Anton’s Hat

So I’ve got loads to do up in Dublin over the next few days.

I have CrunchLudd going on in the evening. It should be a great buzz with 7 great companies demoing on the day and obviously the buxx of meeting a whole bunch of new people again.

I’ll be heading up early though to the dublin open coffee in the morning and I’ll try to drop in to the Silicon Ireland  event at some point.

Then on Friday I’ll be attending a panel at the Darklight festival featuring Damien Mulley and Niall Larkin on privacy in the digital world and later on at 12 to 1:30 I’m standing in to chair a panel  on the future of the web. See here for details

I run a little networking event called Techludd. For an event we’re doing in Dublin with TechCrunch I decided to try out a new registration method for our meetup with TechCrunch on the 26th of June. Normally we use a comment hack to allow people to say who they are and that they’re coming. While this was fine I like to think I’m open to using a new service to see how it fits. Enter Amiando, a company operating in the same space as Eventbrite in the US. Also in this space is Mobaganda which takes a VERY minimalistic approach.

There are of course plenty of services like this (see Pingg, Socializr, MyPunchbowl, etc.). Mobaganda got started as a conversation between Web developer Jason Stirman and Twitter founder Evan Williams. the question they were pondering: “Would it be possible to create a better Evite, without even requiring a signup or login?”

Amiando is what we’re testing though and I have to say the setup is simple and the features are superb out of the box such as photo upload, carpooling and message boards. Importantly for me is that it’s free for free events, but if you have a commercial event and don’t want to handle the ticketing and payments they’ll do all that for you for a (very) small fee on a per ticket basis.

All-in-all I’m pleased so far but I will update this if anything changes my mind or based on the comments of those who use it.

So Pat Phelan of MaxRoam is at it again. The serial entrepeneur and telecoms disruptor has launched a new speech to text service for twitter. It’s not a general lifestreaming tool it’s twitter only and they’ve planned for a million sign ups over the next year.

The investors behind this are Pat Phelan of Cubic Telecom/MAXroam, Sean O Sullivan and Ivan MacDonald of Dublin based Dial2Do, Florian Seroussi of Global Roaming and David Marcus of Zong. The technology behind these companies is what powers twitterfone. Geneva-based VOX telecom provides calls routing, Redwood City, California-based Zong powers mobile enrollment and transactions, MAXroam powers the telephony intelligence system and Dublin firm Dial2Do supplies the core speech recognition which is at the heart of Twitterfone. Dial2Do CEO Ivan MacDonald who I had the pleasure of meeting recently at the Web2.0 Expo said,

“We’ve been involved in the space where the phone system meets the web for a long time now, and naturally we’ve been fascinated by the rise of Twitter. Increasingly, we’ll see “web 2.0″ services that people use primarily from their phones. Projections are that mobiles will become the dominant way of accessing the Internet, and a lot of this will be done via voice interfaces. We are very pleased to see Dial2Do add even more value to an already extraordinary service.”

Pat himself had this to say “We built this because we are all avid users of Twitter and have made some excellent business connections and friendships from it. We decided to see what we could contribute to the service and with our telecoms backgrounds the Twitterfone idea fitted perfectly”.

Like everything that’s cool, Twitterfone is in invite beta at the moment meaning that only those that have been sent invites can join up. I’m told that there will be regular releases of invites and as I said earlier Twitterfone says they have planned for a million sign-ups over the next year. Naturally enough it’s already on TechCrunch and been covered by Damien Mulley (who has had a deft hand in the PR) and quite a few other blogs and I expect there to be a bit of noise about this one.

It’ll be interesting to see how this develops…

(Disclosure: Pat Phelan is an advisor to Benchd)

Hi there folks I’ve been very quiet for a while around here but that’s because I’ve been running around like a maniac with things for benchd. We have some BIG announcements to make regarding people coming on board and our development plans but I’ll have to leave you hanging on that for the moment.

Anyway, if you know me, you know that I am passionate about helping other irish businesses and I’m a huge believer in the value of networking, which is why I decided to start TechLudd in January this year and it’s exceeded all my expectations.

