The 2008 predictions weren’t the most accurate. Let’s see how we do for 2009.
The Android platform will be absolutely huge. With Motorola, Sony Ericsson and a raft of Tier 2 manufacturers signed up, it will become the mobile platform from the mid to high end. Ignore the HTC G1, that’s just a rough first attempt by one manufacturer.
Despite Android, iPhone will remain big. There is always that 10% of the market who like paying extra for “luxury” brands
SaaS ecommerce providers will go mainstream. The idea of only selling locally will become ridiculous. Everyone who can send something by mail-order will end up online. SaaS will be utterly compelling for small biz like this.
Facebook will continue to grow with people who neither know nor care what a Social Network is but want to keep in touch with people they know
Facebook Connect will be everywhere
Investors in pre-revenue Web2 companies will start losing patience and grab the management reins. In most cases this will fail
Nice-to-have webapps that cost anything to run will disappear at an ever increasing rate
The various Irish Government “throw money at VCs” schemes will continue to fail miserably
Nothing will change in the structure of Enterprise Ireland and how it funds companies
The Incubation Centres in Ireland will continue to be a source of a large number of successful start-ups
Twitter will be sold for a lot less than expected as they fail to execute on a business model
Smart BigCorps will hoover up tons of start-ups for petty cash and start building for the economic recovery
All the Twitter clones will disappear
All the major SocNets will add Twittter-like functionality
At least one global location aware mobile SocNet will get decent traction
Garmin and TomTom will be beaten up by GPS-enabled phones
Google will make a play to own the yellow pages space using Google Maps. Everyone, including your chimney-sweep, will end up there
Wifi will start becoming the norm in mid-range point-and-shoot cameras and everyone, including your mum, will start photo-sharing
The proliferation of local review sites will end and a few big players will own the space in Europe
More APIs will become pay-for as “Free” becomes a dirty word
Sony will file for the Japanese equivalent of Chapter 11, sell off everything that is non-core, exit all JVs and continue to struggle to define itself in the 21st Century
Sony won’t create the PS4, a low-cost perfectly open platform, built around the web, media from-anywhere to-anywhere and open standards
Sony won’t create the PSPhone
BlueRay will remain a perfect solution to a problem which doesn’t exist
The Nintendo DSi will become the de-facto MP3 player for kids aged 3-15
The DSi will be the catalyst to turn kids from consumers into generators
Someone will build a GSM module for the DSi
Someone will build a VOIP app for the entire Nintendo DS range
Someone will provide solid internet access on the entire Cork-Dublin train line
The Semantic web will remain something people write and talk about only
The fastest growing webapp of 2009 hasn’t been written yet
More Irish start-up founders will move to Silicon Valley
2009 will be the hardest year for Irish start-ups since 2002
My predictions for 2008 were very hit and miss (mainly miss), here’s a quick re-cap:
Cubic Telecom will have a £100m exit
Not yet. 2008 was an amazing year for Pat and the team with deals happening at breakneck pace.
European Founders, Howzat Media, TAG or Advent will do a deal with a web or mobile start-up here
Again not yet. I still think this will happen
More foreign VCs will invest in Irish web start-ups than Irish VCs
Well they both hover around zero. With current climate, we could be waiting a long time for this.
One of the current batch of Irish Web 2.0 start-ups will go global in a big way
PollDaddy!
EI’s €170m VC fund will continue to provide minimal benefits to Irish web start-ups
I got that one 1000% correct
Eircom’s small fund will result in two major web start-up successes
Sadly not yet but the signs are still good
Someone will launch a full Y Combinator/Seedcamp here
Sadly no. And with Government pissing away another €500m to foreign VCs this time, could they not take a €5m flutter with some smart entrepreneurs (no not VCs!) co-managing this?
Minister John McGuinness will be given responsibility for re-structuring all state bodies concerned with business
Again no. Will Government have the balls to shake everything up in 2009? €500m to foreign VCs says no.
