While judges were thinking about whom should they award, I asked few people on their opinion. And most of them replied that Kinesense is the best choice. Both of the other projects were quite interesting and good so why such decision?

Here is few tips for your start-up if you plan to attract investors with your presentation:

1) Get clients. Before you even start developing something or planning, get someone who is ready to pay for it. This is basic step where most of the start-ups fail. Even if you have the best idea in the world and you have plan how to implement it. If there is nobody to buy it, investors won’t be intrested.

2) Good presentation. Sometimes good presentation, flashy facts win awards just because they give investors good insight on company. Who cares about your product specifics and technical details? Investor always asks the same question - what is in it for me? Be prepared to present - try it out with your family, closest friends before going to investors.

3) Good team. Very rarely you see investments that goes to one-person company. It is important for any start up to have good team that consists of different specialists. Investors actually want to see that if you get sick and can’t continue, somebody else will be able to do it.

4) Financial Projections. They are important. When will you start to get revenue? How quick your company will grow? And watch out for both - worst case and best case scenarios. If they aren’t realistic then nobody gonna believe you. Don’t forget to tell investors how much money you need exactly.

5) Milestones. Put realistic milestones in your plans. What will be achieved this year? What is achieved next year? Tell how you have been doing for last year and what you have achieved.

Kinesense were able to show that there is somebody ready to pay and somebody is using it already. It is somehow unfair that you won’t get money until you won’t start selling. But its the main rule in investment world.

**Note: Good news - I had enough time to update my IT & Business event page for March and bit of April. This month is really busy so don’t miss interesting events around.

This year was amazing for me and our company. I would be lying if I say it was easy. Honestly - I have never worried about so much things than this year. Recession has made my life more stressful and uncertain. This is why I look forward to New Year with big hopes. This years promise is that I gonna spend more time on my family than our business. And usual those kind of things really work out when you put a thought in them.

Happy New Year! Let all our New Years resolutions come true!

***Note: If you are wandering about events posts I do monthly check out the new page dedicated just for that. I decided not to spam my blog monthly with events posts.

Now back to what you really want to see :

• 11th Nov 18:00 / Free Business Owner Network / Bewleys hotel, free - meet other businesses and try out your pitch in speed networking
• 11th Nov 19:00 / 10 Min Street Networking / Main Gate of St. Stephen’s Green, free - another great idea of business networking
• 11th Nov 19:45 / Southside B2B Visitors Event / The National Yacht Club, Dun Laoghaire, free - Southside Business Network is a business and professional networking organisation whose primary purpose is to exchange qualified business referrals.
• 13th Nov 19:00 / ISA Annual Awards / Burlington Hotel, 125 EUR - The Irish Software Association is pleased to announce the Annual Software Industry Awards 2009.
• 12th Nov 18:00 / World Usability Day & IQ Studio Launch Party / 34 Clarendon Street (opposite Saba), D2, free - there’ll be wine tasting (or bring your own beer), music, food, shorts and Powerpoint Karaoke!
• 13th Nov 20:00 / Cork pre-BarCamp Girl Geek Dinner / Gourmet Burger Bistro, 8 Bridge Street, 18 EUR - Girl Geek Dinner
• 14th Nov 10:00 / BarCamp Cork / Cork International Airport Hotel, free - people getting together, sharing ideas, learning from each other and finding like-minds.
• 16th Nov 08:00 / SME Links Ireland Breakfast Networking for Childline / Hotel Isaacs (Beresford Place), 10EUR (min donation) - the event will include a number of showcase presentations and offers an opportunity to network with other SME owners and managers while raising much needed funds for Childline
• 17th Nov 08:30 / Synergy Breakfast “Exporting” / Synergy Centre, free - yet another interesting topic you might want to hear about
• 17th Nov 19:00 / Dublin ALT.NET / Seagrass, free - event interesting for developers. This time discussing Open Rasta
• 18th Nov 17:45 / NovaUCD 2009 Campus Company Development Programme Awards Evening / NovaUCD, free - meet companies that has been successful from NovaUCD campus
• 18th Nov 09:00 / Winning International Business with the Web / Radisson BLU Royal Dublin Hotel, price €95/ €65 - how to grow your business internationally, increase your revenues and use the internet to expand into new markets cost effectively.
• 18th Nov 09:15 / Technology in Business Conference / Radisson Blu Hotel, Cork, 95-195 EUR - it@cork annual conference
• 18th Nov 19:00 / Python Ireland Meetup / Scruffy Murphy’s, free - 45 minute to 1 hour talk demonstrating the creation of a straightforward webapp from scratch on App Engine.
• 19th Nov / Golden Spider Awards / Burlington Hotel, from 300 EUR - eircom Golden Spider Awards (recognizing excellence in internet & digital media)
  
