Archive

As suggested.

In case you hadn't heard a Cork-based company Cubic Telecom headed by Pat Phelan is making some waves on the technology scene. A few weeks ago they confirmed raising 5M Euro for the new venture and for the last few days have been presenting at the very high profile TechCrunch40 event in San Francisco.

Pat and his team are providing a new service called MaxRoam (launching October 1st) that allows people to use their mobiles all over the world for a fraction of the prices currently charged by GSM providers.

If you hadn't heard already Cubic Telecom have already made huge steps to reduce the rip-off prices for international landline calls - allfreecalls.ie, allfreecalls.co.uk and yak4ever.com.

Pat and Cubic Telecom chairman Don Jeffery also happen to have a history of supporting the tech community in Ireland particularly in Cork. OpenCoffeeClub Cork for the most part have been meeting in Luigi Malones (owned by Don Jeffery) with Pat being a frequent attendee. Not only that but Pat also gave a spare ticket for TechCrunch 40 to Conor O'Neill of Loudervoice.comanother local company with potential.

A big thank you to Enterprise Ireland! We received our "Innovation Voucher" this week. From http://www.enterprise-ireland.com/innovationvouchers:

What is the Innovation Voucher Initiative?

If you own or manage a small company and you have a business opportunity or problem that you want to explore, why not apply for an Innovation Voucher worth €5,000?

The objective of the Innovation Voucher initiative is to build links between Ireland's public knowledge providers and small businesses and create a cultural shift in the small business community's approach to innovation.

The voucher allows us to approach third-level institutions (and a few more organisations) to see if they can help us explore some project ideas we have. We applied during the second phase which had a closing date of 31st of July 2007. The good news is that a third phase opens on 1st October 2007, if you didn't apply before you still have a chance.

Damien Mulley has organised a talk by Marcio Galli, a Firefox consultant, in the National Software Centre in Mahon on the 8th of August. Sounds like it could be a very interesting talk.

Damien has the details here.

Conor O'Neill might have just have sparked something off in his post "How to get and Irish David Heinemeier Hansson" which was followed up by equally pragmatic post by Alan O'Rourke in "Encouraging entrepreneurship in Ireland". In their posts they offer suggestions to foster entrepreneurship for students which is something I feel strongly about.

Conor describes a "just a job" mentality displayed by a majority of students/grads who wanted nothing more than a bank or multi-national job. Unfortunately very little options are open to those students/grads that would love to work in a start-up and develop their careers quite apart from working in large multi-nationals.

In March after attending a ShareIT event organised by Damien Mulley I sent him an email outlining my own thoughts about what could be done to help tech start-ups in Ireland and what some of the current issues were. In two sentences:

• Issues: Not enough tech entrepreneurs completing cycles and re-investing within Ireland.
• Fixes: "We" ourselves become the angel investors and develop a way of encouraging students in setups similar to Y-Combinator.

Unfortunately, after re-reading the email, nothing I said hasn't already been mentioned (nearly a year and a half ago). The vital component is the 'Brain Trust' as Damien Mulley referred to it. As we've seen, despite sitting on millions, Enterprise Ireland can't give the money away. They're looking for the big knowledge companies to appear out of a tiny tech-startup eco-system. Damien Mulley had the first post which kicked off this conversation (in Ireland) by highlighting the fact that the traditional VC's are facing stiffer competition from savy tech entrepreneurs often with not a lot of money, the most famous being Y-Combinator (now Seedcamp in the UK is following a similar model).

James Corbett picked up on Damien Mulleys post and wrote about "Fantasy business teams" which included references to points made by Paul O'Mahony about bloggers and programmers who could "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 membership fees".

Personally, I think Conor O'Neills 'Hothouse' idea is excellent and he and Alan O'Rourke have obviously given it a bit of thought because I couldn't add a whole lot more to what they've suggested. My contribution would be to echo Paul O'Mahonys point that there is possibly an entrepreneurial opportunity in helping to develop €100K start-ups in our own community. The 'Hothouse' idea would be a great place to start - we'd be helping to develop the right environment for a start-up culture as well as giving Irish investors additional confidence in these start-ups particularly if they've essentially been peer reviewed and investment from tech entrepreneurs had already been given.

Though Joe Drumgoole might have the last word? "Populations of multi-millions trumps populations of 4 million everytime."

The good:

• James Corbett (EirePreneur) - Scoble signs up to PaddysValley. Well, at least he knows well in advance that trip is being arranged.
• Damien Mulley (mulley.net) - Paddys already in the Valley. Fantastic to hear that a couple of young Irish guys are getting stuck into a start-up in San Francisco.