EI will absorb Údarás na Gaeltachta
No.
EI will launch a self-contained web unit with its own budget, minimal red-tape, firewall access to Facebook and based in the Cork Gaeltacht or Kilkenny
No, big opportunity missed. The geo-centric model of EI needs to change to centres of expertise.
Damien Mulley will launch his own start-up
Mulley Communications
Six Apart will launch a free version of Typepad
No. Give it time tho.
Six Apart or Automattic will launch a full blown social network built on their blogging platforms
No. I’m very surprised how long this is taking.
Facebook Sign-to-Noise will continue to plummet as more and more people join and repeat usage plateaus (How many FB apps did I have to install this week just to read happy new year messages?)
SNR did plummet but usage didn’t. I started to find FB more useful in the latter part of 2008 as all the vampire crap subsided.
There will be a management bloodbath at a high level in the mobile operators as they see ARPU drop on traditional services and continue to sit idly-by, unable to make sense of the mobile internet
No. Bit by bit it looks like the mobile telcos are getting the hang of the internet.
Google’s Mobile strategy will continue to peek out here and there and continue scare the bejesus out of the incumbents
The strategy seems to be working well. The ones who are scared are not the telcos but Nokia and the non-Android handset makers. It looks like the mobile telcos are actually embracing Android.
The first Google Android phone will be launched by HTC and won’t be fantastic
I got this one right. I have a G1. The software is fantastic, the hardware mediocre. Review coming soon on LouderVoice.
Amazon will merge with eBay
No. They still should
Amazon will seriously impact Apple iTunes
I believe they are making a bigger and bigger dent here. Android will accelerate this.
Google will buy 3 (ok ok that’s wishlist too)
No, not even close.
RyanAir will buy 3
Ditto.
Ye know I cannot come up with one decent prediction about Microsoft. More of the same maybe?
Live Mesh impresses the socks off me.
The BBC will brand the OLPC XO as the BBC Micro Model D and launch a major combined TV and internet education program around it
A little too bluesky for the BBC. Netbooks seem to have taken all the buzz here.
Google will buy Bebo
Well they were bought but not by Google.
One of the video 2.0 companies will be massive (Qik, Seesmic, Kyte, Ustream etc)
Whilst not massive, both Qik and Ustream seem to be doing very well.
A dedicated generic Irish Social Network will be launched
Both IGOpeople and Locle went live so I got that right!
Bandon and Old Chapel will get 12 Mbs broadband (that’s on the fantasy list)
We got 3 Mbs. Better than a poke in the eye I guess
Old Chapel residents will get flat-rate unencumbered 3.5G on our phones (ditto)
Well I got 1GB for €8 from Voda last month so we’re heading in the right direction
2008 will provide tougher challenges but greater rewards to Irish entrepreneurs than 2007
At Cork OpenCoffee yesterday we conned convinced Joe Scanlon to organise the Cork Blogger & Start-Up Dinner. It’s on December 15th at 5pm in Market Lane on Oliver Plunkett Street and you just have to leave a comment over on the blog to attend.
On Tuesday, I was on TodayFM’s The Last Word radio show with Professor Frank Roche talking to Matt Cooper. The topic was centered on fund raising in the current economic climate. You can hear what we had to say in this audio clip. The interview starts about 4 minutes 30 seconds in.
Don’t forget that our 2008 BES offering is open until Dec 31st. The response to-date has been very positive.
Niall Harbison from iFoods is arranging a blogger and tech-start-up Christmas lunch/party in Dublin for December 17th. If you are interested in attending, leave a comment on the blog.
We were looking into doing similar in Cork but have realised that we are flat-out with travel and meetings in the run up to Christmas. So that leaves two options - someone else grab the baton and arrange it instead of us or have a post-Christmas party in the horrible dead time around mid January.
