EirePreneur

Irish Coffees, flying boats and... racoons

Only 3 days to go until a large group of Irish entrepreneurs set sail on PaddysValley and the excitement is really building. Not that it wasn't exciting all along but it seems like ages ago now since the idea was originally mooted and adrenaline levels had waned a little.

Damien has posted the final itinerary and what a kickstart to the week! Jetlag be damned we're getting right into party mood on Monday when Robert Scoble plays host to an Irish Coffee evening. Considering that the concoction was conceived of only 15 miles away from me in Foynes I'll proudly regale him with the stories I've heard about the romantic era of the Flying Boats.

Lots of other interesting people are coming along including the founder of Seesmic, one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups right now. But how do I tell Loic Le Meur that I hate the raccoon?

Swords, Kilkenny, Cork and Silicon Valley

Antoin O Lachtnain's new company, Swords Express, is a private bus operator with a route between Swords Village and Dublin city centre. Antoin says - "We have a blog, in fact, our whole website is a big blog, and our customers can (and do) leave comments. Most of them are positive, but some of them are a bit less so. But we post them all up there nonetheless". I checked it out and indeed some very negative comments are sprinkled among the many positive ones. Fair play to Swords Express for the openness and honesty. Why can't all transport companies in Ireland be this open?

The next Irish BarCamp will be on in Kilkenny in Q1 2008 and Keith Bohanna hints that it will be themed. Cool, I didn't think I'd have an excuse to return to Kilkenny until the next Podcamp.

Tom Raftery and Walter Higgins are looking forward to tomorrow's IT@Cork conference. Would love to be going but I still haven't packed for PaddysValley.

Personal, portable, learning content delivery widget

Tony Hirst noticed that Grazr will now display embedded Slideshare presentations - "The Grazr widget will automatically embed the slideshow when a Slideshare RSS feed is passed into the widget. Grazr is generally pretty good about embedding media components that are included as feed enclosures, as my RadiOBU widget demonstrates. So what does this mean? Well, it's maybe one step closer to a personal, portable, learning content delivery widget?" Cool, glad you're finding it useful Tony :)

More bytes 'n pieces

Shane MacAllister, formerly of Magnetic Time, is launching a new company, Mobanode, in the next few days and reports that he has received a feasibility study grant from Enterprise Ireland - "A post on the hows and whys to apply a feasibility grant is to follow sometime - so people can benefit from my own experience. Until then, I’m off to enjoy my new found “salary-ness” and locate all those lucrative receipts…"

Bernie Goldback, journalist and Tipperary Institute lecturer, says - "LouderVoice is the one Web 2.0 technology that my fourth year students endorse without any hesitation. All the other things seem to have less utility and a shorter life expectancy". What a cool endorsement.

eircom have announced a very welcome €100k Web 2.0 / tech fund, the relative merits of which are being dissected on blogs and Jaiku.

Proving that you can't keep a good journalist down, even if you're the Sunday Tribune,  Richard Delevan writes about the economies of free cars - "the cost of the average used car in Europe is now cheaper than the cost of [petrol] to drive it for a year - talk about razor and blades businesses.". I wonder if, like the mobile phone market, we'll see greater than 100% penetration in the sense that people will have two cars - one for urban travel and one for inter-urban journeys. I don't want no golf-cart on the M7 motorway!

Bits 'n Bytes

Thanks to Jennifer Farley for leaving a really nice comment on a previous post which was a strong motivation to get back into a regular blogging rhythm. But it's not the only reason you should check out  Jennifer's web design studio. Westmeath based Laughing Lion Design produce ebooks, do digital photography and train clients in Photoshop, Illustrator Dreamweaver and Flash. Jennifer's blog includes a number of free Photoshop Tutorials.

While I've been hitting the Web X.0 Wall Matt has, at the other extreme, got underway in his coverage of 100 topics!

Conor Nolan of webwizards writes about the issue with Google (and anyone else) not knowing where in the country people are logging in from. He says it plays havoc with Geotargeting on Google Adwords and is hoping eircom, and others, will improve their IP allocation.

Alexia is organizing another Tweetup in Dublin before Christmas (and ironically planning it on Jaiku! ;)

'Yell if it changes' now notifies you if more sites link to yours.

The Web X.0 Wall

I was talking to a friend last weekend who ran the Dublin city  marathon recently. He told me that if he'd stopped running at about the 20 mile marker he'd never have been able to get going again. I guess that's what long distance runners refer to as 'the wall'. Now I could hardly run 20 yards at the moment but his words resonated with me on a different level - I've got a mild dose of blogger's block and I'm struggling to get the revs going again.

I'm happily yakking away over on Jaiku because microblogging is beautifully low maintenance. But macroblogging is a whole different ballgame. Ironically, at a time when there's never been a greater flow of news from the ReadWriteMashCrunchGigasphere I've never felt less inspired. My interest still lies mainly in the old-fangled stuff like RSS, OPML and microformats. Why is all the bruhaha surrounding Facebook, OpenSocial and Android leaving me cold? Why isn't it stirring my passions? Have I reached the Web X.0 Wall?

LouderVoice adds direct SMS reviewing

LouderVoice has launched direct SMS (text message) reviewing to a standard rate Irish number (+353-87-9409325). Ideal for sharing your thoughts on restaurants, hotels, movies, e.t.c., while on the move.

Congratulations to Damien and Fergus

My tax returns are finally done and I'm coming out of blogging hibernation in time to second everything Conor O'Neill wrote on Blognation about Damien Mulley and Fergus Burns, two of the big award winners at last night's Net Visionaries. Well done lads, very well deserved. And nice writeup Conor.

I'm not dead baby,...

.... I'm just... eh.... having a break. Actually I'm buried in paperwork. Normal service will resume shortly.

Planet Journals latest blogs

John Breslin has published a list of the latest 200 blogs submitted to Planet Journals (aggregation of Irish blogs). But how do you process such a large list? Thankfully he also posted the OPML file for the latest 20 which I used to create a Planet Journals Reading List. Just bookmark that link if you'd like an easy way to graze the latest blogs.