The bad:

• James Corbett (EirePreneur) - Seems as though not enough people are helping out. PaddysValley is an unproject - please particiate! At the moment Conor O'Neill (Loudervoice.com) and Damien Mulley (mulley.net) are being lumped with most of the work. Both Conor and Damien have done trojan work in Cork between organising the first Barcamp in Ireland as well as the first OpenCoffee Club. So the temptation might be there to leave them with the burden; help out if you're going!

Pat Phelan over on his blog mentions Ooma and its founder Andrew Frame. Frame has a hell of a resume which Pat linked to on the Entrepreneurship Education Resources website from Stanford.

The site is a fantastic resource for videos and podcasts from Silicon Valleys (and beyond) top talent, take a look.

Frame and one of the directors of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a VC investor in Frames company Ooma are recorded giving a hour long talk titled "Adventures of a Startup CEO: No Guts No Glory, 10 Lesson for building a successful start-up" which I've paraphrased below:

• Warren Packard - DFJ
• Andrew Frame - Ooma

1. Pick the big markets It's very, very difficult to start a company, why would you pick a small market. Idea started in a market, despite the technical background. Ooma are targeting telecoms - large market, low bar for innovation. 100 billion dollars in residential calls in the US alone.

2. Recruiting Always actively seeking talent. Their hires were superstars in their last jobs. First get them out to lunch/breakfast, then get them in the building and pitch them. Slow process. Took several meetings to get the Yahoo Head of Customer Care in for example, try to get them emotionally attached. Don't offer contract too soon, wait until they're ready to close. Remove the risk before they sign. All of his executive team signed as soon as the offer was made. Talk about the numbers after getting them hooked. They should be willing to join on the opportunity alone. Employee fifteens fulltime job is to sit on LinkedIn every single day looking for staff. They have org charts for all the different companies and end up taking happy people from their current jobs. Recruiting gets easier once good talent is seen to be on-board.

3. Organisational Design Important to get right from the start. Product management in the middle of everything. Product management controls the process. They are driven by the market and the ideas pool which everybody can contribute to. People need to know how they fit into the organisation. Lots of collaboration but clear demarcation concerning decisions.

4. Board Construction When choosing a VC, try get a pro-entrepreneur firm, who understands the issues start-ups face. As long as the company is trending in the right direction. Get experienced CEOs. They've seen it before. Need to establish personal relationships with everybody on the board. Open, direct board conversation. Safe environment to talk about the 'ugly' [information]. You need to talk about the world as it is rather than the one that you wish that it is.

5. Alignment How do maintain alignment as the company grows. Everything is governed by the company 'playbook'. The playbook is revised each year by the leadership team offsite. Start with the vision - shared vision from among the leadership team which they also use to keep alignment in the company. Ask yourself where do you want to be in two years and try to get group buy-in. Six strategic imperatives in their playbook. If they meet all six of their strategic imperatives then they've reached their vision. Each strategic imperative is broken down to three or four strategic objectives. Each strategic objective has a set of tasks with an owner and a due date. All the tasks necessary. Now you have a self managing system. Simple Red/Amber/Green (RAG) tracking of tasks which are discussed at weekly meetings. Very clear to see how people are performing.

6. Mis-hires Every successful CEO says their biggest mistake was waiting too long to fire a bad hire, especially in the leadership team. Best case scenario is a few million dollars, at worst the company will die. When you identify a bad hire, mightn't be that they are bad, just not the right fit for the company, it's vision. You have to move quick. Using the already agreed upon playbook it's easy to communicate a problem. You don't just fire someone. Praise publicly, criticise privately. Be open with your communication. When you have a bad situation, you need to act fast.

7. Build for scalability First you need a leadership team that can scale. If they can scale, then the company can scale. Four questions each executive is asked - if you don't meet these four then you don't get in.

1. Do you have start-up experience? An exec with only big company experience might struggle in a start-up experience.
2. Do you have big company experience? An exec with only start-up experience mightn't be able to scale the business.
3. Have you experienced a massive success? You need to know what that feels like.
4. Have you experienced a massive failure? You need to have felt 'gravity' and the bad times.

8. Product Development Ooma is strict with the engineering department particularly not having control over where the product is going. Bad experience in a company where the engineers build something 'supercool' but didn't sell after four years of working on it. The product management role there was trying to keep up with what was going on so the PR department could be kept informed. The opposite of what was supposed to happen. In Ooma, you need to have a process. The requirements cannot change after their signed off. You won't nail the specs 100% first time but fairly close.

9. Intellectual capital Believes marketing is an intellectual exercise. Traditionally customer acquisition is seen as function of marketing spend but now there are lots of examples of companies getting market share with great products and not a lot of marketing. Examples of intellectual capital are things like designing 'virality' into the product. Creative strategy better than the standard press release.