I’ve been raving about Nokia Maps since I got my N95-8GB last December. Having voice-guided turn-by-turn directions on your phone is a killer app. It totally saved us getting back from Carnac to Roscoff this summer after printed Google Maps made a total mess of the outbound journey.
However something has gone badly wrong in Ireland and I’m not sure how long the problem has been there. I’m running the latest V30 firmware on my N95-8GB which includes the latest Nokia Maps 2.0. The big problem is that it seems to have lost the ability to find addresses.
Unless you give an utterly vague address like Rathmines, Dublin, it will fail. Most attempts at putting in street names or numbers fails. But what is driving me insane is that is has the data. The latest attempt was last week where I wanted to see where 84 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin was located. My searches were as follows:
84 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin: No results
Lower Baggot Street, Dublin: No results
Baggot Street, Dublin: A few results including “Baggot Street Lower”
Baggot, Dublin: Even more results and the type of list I’d have liked with the first search.
Come on! Is Nokia Maps really doing exact text matching including word-order on street addresses? That’s ridiculous and utterly useless. I’m particularly amazed that when there are zero results, that it doen’t expand the search using individual words.
Is this problem unique to Ireland?
Please Nokia, you have an awesome app in Nokia Maps 2.0 but if I can’t put in a destination address, then my use of it will plummet. Remember, Android is coming and this is the instant result for “84 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, Ireland” on Google Maps on my N95-8GB:
One other issue worth mentioning is foreign travel. I didn’t realise that loading a foreign country map on to the phone in advance of travelling did not include voice navigation. We ended up in McDonald’s in Vannes on free Wifi buying the France voice guide to help us get home.
I’d also like to be able to pe-load detailed routes at home to avoid the usual rip-off roaming charges. Luckily by using Vodafone Live on the SFR network we somehow managed to avoid roaming when the map detail was loaded up.
A few simple fixes could ensure that Nokia Maps continues to kick the iPhone’s hamstrung app and can compete against the Android app.
Oh and I’m still waiting for that touch-screen version of the N95…….
We have just kicked off our BES 2008 offering which is built around the LouderVoice business. If you are interested in hearing more about this investment opportunity or discussing direct equity investments, please contact Conor O’Neill on conor AT loudervoice DOT com or +353-87-9790297.
Over the past few months we have been trialling our business services with several clients. Some of those are already live, others will go live over the next quarter. We now have a very nice brochure site to go with these services and a very powerful content moderation back-end for our clients.
The it@cork annual conference has just been announced. Its title is ”GREEN IT: Reduce CO2, Raise Profits” and it’s on November 26 in the lovely Radisson SAS Hotel in Cork.
The line-up looks like an excellent mix with the focus being clearly on Green as it relates to IT and Business. I particularly like the profit angle given the turmoil the world is going through right now
The is an Early Bird Discount available – Book on or before October 31 and it’s €250 for members, €350 for non members.
The agenda is as follows:
07.30 – Heads of IT breakfast sponsored by Certification Europe
08.00 – Arrival coffee & registration
08.45 – Welcome from Donal Manning, Chairman, it@cork
08.55 – SETTING THE SCENE – George Lee, Economics Editor, RTE
09.35 - Green IT: Moving Beyond the 2% Solution, Douglas Neal, Research Fellow, Leading Edge Programme
10.05 - SMART2020: ICT and climate change. Opportunities or Threat? Chris Tuppen, Director Sustainable Development, BT
10.35 – Q&A Moderated by Tom Raftery. Lead analyst, energy and sustainability practice, Redmonk
It has been over two years since the last one, but BarCamp is finally coming back to Cork. It’s soon, very soon, only four weeks away. The venue is the lovely Webworks building in the City Centre, just like the last time.
We have a strong vision for this event and we need your help to make it happen on the day. Please read the first set of posts and give us your feedback. If you think you’ll be attending, please register. As always with BarCamps, it is completely free with the costs being taken care of by our kind sponsors.
If you wish to sponsor or help, please read the “what we need” post.
