack lab.
 http://www.flickr.com/photos/7375989@N06/ We’re looking for proposals for experiments, exhibits, events, apps, mashups and visualisations which go beyond Science Gallery in to the city of Dublin and even connect multiple cities globally. Potential venue partnerships include The Ark, Temple Bar, Dublin and international partnerships with ZER01 in San Jose, California. We are especially interested in (more…)
Hack The City, Mashup, Open Data, Potential Exporters, Science Gallery, Startup
This is a guest post from Amy Neale, Marketing and Programme Manager at the National Digital Research Centre (NDRC).
We at NDRC (National Digital Research Centre) have just announced that we are now open for applications to LaunchPad. This investment programme is open for applications from digital start-ups from Ireland and internationally, and 15 start-ups will be selected to work with us for a 3 month period starting 13th February 2012. During this time we provide these 2 or 3 man bands with a hands-on, intensive mentoring programme; weekly workshops and networking opportunities with experts; as well as the all important investment of up to €20,000 per project. The three months will culminate with NDRC’s ‘LiftOff’ competition, taking place in May 2012 where the start-ups will present to a room of investors and compete for access to a follow on investment prize fund.
We were delighted earlier in 2011 to be ranked in the ‘Top 10 EU Accelerators’ by the Kauffman Fellows, and – along with Enterprise Ireland’s iGap programme – we have been nominated for Best European Accelerator at The Europas 2011. NDRC LaunchPad is producing award winning startups such as Redeem&Get and Hit the Road, and developing technology entrepreneurs with early stage innovative digital start-ups. We invest in and collaborate with early stage start-ups to establish market focused, technically excellent and profitable ventures.
In 2010–2011 NDRC mentored, trained and developed 39 entrepreneurs, and has to date secured €4.8 million in commercial investment for technologies and start-ups. Just ten days ago, NDRC-backed start-up Redeem&Get won the Spark of Genius Award, giving them access to an ACT Venture Capital term sheet worth €100k. This year NDRC received a record 81 applications for 15 places on the current LaunchPad Programme, with Irish, European and North American start-ups participating.
If you are interested in NDRC LaunchPad, come along to our open evening to meet the team, ask questions and find out everything you need to know about the accelerator programme, before the application deadline of 16th December. This informal evening will be held on Thursday, the 1st of December, and will start at 6.30pm and will run to 8.30pm. It will take place in NDRC’s ‘Digital Exchange’ building on Crane Street, Dublin 8 – please register your details here.
To apply for a place on NDRC LaunchPad visit www.ndrc.ie/launchpad; deadline for receipt of applications is 5pm on the 16th December 2011.
NDRC LAUNCHPAD CLOSING DATE 5pm 16th December 2011
NDRC LAUNCHPAD PROGRAMME START 13th February 2012
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