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Top ideas win funding opportunity
16 August 2009
Four Irish startup companies have shared this year’s EircomWeb Innovation Fund.
The €100,000 fund is designed to support early stage internet businesses in bringing their ideas from concept through to production.
Among the winners is Diary plan. com, which aims to become a global provider of online calendar services.
Pitched primarily at sporting events, the service is intended to provide downloadable calendars to sports fans that can easily be integrated into people’s social networking sites.
The site is the brainchild of entrepreneur Pat Walsh, who already has a number of successful ventures behind him. He sold his Vingo It Solutions business in 2004 and later moved onto open Sky Business Centres, a chain of serviced and virtual office centres at three locations across Dublin.
Walsh said he began developing Diaryplan.com in 2006 and, since then, over 2,000 hours of development time have gone into the project. Diaryplan.com features over 2,000 calendars of sporting events, including GAA, rugby, Premier League football and golf.
The company’s next objective is to increase the number of available calendars to 5,000, while broadening the range of services on offer.
At present, calendars can be shared over social networking sites Bebo and Facebook. The company has also development a management tool for Microsoft Outlook, which allows calendars to be added to the software, including associated graphics, photographs and links.
Also sharing in the prize fund was SocietyMail.com, which is a plug-in for web based e-mail systems that transforms an individual’s inbox into a social network search engine for content stored in a person’s e-mail archive.
The aim of the service is to provide what’s dubbed as a personal relationship management system, which organises interpersonal contacts in a similar way to CRM systems do for businesses.
The business was founded by Ronan Higgins and Pieter Oonk, both of whom have a background in the software industry.
Higgins worked for many years in the US both in the gaming industry and later on the first legal US gambling website,Youbet.com. He was also the founder of Californianbased wi-fi hotspot network Cafe.com, which he sold in 2005 before moving to back to Ireland.
Dutchman Oonk has been in Ireland since 2006 and has previously worked in a number of media and technology companies such as Artery Solutions, Overloaded, Kinsale Mobile and TFB.The pair have been working together since 2007 and their first product was Locle, a mobile friend finder application
The third winning project was BeeHerd, another online platform pitched at the sports market. It is designed to allow online sports publishers and websites to create their own customised widgets (ie miniature applications) for readers. Widgets would allow fans to remain updated with news, photos and results as well as provide a live discussion facility over the Twitter micro blogging platform.
Website owners can sign up on the BeeHerd website, select the type of widget they are interested in, adjust its appearance, select the content sources and then provide it to their website users. BeeHerd is being developed by Geco Loco, a start-up firm specialising in web applications. The business was founded by Bartek Czerwinski, Jackie O’Sullivan and Tomasz Walkowiak.
Originally from Poland, Czerwinski worked previously as a graphic designer and art director at a number of advertising agencies before moving into web design and moving to Ireland in 2006.Walkowiak is also from Poland, having moved here in 2006. He previously worked for a design agency as a PHP developer.
O’Sullivan worked in property before moving onto work at a design agency as project manager.
The fourth winner was Get It KeepIt.com, which bills itself as an online storage system for life’s essential documentation. The site can store copies of a range of documents such as utility bills, insurance documents, pension records, tax receipts, credit card bills, e receipts and e-tickets. The site can analyse documents upload and create alerts for any that require attention.
According to its founder Austin McGinley, the benefit of such a service is that users can access these documents quickly from anywhere, while cutting back on paper related clutter.
McGinley is a Silicon Valley veteran, having worked in a telecoms firm there before moving into the banking software sector in Dublin and later working for brand consultancy JHP Design in London.
Now in its second year, the €100,000 fund is split equally between winners and will be released on a staged basis throughout the six-month development process, according to needs assessed on a per-case basis.
The fund this year partnered with the Telecommunication Software & Systems Group at Waterford Institute of Technology, which will provide free consultancy and training to the winners. They will also receive entrepreneurial training and incubation space at the Arclabs business centre in Waterford.
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