We have two mottos for BarCampCork II “talking with, not talking at” and “less talking, more doing”.
If you don’t know what a BarCamp/Unconference is or have never attended one, here is a simple description from the main BarCamp site:
BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.
Every attendee of BarCamp is expected to contribute in some way. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to give a talk. But at the very least, you should take part in lots of the discussions that occur and share the knowledge you have in your area of expertise.
We’d love to see you down in Cork and we encourage anyone based outside of Ireland who reads this blog to consider flying in for the day.
PodCamp last year was one of my conference highlights and it looks like they are pulling out all the stops this year.
Head on down to Kilkenny this coming Saturday if you want to see what it’s all about. Tons of information and pre-conference activity on the PodCamp Ireland site.
The second annual Leader’s Awards are on October 23rd in the Clarion Hotel, Lapps Quay, Cork. It’s a nice opportunity to recognise some of the leading companies and individuals in the region.
The winners last year were:
Emerging Company Award - Cubic Telecom
High Potential Award Abtran
R&D Project Award - Treemetrics
Academic Award - Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4Cs)
If you just can’t wait, Chrome will run on Ubuntu with a little help from Wine. Some scrappy fonts and I don’t think Flash works. But still, pretty darned impressive. Picasa 3 also seems to work well.
My business hero is my Dad. He left a secure job in Dublin to join a startup in Kilkenny in the early 1970’s. This wasn’t a tech startup, it was a dairy one, called Avonmore-Avongate. That team built a global business over the next few decades.
My most recent business hero is Pat Phelan. He overcame huge personal crisis to firstly build a great business locally and then build MaxRoam. What he has achieved with MaxRoam in those timescales is close to miraculous. Every chat with Pat consists of me going “no way?!” as he describes another major milestone.
Anyone doing a startup is going to have tons of criticism thrown at them. When I get reamed about LouderVoice by my peers, I value every word they say. The criticism is nearly always well-intentioned and I never take it personally.
However, when people who have never built anything in their lives, come along and throw insults around, making blanket criticisms of groups of companies or just make personal attacks, then that’s a different matter. These desperate attention-seekers have never done anything except comment on other people’s efforts.
Robert Scoble, who used to be well-known as a Microsoft blogger, slagged off a ton of companies in his most recent link-baiting post. With his usual insight and depth, he said they sucked. I unsubbed from his blog over a year ago. Maybe if the rest of you do the same, he’ll learn some manners and show some respect.
The fundamental problem with advertising is that it has always taken the shotgun approach. Show the same ad to as many people as possible and hope some of them like it. Systems like Google AdSense have improved things a lot by showing ads related to the content on a web-page but they are still not ideal and give the person who owns the web-page minimal control beyond some simple competitor-exclusions.
In the past few years the whole area of widgets has been growing at a phenomenal rate. There is a widget for displaying almost anything at this stage. Now imagine if you had a widget where you defined the ad content and it was for products you like? Imagine if you got paid every time one of those ads resulted in a sale?
Well that’s what Nooked has built. For example, if you are a Birkenstock fanatic, you can choose to just display ads for those on your blog, social network or other web-page. Select the products you like and you are up and running in minutes.
The big advantage for you as a “publisher” is that you display products you recommend and the likelihood is that those who read your blog or are connected to you on a social network will also find them interesting. The advantage for advertisers is that it is much much more targetted than even AdSense because it is focused on people and their interests instead of just content.
The Nooked guys have a great blog post pointing out some of the history of sell-side advertising. Why not head on over to their site and grab a widget showing the things you like?
I mentioned before that a few months back I was in London for an event and I decided to forego my laptop and just bring my Nokia N95-8GB. This would provide e-mail, RSS reading and Twitter. Of course I was petrified of the roaming data charges that can happen abroad and made sure to just use Wifi where possible. Unfortunately my hotel room had a very poor wifi signal so I decided to bite the bullet and check my email using the (much maligned by me) Vodafone Live APN on the phone. I pay a few Euro a month for 500MB of Live data.