• 20th Nov / National Women’s Enterprise Day / Mullingar, 100 EUR - this event offers support to women already in business and those thinking of starting out
• 21st Nov 10:30 / Open Coffee Dublin / Dakota Bar, free - informal event for web / business people to get together and chat about anything and everything.
• 24th Nov 18:30 / Entrepreneurs Only / Mont Clare Hotel, 25 EUR - what do all these enterpreneurs (check out speakers) have in common?
• 26th Nov 09:30 / Virtual Desktop Roadshow / Sun Microsystems, East Point Business Park, seems free - explore the opportunities offered by a virtualised desktop from Sun Microsystems
• 26th Nov 19:00 / Connector - New Businesses / Kobra bar, free - Connector is looking for 10 new businesses to step forward and tell us their story
• 27th - 29th Nov / Xtival / free - XBox Live festival
• 2nd Dec / The iPhone as an Emerging Enterprise Platform / The Alexander Hotel, free - this is a chance for software companies to explore the opportunities presented by mobile applications and Apple’s iPhone in particular.
• 5th Dec 10:00 / GreenHouse Business Camp / O’Reilly building on the Trinity campus, free - event is about sharing information, knowledge & experience

more to come later…

p.s. if anyone is free enough to help me with some English texts, I would really appreciate it!

Today I have a guest post from the CEO of Agile Technologies - Romans Malinovskis (who also happens to be my husband). In case you have heard word “scammer” but are not sure what it is exactly - read on.

We were one of the several to be hit by the scam attack and I actually almost fell for it.

Dear AIB Ireland Bank member,

You have added blue7.cork@yahoo.ie as a new email address for your Aib online Bank account.

If you did not authorize this change, check with family members and others who may have access to your account first. If you still feel that an unauthorized person has changed your email, submit the form attached to your email in order to keep your original email and restore your Aib account.

This was the original email text. The email was sent from: AIB Bank <service@aib.ie> which seems to be legitimate. But of course you do know:

• Email sender can be set to ANYTHING. There are no verification.

Content of email seems to be very skillfully created. However they do have some minor mistakes such as spelling “Aib” instead of “AIB” and also refer to “Aib NetBank”.

• Scammers will use scare technique, which will make you panic and try to trick you into doing silly things.

Email is also very well composed to avoid being blocked by spam filters. Obviously should you receive email from bank it would be using full name and surname which scammers usually do not know.

• Pay attention to “To:” field your email. If it does not contain YOUR email and your full name - this can possibly mean that it was sent to multiple people.

There is .HTML attachment. Attachment is basically this page: http://www.aib.ie/personal/current-accounts which have it’s content removed and replaced by a form asking for: 8-digit registration number, PAC number and home phone number. Also scammers ask to fill in all the digits from the code card. All that finished with blue button with lockpad.

• Never trust email attachments.

I have looked inside the file. If you open it in the editor, scammers have entered a lot of newlines, which makes reading file very difficult. Search for “form” shows offending link:

http://www.advancecolleges.org/Editor/assets/test.php

of course the site have been compromised. (I tried to notify webmaster).

Script itself would record the details you have included on the form and would redirect you to AIB site.

Any of you know how to report this URL / site as offending and potentially dangerous? Modern browsers will verify domains you visit of being harmful.

I would appreciate if readers could direct me to scam report pages.

