Digital Media Island

In budget 2009 back in October that slipped under the radar for a few people so I thought I’d review it again here. I find it amazing that this has been discussed so little amongst the startup community. From the Budget.gov site

3 Year Tax exemption for Start-up Companies

New start-up companies which commence trading in 2009 will be exempt from tax, including capital gains, in each of the first three years to the extent that their tax liability in the year does not exceed €40,000.

This measure is being examined to ensure it is in compliance with EU rules on State-Aid. Further details of this incentive will be contained in the Finance Bill.

What this means is that a new company starting to trade in 2009 can earn up to €320,000 in profit per year (tax liability of €40,000) without paying corporation tax. It’s important to note that that is profit NOT turnover and it also includes capital gains tax. This is a per year allocation so, as I understand it and please correct me if I’m wrong, this means that a startup commencing to trade next year could make €960,000 in profit in the next 3 years and not pay corporation tax.

I’ll be watching this to see how it runs through the compliance stage but it’s definitely good news for the startups and entrepreneurs. Might even encourage a few startups from abroad to locate here. Admittedly it doesn’t help those who’ve already started trading but we rarely get everything.

This brings us back to a popular subject of late which is what can be done to foster innovation started by Pat Phelan on his blog in the run up to our panel on the subject which had some more interesting feedback on the ranging from the lack of angel investment, lack of venture capital, difficulties in dealing with Enterprise Ireland and the huge issues of lack of adequate broadband coverage. I’ll be interested in hearing what Joe Drumgoole of Putplace has to say on the subject at an upcoming IIEA roundtable.

Neil Leyden has ideas regarding a Digital Content Sevices Centre which is an interesting idea and one I’d be interested in hearing peoples views on.

How can this and other measures help foster innovation in Ireland? What measures would you like to see specifically? Can we use innovative homegrown companies to navigate the country to calm waters in these stormy economic times? I’d love your thoughts…

Fantastic list of winners of last nights IIA & Enterprise Ireland Net Visionary Awards.

Winner of the Overall Netvisionary Award was Cork Entrepreneur Pat Phelan. Pat is the behind Maxroam and twitterfone to mention a few and is always forthcoming with advice for young entrepreneurs. Well deserved.

Here’s the full list of winners

Overall Net Visionary
Pat Phelan, MaxRoam

Web developer excellence
Jennifer O’Brie, Webtools Software

Web design excellence
Karen Hanratty, www.pixeldesign.ie

Social Contribution
Niall Devine, MyCharity.ie

Mobile Internet Innovation
Johnny Beirne, downloadmusic.ie

Journalist Award
Marie Boran, Silicon Republic

Internet Marketer
Michele Neylon, Blacknight Solutions

Internet Entrepreneur
Derek Quinn, MyAddress.ie

Innovation
Niall Devine, MyCharity.ie

Educational Contribution
Paul Whelan, Lichens.ie

eGovt
Cathy Clarke, www.itsyourmoney.ie

Best Use of Social Media:
Marcus Mac Innes, Pix.ie

Best Online Trader Ireland
Brian Fallon, www.daft.ie

Best Online Financial Service:
Martin O’Leary, RaboDirect

Online Exporter
Lulu O’Sullivan, www.4giftsdirect.com

Best Online business use of Irish
Niall O’Driscoll, vStream

Best Business Podcaster
Alex Gibson, www.thepersuaders.com

Best Business Blogger
Michele Neylon

I’d like to add my congratulations to all of these guys. Well done to to the Irish Internet Association and all involved.

Hi there folks I’m delighted to announce the launch of the Digital Media Breakfast events which will roll out to smaller places over the next while.

Where: Cafe Urbano, IFSC, Dublin – Tuesday, 4th November, 7:30am-ish

We do evening events regularly but we want to offer more. We want to run a smaller event at the other end of the day for Digital people who can’t make it in the evenings.

The theme of the event is open for now but there will be a Q&A about the progress of the network project and the Digital Media Forum and I’d love your suggestions ideas and inputs for future events and initiatives.

