This Friday HubSpot had another quite nice webinar. I tried out to draw mind map of it. I know - it is not perfect as each branch shouldn’t contain more than 1 word. But still, it’s great way to get an overview of it.

This post is dedicated to IGOpeople as part of Tuesday Push.

I started to use IGOpeople right after I stopped to use Yammer. When I joined IGOpeople I found a lot of people I know and the topics that are interesting to read. While Yammer e-mail announcements I found really annoying, I love IGOpeople weekly digest. It keeps me on track of all the things happening in my groups and who said what. I can also rate topics I like and contact people directly. It keeps track of everything I did and others did - it so it’s really great.

So few things I liked about the IGOpeople was:
- Dell Limerick group - it is really great idea and a lot of positive feedback from people
- Keiretsu group (as I do love everything related to Japan and would love this to be implemented in Ireland)
- I put up my own topic and got a lot of valuable responses
- I got twitter accounts for people related to IT & Business in Ireland. I always try to get grow my network and this is great way of doing it
- I joined 5 Fav Books group and got good idea which books to read next

<3 this app. Looks awsome.

Get yours here

I keep practice to go out on Saturday or Sunday to some event. I like to chill out and I love my kid to see something new. This time we went to two events - Chinese New Year and Lightwave festival’09.

Here is photos:

It all started 8th of January when Dell decided to cut 1,900 jobs in Limerick and move manufacturing to Poland over next 12 months.

Just few days later a new idea was born - Dell employees should start their own business. And while some were still discussing it, people like Evert and Chris went right into action.

Right after news they posted blog post “How to turn a bad thing around…” and received awesome response from people commenting. So they went further and created group on IGO people. At the moment it has over 20 members who are willing to help Dell employees for free or with discounts. Idea got also featured in Silicon Republic just few days later.

People started to respond very quickly - re-blogging Open Coffee post and even creating seminar covering redundancy.

Evert posted yet another post yesterday following ideas from New York incubators and the ones in London, Ottawa, Waterloo. I’m sure there isn’t anything like that in Ireland. Keep it going!

It might take time, but if we will support Dell employees, Limerick valley is not a fantasy.

For those who missed here is news on 8th of January:
“1,900 jobs lost at Dell in Limerick” by RTE News
“Dell’s Ireland plant to shed 1,900 jobs” by CNET news

Redundancy has been very popular topic from September and people keep blogging about it. If you look around the net, you will see a lot of help already provided for Dell employees. For example, RecruitIreland.com offers free placement of any recruitment ads on their site to any Limerick based employer.

Cheers and keep it going!

People often use terms incorrectly. It’s ok if nobody around knows that term anyway. However after some time term gets wrong meaning in people eyes. E.g. a lot of people are mixing up eBusiness and eCommerce and don’t know what they really are. 

I wanted to start discussion about eBusiness term and make people more aware what it is.

Please join me by leaving comment here as reply to “what is eBusiness?” or reply in: 

LinkedIn
IGO People

Thank you!

I forgot to blog about last Open Coffee so I’m taking opportunity to blog about today’s one.

When I first came across Open Coffee site and it said “informal event for web / business people to get together and chat about anything and everything” - I didn’t believe it. Comon’ if it is meeting, why in cafe and why such a name?

I went to meeting in October and was the only girl there for 2h. Believe me or not, it made me very uncomfortable. This time there were Andrea (thanks for saving me!) and I felt much, much more into it.

So what do people do in Open Coffee? First, they drink coffee and eat breakfast. And second they talk. I take notebook with me every time, because there is so much to learn about. People is either very technical or very business and they come with some reason to this meeting. I go for networking and news in IT. Others come to get help with website or coding. And then there are people with great ideas like ALT.NET.

Happily enough I sat by the table of ALT.NET. It is a self-organizing, ad-hoc community of developers bound by a desire to improve ourselves, challenge assumptions, and help each other pursue excellence in the practice of software development (I copied this sentence from net). You can read more at their site. They will be starting regular meetings shortly.

