And now Conor over at Web2Ireland has a fantastic opportunity for those looking for mentoring and investment. My advice, send your business details or proposition in, what do you have to lose?

(Update: I did mean this as more of a question related to Conor’s post)

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.