We will be running another breakfast in Dublin for Enterprise week on Friday 21st on the theme of “Funding in a tightening economy” more details to follow on that one.

The format will initially be relatively free flowing with some networking and informal discussions. That’s not fixed though so we’re open to the idea of this becoming seminar based or otherwise. We’d love your input into what type of event this eventually becomes. So come along and add your views.

Coffee and pastries will be provided and some good networking to boot. See you there…

Please leave a comment below if you’re coming. (Gives us an idea of numbers)

Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials program has run for some time in the US and more recently, in 2007, it kicked off in Europe. The program is aimed at helping Startups get going and then to help them scale their activities as they grow in a cost effective way. I ran into Sun Startup Essentials EMEA head Stewart Townsend recently at the FOWA conference and here’s what he had to say about the program and their reasons for targeting Ireland as one of the first places to come to as they spread the program across Europe.

AM (Anton Mannering): Hi Stewart you run Sun’s Startup Essentials program in the EMEA region. How long has Startup Essentials been going elsewhere?

ST (Stewart Townsend): Globally it was launched in November 2006 in the US and came to Europe on December 5th 2007.

AM: Who that we’d know has been a client? Give me a few examples..

ST: People like Last.fm, Glasses Direct and fav.ot.it are just some of the services people might know that are Sun Startup Essentials clients.

AM: What problems do you help solve or alleviate for startups?

ST: Discount hardware down to a startup price, so that they can gain access to Enterprise class engineered servers at startup prices, with a global support practice, thus you can ring up, if there is a problem and talk to an engineer. (Here’s Fav.or.it CEO Nick Halstead talking about his experience with Sun and the support they’ve given him)

We also give startups who require hosting, access to discounted hosting for cloud computing, colocation, dedicated and managed hosting, making it easy to scale from Day 1, and we’ll continue talking to them about how to scale their company. (Stewart lists what they offer, I’ve listed it here so you can read it easily)

• FREE technical support, ask a Sun engineer questions on MySQL, Glassfish, and get an answer, to your problem
• Introductions to investors and capital houses.
• Discounts on the latest events…..
• Community hosting offers - FREE hosting for FB, MySpace, Opensocial

Each startup is different so I try to offer as much as I can then tailor where required, if someone wants to grow their business or a channel, I can introduce them to our sales team or channel to market.

AM: Why are you getting into the irish ecosystem now?

ST: We have been running the programme in the UK, France, Germany and Israel for 8 months to trial it, and make certain we have the right offering for the market, now we have all in place,then we are growing out across EMEA over the next two months, and I made certain that Ireland was on the first growth output, as it has such a hot vibrant startup community, that Ive wanted to help and support for such a long time

AM: What is Suns philosophy on this? What are you trying to achieve?

ST: In terms of Startup Essentials, we want to help support the community at large and give them access to our Open Source stack and Enterprise class offerings, so that when they grow and scale, they are prepared for it, and have an infrastructure in place that will mean they wont fail, whilst also by introducing them to our large startup network they can grow as a business as well, and thus benefit not just technically but commercially as well.

AM: And do you have any specific goals for the program in Ireland?

ST: Help grow and support as many startups as possible.

AM: Will there be some sort of official Launch in Ireland? When will it be?

ST: The programme is live in Ireland now at http://ie.sun.com/startupessentials/. We just need to organise a launch event or activity to officially wet the babies head.

AM: Well we’ll see if we can give you a hand with that…

END

So the program is live now in Ireland and it’s free to sign up. It’s definitely worth checking out as their definitely seem to be some great benefits to the program as described here. I’ll certainly be keeping a keen eye on the developments here and I’d love your feedback on any wins and losses.

SO your twitter followers have left you. But why?

Well Contrast, a fantastic little Web App development shop in Dublin, may have provided the answer.

Qwitter isn’t complex. It just sends you an email when someone stops following you. The clever thing is that it includes the last tweet you sent before they quit, so there’s a fair chance you’ll find out why someone doesn’t want to listen to you drone on anymore.