So I’m delighted to announce that, as of yesterday (21 Apr), I’ll be workingwith the guys at the Digital Media Forum to help develop an All-island Digital Media Network. Neil Leyden chairman of the Digital media Forum introduced me thus.

I am happy to introduce our new Project Manager, Anton Mannering, who has joined the companies in San Francisco. Anton will be looking after the All-Island Digital Media Network, a collaboration between the Digital Media Forum and the Northern Ireland Digital Content Panel and kindly funded through Intertrade Ireland. Anton is going to help us build the network North and South and hopefully become a key dynamo in our continuing efforts to build and strengthen the digital media industry on the Island of Ireland.

So apparently I’m a “key dynamo”!! Never been described as such before but it’s appreciated all the same.

There are some very interesting things in the works at the moment so watch out for that and if you’d like to chat with me about it please get in touch.

Edit: I’ll be blogging about the Web2expo Tour and other things for the Digital Media Forum and the Network project here 

Hey there folks just a quick reminder that the Irish Microsoft Technology Conference is on next week.

The guys at Irishdev have surpassed themselves again and the lineup for those of you working with Microsoft technologies, and lets face it that’s quite a few people, is superb.
If you’re going and want something to do on Thursday (the 3rd) evening then head along to TechLudd in the Odessa. It’s come home to it’s birthplace where we had a great night in January.

P.S. The IMTC speakers dinner is on in the Odessa that night as well a little earlier so there should be some interesting people wandering around.

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…

http://irelandstartupevents.com

I’m in a bit of a mood right now about all the events that are coming up. While I absolutely delighted at the sheer volume of events that are going on I have to say that I’m frustrated by the fact everything is on at the same time and I can’t go to them all. OK enough whining here’s the lowdown on the next bunch of crazy days.

Tuesday 26th

IWTC conference Launch Cost: €245 (€189 online) | 7:oopm til late | CineWorld complex, Parnell St., Dublin

Wednesday 27th

Xcellerate 2008 Dublin Event Cost: €100| 8:30 to 12:45 | Ballsbridge Court Hotel, Dublin

IWTC conference Day 2 9:15 to 16:45 : CineWorld complex, Parnell St., Dublin

Drive Project conference Cost: €0 | 9:30 to 16:00 | Malton Hotel, Killarney, Co. Kerry - Opened by Michael Ahern, TD Irish Minister for Innovation Policy

Girl Geek Dinner Cost: €? | 19:00 til late | Odessa Club, 14 Dame Court, Dublin 2

Thursday 28th

ISA Conference Cost: €300 (€200 Incubator, €250 member/xcellerator) | 8:30 to 1:10 | O’Reilly Hall, UCD Campus, Dublin 4.

IWTC conference Day 3 | 9:15 to 16:45 | CineWorld complex, Parnell St., Dublin

Friday 29th

Xcellerate 2008 Belfast Event Cost: €100 | 8:30 to 12:45 | Malone House, Belfast

IWTC conference Day 4 | 9:15 to 16:45 | CineWorld complex, Parnell St., Dublin

Saturday 1st

Irish Blog Awards Cost: €10 | 19:30 til late | Alexander Hotel, Dublin

Sunday 2nd

WebCamp: Social Network Portability Cost: €60 | 9:15 to 18:00 | Kingsley Hotel, Victoria Cross, Cork

Bloggers Dinner Cost: € | 21:00 til late | Rossini’s Restaurant, Princes Street, Cork

Monday 3rd

BlogTalk Conference Day 1 Cost: €120 | 9:15 to 18:00 | Kingsley Hotel, Victoria Cross, Cork

BlogTalk Conference Dinner | 20:00 til late | Kingsley Hotel, Victoria Cross, Cork

Tuesday 4th

BlogTalk Conference Day 2 | 9:15 to 17:30 | Kingsley Hotel, Victoria Cross, Cork

Private equity Conference 2008 Cost: €270 | 8:30 to 16:10 | Waterfront Hall , Belfast

Wedneday 5th to Friday 7th

Nothing theres nothing on, take a break.

Saturday 8th

CreativeCamp Kilkenny Cost: €0 | 10:00 to 17:00 | The Parade Tower, Kilkenny Castle, Kilkenny

Now if that little lot doesn’t keep you occupied for the next while I don’t know what will.