When I got back I checked my data charges on vodafone.ie to discover that they were zero for my trip! It seems as if the concept of “roaming” doesn’t occur on Vodafone Live as long as you are on the Vodafone network. I don’t know if this is by accident or not but I was thrilled. Of course the downside is that Live only gives you HTTP(S) and POP, you don’t get IM, IMAP, SSH or any other protocol/port.
I’m just back from a two week holiday in France and for the most part I tried to use Live on the SFR network which Vodafone owns. I had no idea what the charges would be so I was very conservative in my use. For some of the LouderVoice site work, I had to use the Vodafone ISP connection to get SSH access but the usage was minimal so I wasn’t too worried.
Yesterday I logged on to vodafone.ie and bless their little hearts, the trick works in France too! Zero data charges for all my GMail, RSS reading and Nokia Maps over Vodafone Live with a few cent here and there for the ISP connections.
The only other downside of this is that you cannot use the phone as a modem for your laptop with a Live connection since it is not a real access point, it’s a legacy WAP thingy. But if, like me, you can get most things done on your N95-8GB along with the brilliant iGo Stowaway keyboard, then you’ll save a packet on your travels in Europe.
Now if Nokia needs a tester/reviewer for the soon-I-hope-to-be-launched touch screen phone, I’m ready and waiting.
Given the interest expressed in having a SeedCamp prep session, Gordon Murray has arranged a room in Oriel House Hotel in Ballincollig, Cork for Thursday August 7th starting at 9am.
It will be quite informal, the aim is to get practical advice from each other on answering some of the questions on the application form so that you promote your business or idea as best as possible.
He’ll have printouts of the questions with him on the day. For anyone who’d like to work on it beforehand, here’s a link to the the Seedcamp application PDF.
Unfortunately the closing date for doing video pitches is Wednesday but hopefully that won’t stop people giving the webcam a go. Robin Blandford of Decisions for Heroes already has.
Pix.ie is often compared to Yahoo’s Flickr and understandably so, but it offers a far more impressive and friendly user interface. Once they launch their public API, they should be unstoppable.
There are a LOT of photo sharing sites out there. It’s an area I haven’t dug too deeply into over the years as my needs are quite simple. I want somewhere that allows me to easily upload cameraphone pics and screenshots, set the privacy so that my family doesn’t need an account to view them and allows me to display some of those pics in a variety of sizes on my blogs.
Up until recently, Flickr fit the bill perfectly but I’ve always found its user interface to be unintuitive. Drop-down menus in 2008! However it won on speed, price and tools. The various Flickr uploaders really are very good. I’ve also been a fan of Shozu on my mobile phone for sending pics directly to Flickr. Most recently I found that the maps showing geo-located pics taken with GPS in my N95 was an absolute killer feature.
In the past few months I’ve been using Twango/Ovi more. There are a couple of reasons for this - better N95 integration and decent video upload. Downsides were less flexible photo sizing, poor mapping and an annoying Java Applet based uploader.
Pix.ie doesn’t openly address this ultra-early-adopter market but it easily competes with Flickr on mainstream user features whilst doing it in a much slicker way and the site is infinitely more usable than the horror that is Photobox.
Having played with it a lot today, I really don’t know why I didn’t move to it sooner for a lot of the stuff I do. Rest assured that all Web2Ireland.org pics will reside there from now on. Marcus Mac Innes has promised us a Wordpress plug-in too which will provide a sidebar gallery feature like the FlickrRSS one we currently use.
What would I like to see? Well I know the API is coming so that’s great. The RSS feeds are excellent but maybe one per album too? I was just about to suggest a “secret” email address but that’s there too so I’ve added it to Shozu and I’m now uploading pictures directly from my N95-8GB. So in fact “location” is really the only thing missing at all!
