EirePreneur

Business Angels can hear your call

I'm intrigued by the hints Dermod Moore is dropping about his stealth business idea. He seems to be doing alot of tinkering with social bookmarking and aggregation services and cites Protopage and PXN8 as role models. These are interests I share so I'll be keeping a close eye on what he's cooking up.

He also offers great advice on why, if you have a business idea, you simply must blog -

This project is going especially well at this early stage because my general invitation of a month ago, when I announced to the open space that is the blogo'sphere that I was about to start down the business road, resulted in an angel (there isn't a better word, really) getting in touch. He's been offering me exactly the practical financial/managerial advice and support I need, because he thinks it's going to work.

So, folks, blogging works as a means of connecting people, in a way that I'm really impressed with. If you find yourself needing something, just put it out there and ask. You never know who might answer.

Online gaming reaching new levels of grandeur

John Kelly points out that the online game World of Warcraft now has a bigger population than the whole of Ireland while diggdot.us throws up a link to the most spectactular game demo I've ever seen - not for the graphics (though they're cool too) but for the incredible ambition and scope of the gameplay. I'm not much of a gamer but this demo kept me rooted to my chair for 35 minutes.

Bring good ideas to the boil fast, don't brew

MJ has also been thinking about the internet cafe as business incubator idea and better again he intends "doing something about it".

I'd hoped for a bit of a head start. Too late! I'm going to have to get my finger out and do something about this which means moving things a bit faster. I don't have to implement the full scale plan, but I do need to do something.

Good on you MJ - the first step is always the hardest. I have a friend (who shall remain nameless) who has run at least a dozen different business plans by me in the last 5 years. The same thing happens each time - he inevitably comes up with an excuse not to jump from the security of his cosy 9 to 5. I still think he has the makings of an entrepreneur in him but he desperately needs to cross a scary psychological chasm. I myself spent 2 years brooding over the business I'm in now before finally cutting the safety harness.

PXN8 gets Scobleized, explosion to follow?

So right after reading that Don Dodge post that Fergus pointed to (boy has he got his finger on the pulse), I realize that Walter Higgins' PXN8 has just been Scobleized. So Walter gets a chance to evaluate Don's thesis -

"Simply engage a couple of the "A-List" bloggers (Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Om Malik, Steve Gillmor, Cory Doctorow, Richard MacManus,  Stowe Boyd, and others) by sending them a link to your new product or service. Tell them what problem it solves and why it is cool. When they blog, people listen. When their stories hit Tech Memeorandum, Digg, TailRank, and other services the story explodes across thousands of blogs within hours."

Fingers crossed for Sxoop. I still think it was a mistake for Walter to pack in the blog and I hope he can resurrect it to take advantage of the forecasted traffic spike.

Damn, why didn't I invest before the stampede? ;-)

Fundable for Angel Investing

And speaking of Fergus Burns he continues the conversation opened by John Collins about the Irish investment market and M&A activities.

I wish there was a version of Fundable for investing in companies. I, for one, would love to invest a few hundred (or more) in some of the early stage Irish Web 2.0 ventures, like Nooked, Tablane and PXN8, whether they're BES approved or not. Surely there are a few thousand like minded individuals out there. Multiply a few hundred by a few thousand and suddenly you're talking seriously useful funding for a startup.

The investments may be on the risky side of the spectrum but an entrepreneur is nothing if not risk loving and these are the type of companies I understand. I don't personally invest in property or blue-chip shares. I want to put money into things I know something about, regardless of the risk.

Those YANKs

Yet Another Nooked Klone. I wonder how Fergus Burns feels about having pioneered an ever growing category of software.

What it sometimes takes to win business

Sometimes the 'whatever is necessary' actions of quick thinking entrepreneurs are borderline unethical. But its difficult not to admire the 'can do' attitude.The story in yesterday's Sunday Times of how Strencom's Tim Murphy won an early large contract is a case in point and a rather amusing annecdote -

"When the client asked to visit Strencom’s premises, Murphy, who had just two employees, called in family and friends to sit in the office and pretend they worked there."

Read on to see how the devious plan nearly backfired....

Information overload? Don't subscribe. Don't aggregate. Glance!

Rowan Nairn does a great job of breaking down the different types of RSS feeds we subscribe to. His 4th category of feed is -

Friend’s and must-see feeds:
With these feeds, I want to at least glance at every item that comes through, maybe not immediately but eventually. These can be almost as important as personal email. List-of-feeds works alright here. My current personal project is addressing this latter species

Rowan uses the word glance in that paragraph and I think its more significant than he realizes. Because that, to me, is exactly the benefit of his OPML browser + RSS Reader project - OPod. For instance OPod allows you to glance at the RTE News feeds if you follow the News & Media -> All Media Feeds -> RTE hierarchy. No need to subscribe, no need to aggregate.

According to Answers, to Browse is to "inspect something leisurely and casually". But in the real world we don't have time to inspect much. Instead we Glance - "direct the gaze briefly,... move rapidly from one thing to another."

I would suggest therefore that OPod, Taskable and whatever Kosso is cooking up are a new breed of software application that we should refer to as Feed Glancers. I think we're all going to be doing a lot less subscribing in future and a whole lot more glancing instead..

Fantasy business teams

Damien Mulley points to the buzz surrounding proposals to reboot the way venture capitalism works. And Scoble's post extrapolates the ideas around outsourcing business functions and building virtual companies, eg -

"5) Venture deep technical help. Let’s be honest. The skills to get a prototype service up and working are far different than making it work for 10 million users. Building UI’s in Ruby on Rails is a lot easier than building a server farm that can handle exponentially-growing loads. So, can you build a network where you share one tech team among a group of startups? Then you’ll add value to the whole network and be sought after. I saw just this happening at startups in Silicon Valley where one deeply-skilled tech guy was shared among three or four startups."

This reminded me of Paul O'Mahony's comments on the PXN8 review at Web2.0Ireland.com -

"Surely bloggers should come together and form some sort of loosely bound structure/organisation to facilitate this kind of collaborative enterprise. With enough members we may even be able to boot strap our own ventures through membersip fees... I was half thinking of starting a blog on Web 2.0 also. It would be devoted to discovering fast growing Web 2.0 startups and assessing the potential of porting them to Ireland."

Paul also made a very interesting point in an email -

"I guess its fair to say that a high percentage of bloggers are programmers and that bloggers in general are a  skilled and enterprising bunch. After all, making a blog in itself is an enterprising act. So I think it makes sense to channel all that energy in a collective way."

And while Paul thought that TechCamp was great he wondered why the Wiki wasn't an ongoing affair, acting as a collaborative business plan. Why indeed?

I started asking myself similar questions recently after putting together a reading list for Irish entrepreneurs. It occured to me that the list was something of a fantasy business team. If I was to be struck by a flash of inspiration for the right business idea I can't imagine having a better team than the 13 people on that list. Granted it may need to be rounded out a little with other skillsets but its an incredible starting point.

Aspoke 'n for

Great to see more Irish bloggers covering their entrepreneurial exploits. Antoin says that Aspoke.com - his laptop style brand - is moving along nicely:

"There’s a steady stream of orders and interest. We have all the usual problems of growth - space, logistics, capital and so on. But the product is good, and it’s getting better as we learn more about what the marketplace wants."

You know a new coat might just be an ideal birthday present for my drab Dell Inspiron 510m.