Tracking Startup events in Ireland…
Over the last while I’ve spoken to quite a few people such as Bernie Goldbach and James Corbett (it may have been lost in the blur when I cornered James at Creative Camp Kilkenny and burned his ear about social search, Google and a few other things) as well as quite a few others, about the idea of creating a central list of events that might be of use to startup companies here in Ireland. This is a pain point for me personally as finding out what’s on around the country and even beyond our shores, that might be of use to my business is often a matter of combining luck and knowing where to look. Quite a few of people I talked to about this felt the same way so I commited a while ago to developing the idea. Then during the “beyond open coffee” organised by Bernie, I decided to reveal that it was something we were working on.
I am a great believer in the Nike mantra of “Just do it”, so over the last week I decided to build a version of Ireland Startup Events. It’s not complex or wonderful and not a lot of design work has been done, but what it does do is “what it says on the tin”. It will be kept as up to date and accurate as possible, we may occasionally not know about an event so anyone can register and enter events themselves if they like.
Why?
The idea is to have a list of events which is actively managed, to ensure that it is relatively complete. I feel that is also important that it be quite broad in it’s scope as there are many things which are relevant to startup companies besides technology.
The service is an “alpha” and therefore is not particularly well resourced right now, it will be improved in future iterations if people find it useful. I’d love your thoughts…
March 19th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
As I said in Kilkenny, the idea is good and this is something I would like to use and opencoffee.ie would be a great place to track upcoming events in a shared calendar. The domain name is awful (worse than techludd), and the site is overkill, but that’s rarely a problem these days..
The underlying idea is still sound though, so well done on getting the ball rolling. At worst, I’ll subscribe to the RSS and check back occasionally. Would be good to have it in my ICAL.
My one concern is “for those running free events the service will always be free” - if you intend to make money from this down the line by charging people to list, it means that I can’t rely on this as a definitive list of interesting startup events. I would prefer a community oriented site, with a guarantee that it will always be open and free to list an event. If you want to make some money back, then sell featured advertising/sponsorship because that does not affect your users.
March 19th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Absolutely James. I agree that the best thing would be that it always be free for anyone to list an event so in that spirit I’ve taken that out. Start as you mean to go on and all that. If people od have an interest in a little service like this then getting enough sponsorship to pay for it’s upkeep shouldn’t be too difficult.
For now though I felt it was more important to get the idea out there and see how people feel about it and what they think.
I take your point on the name, I suppose my view would be, it’s not meant to be a cool web 2.0 application it’s just a list really. I felt it better that it be functional and easy to find rather than aesthetic.
iCal suggestion noted though and I’ll see about adding this later.
March 20th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Nice one Anton.
The whole Upcoming/Eventful approach was only working patchily here and was never definitive. It’ll be good to have one place to check out.
March 20th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Thanks Conor. Appreciated. We’ll see how it goes anyway
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I have a project in social studies for Ireland. What are some interesting things in Ireland. I have to keep the attention of 12 and 13 year olds for at least five minutes and still pass my assignment.
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:35 pm
You’re a bit vague there Heather. Give me a few more details and I’ll get back to you.