EirePreneur

What a beautiful city is Baastin

Boston is a charming mashup of the old and new which is nowhere better exemplified than in Copley Square where the reflection of Trinity Church shimmers on the facade of Hancock Tower.

Taking the strange out of being a stranger

I'm off to Boston on Friday to meet with the team behind Grazr for a product planning session. It'll be my first visit to the Athens of America so I've been doing as much research as possible to familiarize myself with the city, the attractions, restaurants, pubs and so on.

Google Earth was the tool of choice in scouting the wider area and finding places of interest.  The big advantage is its tie-ins with media services like National Geographic, Discovery and TurnHere. TurnHere is a particularly valuable reference with 16 'short films' about 'cool places' in Boston including the neighbourhood of Somerville and Davis Square, about 4 miles from downtown, which was a run down area until the establishment of The Burren Irish bar gave it a fresh lease of life.

Other videos promote Harvard Square and the fashionable Back Bay area. The latter visits premises on Newbury Street and Jurys Boston Hotel on Stuart Street. Already I was buidling up a comprehensive mental image of this downtown area. Next step was to plot a walking tour taking in these locations and the (fake) Cheers bar, Ritz Carlton and Copley Place.

This is where Live Local really shines. Not alone for the plotting tools but especially for the isometric Bird's Eye view. As useful as 3D buildings are in Google Earth that feature won't compare with Bird's Eye view until those buildings are fully photo textured. Isometric imagery allows you to orient yourself in a much more compelling way than any overhead view.

With the line drawing tool you can conveniently plot a trail or path. It's easiest to plot the line in Aerial View and then switch to Bird's Eye view to follow the trail in a way that almost feels like you're flying a helicopter through the streets. I can't imagine losing my bearings after 'rehearsing' my route a number of times in this way. Here's my short tour of downtown Boston - give it a few moments to load.

Amazon's Yellow pages add another dimension. I'm getting a taxi from the airport to Harvard and meeting Grazr president Adam Green for a coffee at Border Cafe in Cambridge. Here it is, in a format that allows me to virtually walk down the street to it. Another way for me to familiarize myself with surroundings some 3,000 miles distant.

This is my first time applying these tools to a practical application and really putting them through their paces. What's my verdict? Well, when I arrive in the unofficial capital of New England on Friday I'll be a stranger.... but thanks to these services it won't feel strange to me.


Technorati Tags: google earth, live local, mapping, boston

In favour of Lifestyle Entrepreneurship

Hadyn Shaughnessy questions "the financial and cultural logic" behind the "Web 2.0 philosophy that entrepreneurs seeking a better lifestyle rather than arduously ramping up a business to stellar status shouldn’t get VC backing." -

One entrepreneur with a lifestyle objective might be bad news but a network would be a powerful force. So let’s hear it for lifestyle entrepreneurs.

Does your aggregator follow comment feeds?

Grazr does.

How a small business can help itself

Keith Bohanna has announced a brilliant new initiative called Help Yourself which...

"...at it's core is a support network for bemused businesses. The format is a monthly talk with 15 mins on a particular topic (non techie and simple) and 20 minutes or thereabouts from a local business person /entrepreneur (again non-techie) who will talk about their site and use of the internet. Then Q&A to round out the hour."

Keith is based in Kilkenny but I know from experience this kind of programme is badly needed here in west Limerick and, I'd imagine, the most of the rest of the country. I think this could become a franchise.

I blog to network

Walter Higgins is part of my del.icio.us network so I took a look at his bookmark for Failure To Launch: Why Every Startup Should Have a Blog. The four reasons cited are to -

1. Find Co-Founders
2. Find Employees
3. Find Early Customers
4. Get Early Feedback
5. Find Investors

All valid reasons (and a good read) but which could possibly be summed up with one word - Network.

A mere few hours after blogging that I'm visiting Boston this weekend Jim Moore invited me to meet up with him for dinner when I get there. Among many other things Jim is a Senior Fellow at HLS Berkman Center and a best selling author. Naturally I'm very flattered by the invitation but the point of this post is not to name drop, rather it's to emphasise the incredible networking power of blogs.

If you'd told me 5 years ago, before I started blogging, that a thought leader I'd never met before, living thousands of miles away, would casually drop me an invitation to dinner on the basis of my amateur writings....... well, I wouldn't have even laughed.... I'd have just shook my head in pity ;-)

Grazr get's 'crunched, goes v1.0

TechCrunch reviews Grazr just as we launch version 1.0 and a brand new website -

"Grazr, the mini OPML browser that puts mortal widgets to shame, just launched version 1.0.  The Grazr team is led by founder Michael Kowalchik and Adam Green - who as CTO at Andover.net, the parent of Slashdot and many other sites, took the company to its IPO. What are they up to today? Something very forward looking. I really like Grazr and I think the company’s plan for the future is very smart.

I’ve been excited about Grazr ever since I first saw it in alpha. I’ve used it in many different circumstances and find it invaluable as a very pleasing way to display the living information inside OPML files. The future of Grazr is even more exciting."

At the same time Tom Morris has announced another in a line of clever Grazr mashups - Traffic reports in OPML. I'm heading to Boston this weekend (to meet with the Grazr 'gang') so I'll have to point my cabbie to this mashup ;-)

Dublin in Second Life

Yesterday's article in the Sunday Tribune about Dublin in Second Life obviously caught the imagination of a number of people because I'm seeing a large number of hits today both from John O'Shea's blog post and directly from Google searches. Fair play to John Mahon for having the entrepreneurial spirit to see his vision through to... er, unreality. And thanks to John for dropping by to say -

"Unlike all other builds in SL, I worked my team to provide the highest level of accuracy we could achieve while still including some key Dublin landmarks. During a meeting with Linden Labs in San Francisco, they also raised the prospect of virtual shops, with virtual assistants conducting real transactions."

Wow, very cool indeed.

The value of mentorship

Conor O'Neill comments on his recent presentation to an Enterprise Ireland Mentor Panel -

"It was a very valuable exercise and I recommend that anyone in a start-up in Ireland do one as early as possible. Not only do you get excellent feedback from the panel but it is a great way of clarifying your own thoughts and tightening up your presentation skills.... We all tend to focus on the grants and funding aspects of what EI does, but sessions like the Mentor Panel, the upcoming BES & Seed Capital session and the “Sales Process Coaching Programme” are possibly even more important."

This brought back the memories of my participation in the Enterprise Platform Programme. I commented in the old EirePreneur, almost 4 years ago, about mentorship being the most valuable element of the programme. And I followed up on Boards.ie, nearly 3 years ago, with a small proviso -

"I have also had access to mentorship and I agree about mentors being a mixed bag. One guy I had for marketing mentorship was, I'm sure, a very qualified and capable mentor for most traditional business, but, I'm afraid, for my international website service he was really lacking in ecommerce/internet competence. Fair enough, business is business, but in this case it was vital that he had some degree of knowledge about the specifics of internet businesss and he just didn't."

What I forgot to follow up with was the positive experience we had with a subsequent mentor who, even though in his 60s, was very clued into internet developments. In fact, he was himself involved on a consultancy basis with an internet startup.