10. Mentorship Very important to give and receive mentoring advice. Lots of ways to successfully lead. Frame has a mentor named Keith Krach who was the youngest VP in General Motors - head of the robotics division at 26. He started and sold several businesses including Ariba. Saw him at a talk and begged him to help him out. Believes that if you show passion and enthusiasm they'll more than likely help out.

Commentary and Q&A

WP - 75% of their decision process goes into assessing the entrepreneur themselves.
WP - How did you come up with concept for Ooma and when did you decide to do something about it?
AF - It seems to occur over a long time, it's an evolution. The idea started as something very boring, keep figuring it out. Focused on the market first and came up with a 'base case' but it had a lot of holes (from the VCs). You need to take that feed back, not take it personally, and keep going. You need to stick with the idea, hardening it and eventually it will happen.

WP gives an example of Mike Campbell and his Ultimate Arena product which allowed gamers to compete against each other for money. Problem was the great gamers were just stalked the novices and eventually the novices didn't play anymore. The assets Ultimate Arena had was access to some great gamers so they changed Ultimate Arena to XFire which is an network for gamers. The entrepreneur wasn't invested in the particular product itself, he was invested in helping gamers have a more enjoyable experience. The vision evolved a lot over time.

WP - What percentage of your time is spent recruiting?
AF - Probably 15-20%. He interviews every single potential employee for a 'cultural' fit. They need to be hungry, excited about the product, see the position as more than a job. You need to make sure the person is driven. Has rejected people because of their 'negativity' towards their previous jobs.

WP- Not everything works. You could have a great team and still not make it. Would bet on the team again in a heartbeat.
AF - Celebrate each success quickly.

In doing some prep work for the Paddys Valley trip I put together a list of the more well-known venture capitalists using Google Maps: VC's in the Valley

The list of VCs in San Francisco, Palo Alto and Menlo Park used in the map above is here:

• 3i
• Accel Partners
• Acorn Ventures, Inc.
• Alta Partners
• August Capital Management, LLC
• Battery Ventures
• Benchmark Capital Management Co., LLC
• Bessemer Venture Partners
• Canaan Partners
• Crosspoint Venture Partners
• Draper Fisher Jurvetson
• El Dorado Ventures
• Institutional Venture Partners
• Integral Capital Partners
• InterWest Partners
• Jumpstart Ventures LLC
• Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Mayfield Fund
• Menlo Ventures
• Mohr, Davidow Ventures
• Morgenthaler
• Panorama Capital, LLC
• Partech International
• Redpoint Ventures
• Scale Venture Partners
• Selby Venture Partners
• Sequoia Capital
• Sierra Ventures
• Sigma Partners
• TPG Ventures, Inc.
• Trinity Ventures
• U.S. Venture Partners
• Vision Capital
• Vista Equity Partners, LLC
• Walden International Investment Group
• WaldenVC

As an aside searching for the companies using Google Maps was very unreliable, often a completely inaccurate address was presented so I had to double check with each sites contact details.

it@cork have been doing an excellent job in Cork so it was no surprise that they managed to get Jerry Kennelly, of Stockbyte fame, to speak at their 'Midsummer networking event' last night.

For those of you who don't know the story Kennelly, a former photojournalist, setup a photographic image company in Kerry in 1996. He grew it to become the third largest stock photography supplier in the world eventually selling the company for $135M to Getty Images.

At the time of the sale, he had 100% ownership of the company having bought out the VC share (approx 30%) beforehand (that's a story I'd like to have heard). So Kennelly can afford to be brutally honest, and he is. Not long after the sale I heard Kennelly describe the banks in Ireland as 'bastards' on live radio. Often said in private, rarely said so publicly.

His family started a newspaper business (still running) in Kerry when he was a child which is how he got into the photo-journalism business. He realised that technology was radically changing the media world. After understanding the money that had been made from VHS he correctly bet that digital photography on CDs was the way to go.

Possibly like a lot of others I had heard about the company but just assumed that Stockbyte were a clearinghouse for stock images which they bought from freelance photographers. Turns out that the majority of Stockbytes then portfolio was created internally. They had teams of photographers and art directors who planned for months photo-shoots in locations all over the world. A huge amount of planning went to each photo-shoot since they were so costly but the more interesting aspect of that was how customer driven they were. As a company much smaller than existing competitors they were shameless in trying to engage their customers and getting feedback from them. He and his team were very, very focused on giving their customers what they wanted and making their lives easier.

I'm not sure if he said it directly but from his talk you understood that he built a fantastic team around him in what sounded like a great working environment. When the deal was done to sell the company one of the first things he did was write all his staff some serious thank-you checks!