This has some implications for the way people use twitter. It may give some people pause before unfollowing a friend who’s noisy but it may give those who use twitter as primarily a broadcast tool a feedback loop for when they’re losing their audience.

It’s to early to tell what the effects might be but it’s definitely popular and growing fast. They had server meltdown within the first half hour of launch and got bac up with some amazon instances pretty quickly.

This is only one of a few top class twitter apps to come out of Ireland Lately with Twitterfone, TweetRush prominent amongst a few others.

Update: I’ve just been told by CEO Eoghan McCabe that Hosting365 one of Ireland biggest hosting companies have come to the rescue by donating 2 large cloud servers. Well done to them.

With 3000+ signups in the last 7 or 8 hours on a Friday though it makes you wonder if this is the tip of the iceberg for this little app. Is it going the way of twitterfone? Time will tell.

Despite the rain and the low numbers I really have to say it was a superb meetup on Wednesday in Galway.

It was brilliant to meet up again with James Gallagher, Ina O’Murchu and Mick Lohan. Naturally with Ina in the room the Semantic web was a topic for discussion but unfortunately she had to run off early. She tells me she’ll be blogging regularly again shortly after her move to the London/San Francisco to join Rummble so I’ll wish her the best with that.

I had a great time chatting with Ben Sykes of Cisco a recent transplant to Galway from Silicon Valley. From chefing to showbiz (he worked on American Beauty among other things) to Microsoft and now helping Cisco’s unified communication effort we had a blast talking about a few of his projects using RFID and also in the web advertising space and of course social networks. Kudos to Martha Rotter for pointing him at the event. He also dragged Cian Walsh along, who he introduced as “a first class icon designer”. Cian proceeded to fill me in on the problems of designing in a medium where literally every pixel counts. Checkout afterglow.ie to see some of his work.

Also in the mix Gerry Cahill and and David Kelly. Gerry is a consultant and also an Enterprise Ireland advisor and is a great source of experience and knowledge having worked previously in senior management at Nortel amongst other places. David has an interesting take on simple CRMs for beauty salons and I look forward to hearing more about it in Cork as he say’s he’ll be coming along to the next Meetup.

All in all despite the rain and the small numbers a great night. See you in Cork at the end of August start of September for the next one.

Muzu TV were one of nine companies that demoed recently at the Techludd-Techcrunch meetup CrunchLudd.

You may have heard about this already (it was mentioned by web2ireland amongst others) but in case you missed it, out of that event the Dublin based startup have had some fantastic coverage in both TechCrunch UK & Ireland and in the main TechCrunch.com blogs.

Read more here on Tech Crunch UK and here for the main TechCrunch take

(Note: For those that read this blog that may not be aware, TechCrunch is one of the biggest technology blogs in the world.)

The Digital Media Forum is always working to try and bring value to companies in the Digital space. Digital Media in Ireland is an emerging sector and because of this many if not most businesses in this sector are early stage companies who need as much help and support as possible to reach there goals.

Access to top business experts and good advice are critical to the process but can at times be expensive and difficult to achieve and as Joe Drumgoole learned at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Franciso you can’t be too prepared when pitching. Opportunities to fine tune your pitch and proposition and then have mentors from highly successful companies work with you on improving your company are extremely valuable. Enter the Digital Media Panel.

The Digital Media Panel draws panelists from different sources depending on who the applicants pitching are. These include:

1. Our Listed Corporate sponsors
2. Experts in Digital Media tailored to the particular company
3. Venture Capitalists
4. Successful Digital Media Entrepreneurs

For even more details please feel free to contact us

Applications

Applications are open now for the first panel in September so please fill out the online application form.

Applications close on the 30th of July so don’t delay as there are only 4 places on each panel.

Supported by

It’s great to see a group of great Irish companies getting the attention they deserve in the press. Marie Boran of Silicon Republic came along to the last CrunchLudd event and used the opportunity to connect with several of the “new wave of Irish Digital Media companies” that were demoing at the event. The result was this article in which several entrepreneurs had the opportunity to give their views on the current crop of companies and the issues they face.

