Recap of PaddysValley / DemoBar / FOWA night in Dublin

Blognation Ireland has a great summary of the PaddysValley / Pitch Training / DemoBar / FOWA RoadTrip night at Ely HQ in Dublin. I was there primarily for the PaddysValley meetup but really enjoyed bumping into a load of ambitious entrepreneurs. Paul Campbell too captures the atmosphere brilliantly - "A hardcore day of Internet technology business people brought together, pitching, chatting, networking, drinking, demo-ing. It was a serious buzz. I brought a self proclaimed luddite buddy and even he was pepped from the atmosphere." Thanks too to Fergus for an excellent event.

It was great to meet the Glowday founders Garry Kelly and Daniel Becker, who gave me a demo of what their service can do. Nice guys and a very promising company.

Walter Higgins from Pixenate was another of those demoing his software, a mere few hours after launching the Facebook version. Which is very useful as it is but I'm really looking forward to seeing some of the functionality that could be unlocked by taking advantage of that famous 'social graph'. For instance, family editing of speech bubbles, captions and interior designs/colours. This Facebook version is only a few days old and already has 68 daily active users!

I was disappointed not to meet Vinny Glennon whose JustRoutes application I've been testing for a few weeks and used to help me plan part of my journey to Ely HQ. Vinny too has just launched a new Facebook version and is looking for feedback. I think one use would be for small groups, like the Dublin based Twitter users, to find a meetup location that's equidistant (or equal access) from them.

Bear in mind though that JustRoutes has far more ambitions plans that just covering Dublin - "we will be mapping public transportation network of the entire island of Ireland. The end result for you, the user is that with 3 simple mouse clicks on our map, you can find all the routes from your starting point to your destination for free. If there is no direct routes between your locations, we will tell you how to get there using connections among all the different types of transport... At the moment, we have over 2500 stops recorded, including all the LUAS, DART and Suburban links for Dublin. More will be coming daily." Clearly one to watch.