Some points from his talk:

• Work in high-margin businesses - it allows you to make mistakes.
• Scale fast and keep it lean.
• Appear bigger than you actually are.
• Put a huge effort into understanding your customer (and getting all your staff to do the same).
• Instincts matter

Not only is it great to see somebody having done so well locally it's great to see them willing to talk so openly about their own experiences.

Thanks to Donal Manning and Catherine Wall at it@cork for organising the event and Murphys-Heineken Brewery for hosting!

We switched to using Statcounter recently being frustrated a little using Google analytics. Statcounter allows websites to track and understand what visitors to a site are looking at. It's a great service, I'd be happy to recommend it to anyone.

So, I was pleasantly surprised to see from Frank Fullard (linked to by James Corbett) that not only is Statcounter an Irish company but the founder Aodhan Cullen is up for a BusinessWeek Young Entrepreneur award. Great stuff.

I voted here.

Back in April Conor O'Neill (after reading Jeremy Fain's blog) put up a post on the Web 2.0 Ireland blog about a trip (for tech entrepreneurs) to Silicon Valley. It's a great idea and not surprisingly there's lots of interest.

Damien Mulley had a post recently about the dates which are December 2nd to December 9th (2007). From the post:

We're still getting the itinerary together but we hope to meet various VC and tech people and also have one evening where the Irish companies present to an audience of investors and influencers. Suggestions for the itinerary are more than welcome.

I'm not entirely sure who the 'We' are but from the press release, apart from Damien, Conor O'Neill and James Corbett are listed as the organisers.

In fairness to the guys, they're inviting anyone along who might benefit from the trip, so if you've any interest in Silicon Valley take a look at the PaddysValley blog.

Coincidence or not we'll be arriving on the same day as the French group (who inspired the trip) are leaving.

So let's say you make it into the worlds billionaire list (<1000). Any ideas about spending the cash? How about a boat?

Kevin O'Callaghan, an old sailing buddy from Schull, is one of the two alernating captains onboard the 'Lone Ranger', Peter Lewis' private yacht.

Unlike nearly all other megayachts 'Lone Ranger' is a converted ocean-going tug allowing her to travel to places inaccessible to other large yachts. With full fuel tanks it will circumnavigate the world, it only refuels twice a year anyway. It has a crew of 16, a gym, jacuzzi on the upper deck, swimming pool, two forty foot boats on board, a trimaran yacht and a launch, the tender is a 450 HP Delta rib. Interestingly, no helipad!

Kevin is taking her to Norway where the owner will join the ship with the intention of sailing up to the Arctic polar ice pack for July. [Kevin O'Callaghan - Captain 'Lone Ranger' below]

A short summary of Peter Lewis, the owner of the 'Lone Ranger'.

Much better pictures at: yachtmati.com.

Megayacht Ranking 2006:
America: 5th largest
World: 31st largest

The Irish Microsoft Technology Conference (IMTC 2007) was held in Cineworld Dublin yesterday. Not quite the same setup as MIX '07 in Las Vegas but it was great venue for a conference, big screens, comfy chairs and Ben & Jerry's. Three screens held presentations simultaneously so we only got along to a few. Unsurprisingly, a quick hands-up poll suggested that the vast majority of attendees were .NET developers, and that not many non-MS folks had come along.

Tim Sneath was first up with two presentations covering Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 1.1 the full titles being "Rich Web Experiences with Silverlight and Javascript for Developers" and "Building Silverlight Applications using .NET". Tim, like all the other Microsoft evangelists, keep both talks interesting by mostly scripting demos on the fly. Very interactive including some debugging using Firebug on Firefox. Perhaps unsurprisingly, IE7 was noticeably quicker than Firefox for the demos.

Carrie Longson gave a presentation titled "Desiging the Ultimate Experiences with Expression Studio". It was absorbing to watch a designer at work particularly for developers who often don't get to see how it all comes together (using Expression tools).

Steve Marx talked about "Exploring AJAX Patterns" but particularly looking at ASP.NET and AJAX together. Steve was quick to point out that the X (for XML) part of AJAX is more often than not ignored then proceeded to work through a juggling demo highlighting the asynchronous aspects in particular.

From Chris Messina comes a link to an article by Uche Ogbuji which is fairly critical of microformats. Uche seems to favour W3C technology so it's unsurprising that he'd be able to pick holes with micromats. It'll be interesting to see the response from microformat supporters.

Mike Butcher meanwhile reports on Freebase and it's aim to monetise via API services. Freebase in their own words is:

"Freebase.com is home to a global knowledge base: a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone. It could be described as a data commons. Freebase.com is enabled by the technology of Metaweb, which is described at www.metaweb.com."

Mike mentions an article by Tim O'Reilly which is also worth visiting.