• 6th Oct 14:00 / Launch of the National Digital Skills Week / The Digital Hub, free - I found this event quite advertised, however I wasn’t able to find any events related to digital skills week, which is pretty strange
• 6th Oct 10:00 / Open Coffee Mallow / Springfort Hal, Bar & Lounge area - monthly opportunity for business people to meet in a casual environment
• 7th Oct 18:15 / 121 Marketing Club / The Mint Bar, Westin Hotel, free - great to meet fellow marketers
• 7th Oct 18:00 / FREE Business Owner Network / Bewleys Hotel, Dublin 4, free - good event for networking
• 8th Oct 10:30 / Open Coffee Dublin / Science gallery, free - OpenCoffee Club is an informal event for web / business people to get together and chat about anything and everything.
• 8th Oct 08:00 / 3rd Annual Mid-West Entrepreneur Showcase / Limerick Institute of Technology, Millenium Theatre - 16 LEAP programme participants and more businesses
• 10th Oct / Irish Web Awards / Radisson SAS Royal Hotel, 35 EUR - great place to learn best web practises and projects and have lots of fun
• 11th Oct / Greenhouse Business Camp / Absolute Hotel, Limerick - for people who are self-employed, starting their own business or thinking about starting their own business.
• 12th Oct 15:00 / FaceBook Garage Belfast / The Black Box, Hill St., Belfast, free - learn more about Facebook applications
• 13th Oct 19:30 / Ireland Girl Geek Dinner / Ciao Bella Roma, €15-€20 per person - Girl Geek Dinners are a chance for ladies in technology to get together, enjoy some nice food and drinks, and have fun meeting other women in their field.
• 13th Oct 08:00 / BIG IDEAS Showcase 2009 / Croke Park, Dublin, free - The event is being organised by Enterprise Ireland’s Research & Innovation Business Unit and will showcase the commercial opportunities emerging from Ireland’s Higher Education Institutes in the areas of: Life Science & Food, ICT, Industrial Technologies
• 14th Oct - 20th Oct / Innovation Dublin - Innovation Dublin is a week-long festival of events highlighting and promoting innovation in the city. Check their website as they host some business seminars as well.
• 16th Oct 12:00 / FWIB 10th Celebratory Lunch & Networking Event / Roganstown Golf & Country Club, Swords, 35 EUR non-members - join marvellous celebration of women in business and networking in Fingal
• 20th Oct 19:00 / ALT.NET / Seagrass - talk about introduction to Python and possibly talk about DB
• 20th Oct 19:00 / WebsiteSpark Lunch with TechLudd / Guiness Storehouse - Come along and meet new people, and make new contacts and have some fun too. The BizSpark and WebsiteSpark programs are run by Microsoft to help Startup companies with support, technology and networks.
• 21th Oct 09:00 / IBM Storage - Doing More for Less / Conrad Hotel, D2 - The half day event will provide you with the details and relevant information that will help you to develop plans to to reduce your storage costs and use saved budget for other business critical elements of your infrastructure.
• 29th Oct 10:30 / Open Coffee Naas / venue tbc - an informal event for business people to get together and chat about anything and everything.
• 29th Oct 19:00 / Connector BTW Halloween party / venue tbc - connect with other businesses, usually includes free drinks and maybe some food.

I might be adding few later on, so keep an eye on the list.

Here is some interesting links I collected over this month.

If you like fitness and want to try to do it in army type - check out this website. They have sessions all over Dublin.

Dublin City Enterprise board opened another networking program - Creative D. Interesting, but is it really different Link! and Trading Post?

National Digital Research centre is calling for business proposals. Up to 100% funding available.

I finally signed up for eFax. It’s free fax first month and costs around 10 EUR / month later. I also checked prices for fax machines, but they cost from 70 EUR and they don’t send you e-mail copy.

Check out this really great post of how to deal with late payments from customers.

Two awards is now open - Ulster Bank Business Achievers Award , Digital Media Awards (entry costs 130 EUR) and Golden Spiders 2009 (entry costs 150 EUR).

If you are ever interested about legal things you should be doing in your company, read Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement website. They can answer to all questions - such as how often should you be holding board meetings and what documents should be publicly accessible in your registered address.

I was very, very surprised that I started to get DM and replies from my followers that everything I did on game was posted on my twitter feed. I was spamming all my followers with posts like :

“@gita_m has just done a job in Drug Deal in #MobsterWorld http://bit.ly/A9N4Yabout 20 hours ago from Mobster World”

And this feed was really, really long… So then I decided not to play this game any more.

Today I received DM from few people saying that this Mobster World is direct messaging all my contacts and asking them to join my Mafia family. I went into MobsterWorld again and there wasn’t anything telling me how can I stop it. Even “Contact Us” lead to the gmail e-mail that got no response.

Finally with help from my twitter fellows (special thanks to @brenstrong @antgalvin) I found that in Settings > Connections tab you can “Revoke” application access to my account. Thanks god its gone for good! Now I should do the same on facebook as I did accepted some gifts from friend of mine there and it might be spamming my friends

So the bottom line:

Please ignore all DM I sent to you and don’t play this game! You gonna loose all your followers.

If you see anyone else “playing” this game then tell them its not worth it.

Vodofone presented new application store in conference (similar to iPhone app store). And a very nice thing happened - I won phone with Vodofone app store. My current phone battery ends after 2h, I was just desperate to get new one (I’m so lucky!). I will be receiving it today and might as well take some photo and put it up on my blog.

I have been very busy whole last month, delivering projects, stressing and preparing marketing materials. And I missed summer sun this year too. Maybe I gonna go for vacation in winter?

Here is some photos from epicenter. I wanted to put up more, but all other were blurry (I should win new camera too).