Check out the article here on www.independent.ie

This kind of coverage for companies that demo at the events makes it all worthwhile and Kudos to Marie for getting in to talk to these companies when the opportunity arose. There are some great stories amongst these companies and hopefully this’ll help encourage more coverage of Irish Startups.

Eircom Innovation Fund has announced it’s winners finally and I’m delighted but not surprised to see two of the companies who demoed from the last CrunchLudd event named as winners. Obviously that has nothing to do with them winning but it just goes to show the great level of companies demoing at the events. Congratulations to all the winners and we wish then every success and will continue to support and try and help them going forward…

TouristR

TouristR who demoed at the meetup at the end of June when TechCrunch UK & Ireland came to town at the end of June is an integrated full-service trip-planning advisor, which cuts out the online information overload and minimises planning problems. It not only helps the traveller to plan a more complex travel itinerary - such as a trip with multiple destinations on a fixed budget and timeline – but it also draws on content submitted by a community of users which will help the traveller to decide on a destination by getting a sense of the type of experience available at their chosen destination.

A new breed of unique Web 2.0 travel service, TouristR will feature stories, adventures and photographs of destinations submitted by users as well as aid the traveller who needs to factor in multiple elements to their trip such as budgetary, geographical, temporal and other personal preferences and restrictions.

Locle

Locle have demoed twice at TechLudd events now back in April and at the June event when TechCrunch were in town. Locle is a social mapping application for mobile phones that combines information from your mobile handset address book with social networks such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace to create mapping services that show users where their friends are. Locle is an enhanced mobile web experience that facilitates “here’s where I am, and here’s where my friends are” for social networks and groups.

Locle is a combination of a web service and downloadable mobile phone software. When the Locle mobile client is activated, it identifies the user’s location and presents the location of “friends” who also use the application. Friends can be both contacts from your mobile phone address book or contacts from your social networks. As well as letting you know where your “friends” are, Locle can also keep you up to date on relevant information to your location such as local events, news, weather and provide details on local restaurants, cinemas and ATM machines etc.
Locle is a Business Expansion Scheme qualified investment.

HeyStaks

HeyStaks is a new approach to Web search that helps searchers to share their search experiences with friends, colleagues, and other searchers. HeyStaks is a browser plugin that works with Google and provides users with the ability to create so-called “search staks” as a way to organise and share their Google searches. For example, a group of friends planning a holiday abroad might create a “Holiday 2008” search stak. As they individually search for travel, accommodation and entertainment options, their selections will be shared with each other during future searches as specially highlighted search results. In this way all of the friends can see what results have been found to be useful during earlier searches, which may help them during their own searches for that perfect holiday package.

Research shows that HeyStaks can help searchers find information more quickly and in turn allow users to create and share many different types of search staks to reflect different topics of interest. In this way search staks can provide users with access to a form of Web search that is powered by their favourite search engine but customised for a particular topic of interest, based on their own search experiences or the search experiences of others.

The HeyStaks technology has been developed by Prof. Barry Smyth’s research group in University College Dublin and is the first spin-out of the new CLARITY research centre, a €16m Science Foundation Ireland research centre combining researchers from University College Dublin, Dublin City University, and the Tyndal National Institute.

Playza

With most popular online games focused squarely at the adult gaming market, Playza is a new social gaming proposition for “Digital Natives” – our 12 to 24 year olds who have grown up in a digital media environment where mobile phones, social networking, multiplayer online gaming, and music downloading have always been the norm.

Playza is made up of a series of connected mini games in which players complete tasks and earn points. Online game players are encouraged to bring their gaming colleagues to Playza and social networkers can invite their online friends to join. The main objective of the game is to form and control player groups. By getting new members into their group, players will increase their standing and capabilities within the games. Playza users can also create their own page to host their game account and mini games. Within their page, users can create their own game groups, receive feedback and messages and post the game to their other sites or blogs such as MySpace or Facebook.

Playza combines the addictive nature of online gaming with the community features of a social networking portal.