Brendan Lally over at web2ireland.org has some good news in the form of a competition from Intertrade Ireland. A total of €280,000 is being allocated for companies who compete in the following categories: Best emerging international company, Best emerging company, Best university spinout and Six regional prizes.

[Update] Brendan has a stack of other posts worth mentioning on his own blog:

• Irish / EU R&D funding for SMEs seminar, May 28th, Cork UCC, IRL
• Irish VC Investment Slackens - Q1 2007
• Business Angels have €20m to invest in startups - Dublin, IRL

What are microformats?

What is Twitter?

Sam Sethi of Vecosys and Chris Messina of Citizen Agency have had a few posts recently about microformats, the big news being that Twitter has incorporated microformats.

Sam:

• hAtomic soon to launch which is a community site for styling microformatted content
• Michael Kaply is officially the owner of microformat support in Firefox 3Twitter now supports microformats
• Twitter now supports hAtom and hCard

Chris:

• Twitter adds support for microformats
• mofo - a ruby microformat parser

Microsoft announced Silverlight earlier this week, to general acclaim.

What's not obvious from some of the coverage thus far, however, is that the platform demoed at Mix07 will ship in two parts: Silverlight 1.0, to be released sometime this summer; and Silverlight 1.1, to be released at some point thereafter. In the keynote (NB: Windows Media Player link), Scott Guthrie, GM of the Silverlight team, refers to this merely as "Beyond Summer 07."

It's the 1.1 release (given that it seems something of a quantum leap over even v1.0, they could almost refer to it as Silverlight 2.0 - and, who knows, they might do, yet) which contains the .NET Runtime support which, in turn, might (finally!) consign Javascript-as-a-general-purpose-programming-language to the dustbin of history.

If Silverlight (or something like it/better than it) takes hold, then I can imagine a time when you simply will not be able to convince a recent CS graduate of just how pointlessly difficult programming the Web once was.

Congratulations to Conor of Argolon on the launch of LouderVoice. LouderVoice makes it easy to write reviews particularly if you blog.

If you like what you see then how about voting for LouderVoice at TheNextWebConference (Amsterdam, June). And if you get that far Walter Higgins of Pixenate would probably appreciate a vote!

Most of you have probably seen the Tourism Australia ad that has been running over the last year or two? (If you haven't seen it already it, check it out at www.wherethebloodyhellareyou.com.) Overall, the campaign spent over 100M Euro to promote Australia using an ad culminating with a bikini-clad model stepping out of the ocean asking "Where the bloody hell are you?"

That's the question I'd like to ask Irish tech investors and support organisations: Where bloody hell are you?

Given the enormous increase in wealth in the country its astonishing how VC's almost avoid investing in small or medium tech companies. A lot of those with money now got it from literally 'bricks and mortar' investments and it's easy to see how potentially riskier investments in start-ups could even be beyond the skill set of traditional professional investors. Why? Well, because using any measure you choose they haven't been doing it, never mind doing it very well.

The chicken and egg situation in Ireland is that investors don't routinely invest in tech start-ups which means fewer start-ups. Fewer start-ups mean less chance of success and, hence, increased risk. We have the people with the skills in Ireland and we have the people with the money. Why aren't we a Silicon Valley of Europe? One difference (out of many) between Ireland and the Silicon Valley is that entrepreneurs heavily re-invest their knowledge and finances back into the system; Irish VC's have a reputation not unlike some of their probably Nordic ancestors.

Given Ireland's economic success over the last decade it's not hard to believe that there has never been more wealth in the country. The policy, of successive governments, of attracting Foreign Direct Investment into the country starting more than twenty years ago has been a big factor in how Ireland developed economically. The IDA and Enterprise Ireland deservedly have been acknowledged for their part in this.

However, we have become a victim of our own success: Ireland is no longer a low-cost economy. Other countries which have studied Ireland's past tactics have played a blinder introducing flat or low taxes to induce multinationals to invest in their lower-cost economies. Ireland's current policies try to support developing a knowledge-based economy but, in aiming to launch 100M Euro enterprise IPOs rather than supporting small to medium size companies focusing on actual knowledge innovation, they are almost expecting too much.

So, Enterprise Ireland and Irish VC's what should you be doing? Just take a look at these two posts taken from TechCrunch on April 25th:

1. Y-Combinators European Clone
2. Scribd Rumoured Financing

Y-Combinator is a private investment group who invest modest amounts of money among many young entrepreneurs. It's a simple idea: spend a small amount on lots of potentially-great ideas in the hope that one will hit the big-time. The European clone (first link) are private investors who are going to take on 8 start-ups at an initial spend of 15,000Eur (5k per person up to three people) for a total of 120K. They don't care where you come from (within the EU) as long as you work in Austria. How much money is EI sitting on waiting to give to one of their High Potential Start-Ups? Keep waiting...