Whilst Pix.ie gets quite a bit of notice in the press generally, I’m not sure people realise just how powerful it is. It can compete with the best sites globally, is a damn sight prettier than most of them and is the easiest photo-sharing site to use that I’ve found so far.
I spent a very interesting afternoon talking to Christine O’Donovan in WCEB in Clonakilty on Tuesday. We covered a pretty wide range of topics and I was highly impressed by the range of services they offer local businesses.
Our big area of mutual frustration was the lack of take-up on the Tech-Check scheme. I’ve written about it before on my personal blog and in summary, if you are a local biz in Ireland with even one laptop and you’ve never even talked to an Enterprise Board, then you are missing out hugely.
For €150 you’ll get up to 6 hours of consultancy on your IT setup. Some people seem to think they are only getting €150 worth of consultancy but it’s obviously heavily subsidised. It covers everything from making sure you have anti-virus software and proper backup all the way up to EPOS systems and web-site development.
Despite tons of advertising, it just isn’t getting noticed and I think the people who need it most are the ones who realise it least. Perhaps a national intense campaign that focuses on the low-end basic problems that I see everywhere rather than “IT efficiency” etc would be more effective?
Tech-Checks are available to a much wider range of businesses than CEBs would normally cover. This is important to understand for the other support measures.
Training is a huge part of the budget for all the CEBs and Argolon has been the beneficiary of the courses offered in West Cork. The “starting a business” and basic accounting ones should be mandated by all bank managers handing out new business loans. They really are that important and the cost is minimal.
On the grant side of things, the range of companies that can avail is smaller. The main caveat seems to be that you won’t get grant support if you are a local-only business like a shop. But, for example, if you are a craft shop and you sell your products online, then you do qualify.
There were three grant aids that I discussed with Christine, one of which I was completely unaware of.
The first is a simple feasibility study grant to a value up to €5100. The grant is paid 6 months after you run your study. The range of areas that this covers is very wide and anyone kicking off a new biz would be well advised to apply.
The next one is the Small Exporters Scheme. This is something that I’d be very interested in making use of for the Web2.0 Expo in New York. Its main function is to help you attend trade shows abroad. They provide matching funding up to €2000. This is really a superb support and I believe that not many people are making use of it. It does have one catch, you must have already received grant aid from WCEB to qualify. I assume the route for many people is Feasibility Study->Small Exporters Scheme.
The final one we discussed was the one I was unaware of and the one that really excited me. WCEB will provide up to €1500 matching funding to help you get an ecommerce web-site built. I can think of so many businesses in West Cork that could benefit from this. Obviously it cannot be a brochure site or a local-biz-only site, the intention is to get you trading nationally and internationally via your web-site. One thing to note is that you must be able to show the bona fides of the company/individual you are hiring to do the work. This doesn’t mean tax clearance certs etc, just that it’s a genuine operation. It does not even have to be an Irish vendor; if you are comfortable offshoring, then that is allowed too. Like most other grants, this is paid after the work is done.
Let’s be honest, the standard of small business web-sites in Ireland is terrible. There are so many cowboys out there charging a small fortune for badly-implemented off-the-shelf templates. If you have a business with a small number of products for sale, it should not cost you €3000 for a great looking ecommerce site using an opensource or minimal-cost shopping cart.
One side-note: You should also keep an eye on Irish conferences/events that you would like to attend. Many of them (including the IIA) give discounts to CEB clients.
I’ve said it many times recently that I see a strong match between the CEBs and web businesses in Ireland. Many online businesses who either provide services via web applications or sell online will be very successful but may never grow beyond a few employees and are therefore under the radar for Enterprise Ireland. The level of paperwork with CEBs is also much lower than with EI.
I genuinely think that if you are kicking off a web biz, your first port of call should be your local Enterprise Board.
Unfortunately the closing date for doing video pitches is Wednesday but hopefully that won’t stop people giving the webcam a go. Robin Blandford of Decisions for Heroes already has.