I also got few ideas for fast reading techniques, better presentations and mind mapping. And most of all - I enjoyed talk with great people. Here is some photos. Again sorry for the quality of them, but my husbands computer is broken and I can’t get to all the photo enchantment programs.

Friday was great night out for all us female entrepreneurs from IBW forum.  Usually when you go to networking events you expect to talk only about business, swap as much business cards as possible and politely leave. Well, that doesn’t happen in women networking.

While a lot of people don’t see difference between men and women entrepreneurs, they are almost like two different worlds. Most of the women who works from home feels lonely. We need to communicate. When men do business they don’t care about their kids, but women has to still prepare meals, do all housework, take care of childcare and play with kids. When something doesn’t work out, men just has this “chill out” attitude. But women get emotional and over worried about things. And that’s why we are often more hardworking then men (and they do not notice that!).

But still - we make it work - we do our accounts, we do small works for previous employers, we work over nights, we get some extra income in our family. It is great honor to be one of you girls

Here is some photos from yesterday (sorry for red eyes, my husbands computer with all the cool photo editing programs are broken):

p.s. Before event I was trying to memorize people and what they do. I failed. I remember just people I was sitting nearby. I really should find some way to memorize faces / names / what they do.
p.s2. It’s very hard for me to write word “entrepreneurs”. I have to google every time for right spelling.

The following events might be interesting to you if you are one of those : IT, entrepreneur or just love to have fun.

There is 3 events very close by I would love to attend:

• Tomorrow is meeting of IBW forum members. This is great place to meet other female entrepreneurs and see how they are doing in current recession situation.
• Second one is on Saturday named Open Coffee Dublin. If you read my blog, you probably know about it already - it’s great IT networking event. Just go and see what’s new in technology and have a drink of coffee.
• Third event not so great but still a big fun is DLREB organised Recharge Festival happening in People’s Park. “Misery is expected to peak on January 21st which has been pinpointed by experts as the worst day of the year.” is what they write on their site so go and relax on Sunday.

Other events is not so close but still needs to be mentioned:

1. January Connector Meetup on 22nd of Jan (what to expect: “You can expect to meet a multi-national mix of bloggers, marketers, designers, web entrepreneurs, photographers, musicians, digital filmmakers & PR people among others.”)
2. Lightwave’09 - 23rd Jan -20th Feb in Science Gallery (what to expect: “a unique chance to experiment with illumination in the company of a bright and buzzing community of scientists, engineers, philosophers and techno-artists who are passionate about the visible spectrum.”)
3. HubSpot Webinar 23rd Jan, sign up for it now and last one was worth it (what to expect: “5 Tips for Advanced B2B Business Blogging - Free Marketing Webinar”)
4. First Tuesday 27th Jan (”The Recession and what it means for Telecommunications”)
5. Net Imperative Dublin Roadshow organised by IIA 28th Jan (FREE one-day conference which will bring you up to speed on successful digital marketing for your business.)
6. DubTwestival 12th Feb, sign up for it on Facebook or follow on twitter (it is event for all twitterfanatics)
7. Irish Blog Awards 21st Feb, unfortunately happening in Cork and I might not get there
8. Future of Web Apps 6th Mar (what to expect “Our aim is to excite, educate and unite you. We want you to go out and build the next big thing. Let’s all abandon our laptops and gather for a day of refreshment, ideas and fun. Rock on!”)
9. ossBarCamp 28th Mar, I expect it to be great fun, but follow on twitter for more info
10. BarCamp Belfast 25th Apr (I went to CreativeCamp in Belfast in summer and it was a blast!)

Don’t forget to note them in your diary so I can meet you

Today I used twitter a lot, because I was planning out my social media plan and I had to get all ideas I could. However, I found few things on twitter annoying:
1) People not always answer me. Of course, I understand that they are following 100+ people and can’t see all updates.. but still - its very annoying
2) on my “follower” list was over 20 environmental, eco and green twitters. I’m not against anything green, but it is somehow annoying that they all are following me. So I decided to protect my updates. And as I did so, they magically disappeared and I didn’t even need to remove them.

To be honest, now I will feel more free to post my updates, knowing that not everyone in world can read them.