Now, look at the second link. Scribd.com, following a similar investment model, is looking at financing at around 10M dollars. That company was probably kick-started with 10-15K dollars.

Enterprise Ireland - Encourage lots of small innovative start-ups. You've been sitting on millions waiting for the big tech IPO which doesn't happen all that often. Any businesses started in Ireland will more than likely end up being taxed in Ireland. Don't be too focused on Irish nationals for that matter. Ireland is too small a country not to ignore talent from other parts of the EU. Ireland could and should be the hotbed of tech innovation in Europe.

Irish VCs - Just. Start. Looking. It doesn't matter if you don't invest because investment is becoming a lot more mobile, Irish companies will just go further afield to get it. The fact that you're not even actively looking tells its own story.

Nothing in this post is either original or hasn't been said before. It should be a no-brainer.

[Updated] - Damien Mulley has a great post about credit unions as possible funding sources. Check out the link to Joe Drumgooles posts about EI offering 175 million to Irish VC's!

You may have noticed that at the bottom of our blog we have a "Some rights reserved" link. This relates to our use of one of the Creative Commons licenses which allows us to give everybody permission to use our material in certain ways.We also use a few pictures from Flickr on our website and the pictures we do use have a Creative Commons license which allows us to use them in a commercial setting assuming we display the license and credit the owner of the material.Just the other day we noticed that the picture on our home page had changed its license to "All rights reserved" which would ordinarily mean we could not use it.

So, what happens if you publish material (pictures, blog posts, podcasts, etc.) with a Creative Commons license and then later change your mind?

As far as we understand it you are perfectly entitled to change the license or stop distributing the material but you are not allowed to withdraw the Creative Commons license. So the moral of the story is that if you release material under a Creative Commons license you are stuck with that license until copyright expires: it never ends.

So what happened to the original homepage picture? We chose to change it, though technically we don't have to, since a) we wanted to respect the picture owners change of mind and, more pragmatically, b) it might be difficult to prove that it was at one point published under a Creative Commons license.

So, hopefully you'll appreciate the wonderful picture (Table Mountain in the background) by Victor Geere of Capetown which we'll use for now.

BarCamp kicked off with a thought provoking introduction by solicitor Simon McGarr of Digital Rights Ireland (DRI) current action challenging the law (Irish and European) on data retention. As we understood it, information surrounding who you've called and for how long, your emails, what you've looked at on the web and your actual location for the past three years will be kept on file. All the Government has left to do is open up your mail and keep a record of what the postman gives you! Not only that but Ireland has no laws forcing companies or the Government to disclose if any information they keep on you has been compromised or abused in any way.

Unfortunately the general public are blissfully unaware of the erosion of their own privacy and it's potential for abuse. Out of sight and out of mind maybe. Click on the DRI links above to find out more.

The format of BarCamp means that talks/discussions are held simultaneously so next up we decided to go along to the Microformats talk given by Conor O'Neill. Conor gave a great talk based around material from Ryan King and Tantek Çelic. Microformats are a simple way of attaching meaning (or structure if you like) to information which is published on the Web. Interestingly Conor described situations where people are already using microformats, possibly without realising it.

When we broke for lunch we talked to two guys who are running some interesting businesses. John Henry Donovan is a trained industrial designer who now works as a freelance web designer/developer as well as working on media projects. The great thing for him is that he has the rare combination of artistic ability and technical skill so he's kept very busy. Patrick O'Connor is a Corkman based in Dublin running a business providing IT solutions for SME's in Dublin. The unusual thing about his business is that open source products are big part of the solutions they provide. This is definitely an area that will grow in time and it's a service not generally provided by his competitors so he's probably on to something there.

After lunch I went along to Bernard Goldbach's talk entitled "On Dropping EUR 35,000 for a Failed Start-up" which he described as a business 'accident report'. Bernie and his wife had a great business idea which on paper looked fantastic and has since been proved to be very viable as another company in Kilkenny is successfully following a similar path. The business was to provide multimedia related services to the likes of Pixar. This was back in 2000 and despite initially enthusiastic support from Shannon Development they hit a huge stumbling block. The company was based in Thurles and they just could not get access, despite the optic fibre being there, to broadband. This severely affected their ability to deal with clients and as everybody in Ireland knows it's taken years for the broadband rollout to even get started. The nail in the coffin was a couple of clients who failed to pay up for some quite large contracts.

The lessons Bernie learned from it all? Killing off a company is actually quite difficult. Since they stopped trading they've spent over €9000 in maintaining the company as they have found it difficult to get its creditors to be involved in its liquidation. Most importantly, Bernie would get somebody involved who would be incentivised to get sales as well as being fairly ruthless about the financial cashflow of the company.

Steve, here. Brian Caulfield introduced the uninitiated to the world of venture capital, and, specifically, to the matter of applying for it. Interestingly, as Brian described it, when his company, Trinity Venture Capital, look at a start-up with a view to possibly investing in it, the start-up's technology is third of three key aspects at which they look, behind 'market' and 'people', respectively. Brian rounded out his talk with the "Top Ten Lies Entrepreneurs Tell" and the "Top Ten Lies VCs Tell." With luck, Brian's slides will be made available on the BarCamp Ireland Presentations page. And with that, I'll hand you back to Dave.

John Breslin gave an overview of his project, SIOC, which aims to help online communities connect information between them which otherwise might remain isolated. One of the difficulties with the Semantic Web is that is sometimes difficult to get people to put the structure into the information the create. The clever thing about SIOC is that it leverages the structured information that is already there and provides tools to develop additional functionality for those online communities.

Mark Twomey probably gave the most controversial of the talks as he advocated a more pragmatic approach to the issues surrounding data retention which was discussed earlier by Simon McGarr. His presentation was certainly memorable as somehow he managed to fit in a reference to "Nazi's riding dinosaurs" (in a joke related to 'what's the worst that can happen' scenario).

When we thanked Tom Raftery and Damien Mulley for a great job organising the event they credited Conor O'Neill and Walter Higgins with most of the effort, so thanks lads!

There was a great spread for lunch, including wine, and pizzas at the end, so a nod to the sponsors: Howard Holdings, Qumas, Roam4Free.ie, Heineken, Bubble Brothers, Trinity Venture Capital, Hosting365, Sigmar Recruitment, Madgex, Blacknight Solutions, C&C Group

Being, by profession, mostly technical, the 'softer' aspects of starting and running a new business present the more .. novel challenges to us.

As such, a relative of mine generously lent me her copy of Marketing: An Introductory Text (ISBN:0333625870).

Since it is, thus far, the only book on marketing I've read, it'd be meaningless for me to proclaim it the best. But it is easy enough to read, and has prompted me to think about the work we're doing in new ways, so it's not hard to recommend it to others.

Last Friday we were given a copy of "Startup.com" to watch. It's a documentary following a couple of guys who raised over $60M(!) for a portal to help people connect to their local government in the US, grew their headcount to over 200 people and then fairly rapidly went belly up in the .com bubble.

The story itself is interesting enough and in some places hilarious (we thought, though this may have been unintended) but the documentary had a lot of gaps in the story particularly near the company's end.One of the more absorbing aspects of it were a number of breakdowns in personal relationships betwen friends. So it was interesting that we came across an article on OnStartups.com titled "Important Questions Startup Co-Founders Should Ask Each Other" the very next day.

It's a good starting point for anybody considering setting up a business with a friend: we'll certainly be discussing it with regard to Waveson.

I had occasion the other evening to transfer a few dozen Waveson-related e-mail messages from Apple Mail on my personal Personal Computer, as it were, to Outlook 2003 on the Dell which I've been mostly using for work these days (if only because it has a larger display).Looking on the web, I found that most of the advice available had to do with transferring e-mail in the other direction, but the following worked well for me:

1. I exported the messages from Apple Mail to mbox format. I found it useful to export to two mbox files, one for received and the other for sent messages. Equally, I found it useful to save the files with a .mbox extension, the better to be picked up by the next step.
2. I converted the mbox files to corresponding folders of .eml files using IMAPSize. (See the mbox2eml option on the Tools menu.)
3. I imported the .eml files into Outlook Express (OE); you can just drag and drop the files into the application window.
4. I imported the e-mails from OE into Outlook 2003, by selecting "Import and Export.." from the File menu, then "Import from another program or file", and "Outlook Express 4.x, 5.x, 6.x". At this point, Outlook warned that "No internet accounts were found to import", but the next option prompted me to import e-mail messages and addresses from Microsoft Outlook Express, and this only took a second, or two, to run for three dozen, or so, messages.

To try out some of the ideas Dave and I have had, I've been putting together some command-line tools with Visual C++.NET 2003 SP1 and the Platform SDK.

Although these tools built without error using the IDE-provided 'Debug' build configuration, when I initially tried building them with the 'Release' configuration, the linker spat out a ream of errors along the lines of:

Tag.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: void __thiscall std::_String_base::_Xlen(void)const " (?_Xlen@_String_base@std@@QBEXXZ) TaggedFile.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: void __thiscall std::_String_base::_Xlen(void)const " (?_Xlen@_String_base@std@@QBEXXZ) Tagger.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: void __thiscall std::_String_base::_Xlen(void)const " (?_Xlen@_String_base@std@@QBEXXZ) Main.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "class std::basic_ostream > std::wcout" (?wcout@std@@3V?$basic_ostream@_WU?$char_traits@_W@std@@@1@A) Main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol "public: void __thiscall std::locale::facet::_Register(void)" (?_Register@facet@locale@std@@QAEXXZ) referenced in function "class std::ctype const & __cdecl std::use_facet >(class std::locale const &)" (??$use_facet@V?$ctype@_W@std@@@std@@YAABV?$ctype@_W@0@ABVlocale@0@@Z) Main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol "public: class std::locale::facet const * __thiscall std::locale::_Getfacet(unsigned int)const " (?_Getfacet@locale@std@@QBEPBVfacet@12@I@Z) referenced in function "class std::ctype const & __cdecl std::use_facet >(class std::locale const &)" (??$use_facet@V?$ctype@_W@std@@@std@@YAABV?$ctype@_W@0@ABVlocale@0@@Z) Main.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: static class std::locale::id std::ctype::id" (?id@?$ctype@_W@std@@2V0locale@2@A) Main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol __Getwctype referenced in function "protected: virtual bool __thiscall std::ctype::do_is(short,wchar_t)const " (?do_is@?$ctype@_W@std@@MBE_NF_W@Z)

A user on the Valve Developer Community wiki recommends removing references to the Platform SDK from the IDE to resolve a not dissimilar problem.

I've found it sufficient to remove "libcp.lib" from "\Lib" under the folder/directory into which the Platform SDK is installed; seemingly, the Platform SDK ships with a version of libcp.lib which conflicts with headers and/or libraries included in some versions of Visual C++.

As you can probably guess we only recently incorporated Waveson so I thought I'd share my experience. Once myself and Steve thought we needed to incorporate I asked a contracting friend, who I believed had a company, how to go about it. It turns out that he's actually self employed so that forms the first question you should ask yourself: Do I need to setup a company or register as self employed (or a partnership)? My advice is to check on the Web for the differences and failing that seek professional advice.

This friend recommended I speak to his accountant who in turn gave me contact details for a formation agent. In the meantime I had checked out the Companies Registration Office website, www.cro.ie, which I have to acknowledge is actually very easy to use.

Setting up a company is actually very straightforward. Along with the registration fee only three documents are needed:

1. Form A1
2. Memorandum of association
3. Articles of association

In putting together the application you must also decide a few things about the company:

1. The type of company.
2. The name of the company.
3. The registered office of the company.
4. The activity carried out by the company in the State.
5. Who are the directors and secretary of the company.

Also on the site you will see that there are basically two ways to register a company: apply yourself or get a formation agent to do it for you. Since I had not done this before and in particular didn't have any copies of the Articles and Memorandum of Association the formation agent was opted for. It also happens to be quicker.

How much?

The formation agent recommended by my friend's accountant charged €345 (incl. VAT). At the time, May 2006, I checked a number of other agents who were charging more or less the same but quite a few were charging more.

What did we get?

1. Certificate of Incorporation.
2. Four bound copies of the Articles & Memorandum of Association.
3. Minutes of a Meeting of the Board of Directors.
4. Company Register / Minute Book.
5. Company Seal (Embosser)

Value for money?

Not great, we thought. Why? Well, now if you search for company formations you should see some cheaper prices now than what we originally paid. Some sites offer you just the documents for €75 (which you get download elsewhere for free — towards the end of this page, for example). The CRO charges €100 plus 0.5% of the issued capital but just check incorporation costs in the UK; far less than Ireland even taking the CRO charges into account. There are two reasons you should use a formation agent and even then try to get them at €260 or less:

1. You are in a hurry. (It's faster for an agent by up to two weeks.)
2. You don't have a copy of Articles & Memorandum of Association.

In the future this is what I'm going to do, it's slower but cheaper:

1. Download, print and fill out the A1 form which is here. You also need to figure out which NACE code (which signifies the company's activities) to use. The list is here.
2. Download these three files and adjust them for the new company (items to change are in yellow):
   1. Memorandum of Association
   2. Articles of Association
   3. Minutes of a Meeting of the Board of Directors (to be kept and not sent to the CRO).
3. Visit a Commissioner of Oaths to witness some signatures on the A1 form and Memorandum & Articles of Association. (For the extra cost, ironically, in our case, our agent had a very, very loose definition of witnessing signatures.)
4. Send the completed A1 form, the Memorandum & Articles of Association and fee (€100 CRO fee + 0.5%).
5. Buy a company seal embosser and Company register / minute book. You can find these on the Web for well under €100 including delivery.

Waveson is a company founded by Stephen Higgins and David Copithorne. The blog is intended to relate our experiences in both developing our products and running Waveson. We hope you find it useful!