The prize of €10,000 for Best Investment Proposal went to Kinesense last Thursday. Another great start up from Ireland that plans to go globally.

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.

I’m back to event list! But before you scroll down, I wanted to tell you that I found 2 really good examples of social marketing. Check out Simon’s Cat and TheFunTheory. You will understand what I’m talking about when you see it.

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…

Thanks for everyone reading my news post about Mobster social worm. It got over 1300 hits. Really appreciated.

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.

You can see a lot of information on web about recession and how to fight with it. Yesterdays Business Advice Show supported by Bank of Ireland was everything about stopping to look down (because of recession) and start to do something with your business. I completely agree with everyone who said that January was the biggest peak of recession. People was so afraid that they actually didn’t even went out of their offices. It started to pick up on February and I’m amazed how much people actually attended this event.

I therefor regret a lot that I didn’t came there with my stand. So much people starting their own businesses and expanding them – they would need to do something with web. They would have some great ideas of expending over it. Well, I was rather unfortunate to not thinking through this beforehand.

Event was part of the Enterprise week and as most of them took part in Stillorgan Park Hotel. My benefit from the event:

• 21 business cards, 2 leads, 10 existing contacts
• 2 free tickets on business coaching event next week
• Information about:
  • Patent search & registration
  • Selling Services in Northern Ireland
  • SFA, IIA, ISME, Enterprise Boards joining, networking, events
  • Investment for Redundant people who are starting business
  • Business Coaches
  • Translations
  • Online Banking (event was organised by BoI)
  • Solicitors, Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement
  • Franchising
  • Accounting software
  • Brochures about Managing Business Finances from Enterprise boards & ROS
  • Brochure about Marketing business

We heard great presentations from both Krishna De (marketing specialist) and Gavin Duffy (from “Dragons Den”) about actually starting to do something not just feeling depressing.

Krishna De presentation

Have you heard of Harry Potter site launching before? I keep hearing it on every networking event related to marketing. It seems that it was such a great success that people keep babbling about it. The marketing person of the site decided to tell only 7 people about site they are going to launch. Those 7 people were a big influencers in their area. They were all invited on the website on midnight for a talk. It made World Wide Rave after. Everyone blogged about it and they got enormous popularity in very short time and with a low cost budget.

So how do we find our customers in this recession scenario? First we talk with our existing / old customers and ask what they have been going through. What are those decisions they have to make now? Creating survey over Google Docs doesn’t cost us anything. Why not to see what our customers are doing? Second we look at your concurrents and analyse how they are trying to target customers.

After creating marketing plan you have to do it. Every day think – what have I done today for my business marketing? And even if it is small step, it will move forward your plan.

Think about how to make marketing more engaging. How to get people come back to you? Promising them free quote, documents or prizes? Make your site interactive. Make your business card interactive. Make people talk about you and keep in touch with them.

Gavin Duffys presentation

He was one of the “Dragon’s Den” dragons, so he kept talking about business, but it was so funny. For example, he talked about applications that didn’t went through. One farmer called them and said that he invented rat catcher, because you are always about 3m from some rat. And those rats, they have electrical charge, so when you take them in hand you can be hit by electricity. The “rat catcher” was actually a land mine. Dogs and cats can walk over it, humans can walk over it and there isn’t a problem. But if rat go over it, it goes boom. Hilarious.

Recession is father of innovation. For those who live through recession are more likely to grow multinational that those who don’t. However, setting up business might be very, very lonely. You are alone with all those problems which you have no clue how to solve. This is where enterprise boards and networking is a great help for everyone starting up.

Apparently “Dragon’s Den” might start second season from September or October. So if you are interested go online and try to apply for it. And remember – that investors do not invest in business, they invest on people.

Awards

BoI together with enterprise boards were giving away 5000eur in cash and 5000eur in mentoring & training to one of the applications for Bright Ideas Challenge. There were 4 of them. Each had great idea, very nice business plan and future growth planned.

• Asimil8 is an e-learning venture that provides immerse education for languages and other subjects through virtual world and gaming technology. I was amazed by they idea. It might be quite similar to the MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft but with learning purposes
• iFoods owns and operates the website lookandtaste.com. The website features over 230 professionally produced video recipes raging from scrambled eggs to the daunting soufflé. I actually have to check that website out. It looked very tasty.
• Trezur is an online music recommendations service. It provides listeners with a widely distributed mechanism to find new music. Its recommendation engine combines the best of people-generated and automated musicology analysis to provide listeners with relevant recommendations
• Vellocity Couriers provides an environmentally friendly bicycle courier service within Dublin’s city center. Using specially designed cargo bikes, it carries small to medium loads more quickly, cheaply and with no emissions.

Asimil8 won the first prize, but I didn’t got enough time to take picture. Congratulations!

Would I go to this event next year? Definitely, with my own stand!

I’m absolutely amazed how busy Locle is this year. Less than a year ago Locle won Eircom Labs Web Innovation Competition and ever since you can hear about them just about everywhere.

Their website got launched in two versions in October – eircom.locle.com and www.locle.com . At the end of February as part of OSLO (Open Sharing of Location Objects) alliance Locle appeared in news announcing “an agreement to enable their 30 million users to share location information and interact between networks, which until now has not been possible across different social networks”.

And now they won 10k in HotHouse Program! See photos on my new Pix.ie account

Update few days later:

• Locle application can be bought through iTunes store now
• Eircom Labs are now open for 2009 nominations

The IIA Net Visionary Awards 2009 will be held on Thursday 21st May in the Crowne Plaza, Dublin Northwood, following the IIA National Congress. Awards is always good way of promoting you and your business. I must check out categories (there is 15 of them) and decide whom I should nominate from our clients. We will go for “Web Developer Excellence” this year so don’t forget to vote for us!

Dates for your diary:

23 February 2009 – Nominations Open
27 March 2009 – Nominations Close
9 April 2009 – Judging complete
13 April 2009 – Voting Opens
1 May 2009 – Voting Closes
21 May 2009 – Net Visionary Awards – Winners Announced

So on Saturday evening I decided to go to the Irish Web Awards (IWA). It was in Radisson SAS and the guy who wrote directions “near Dublin castle” made me quite mad. All the roads around that Radisson is one way so it took us half hour to find where it was and where to stop.

My second worry was about the clothes (women always worry about clothes too much). After Inspired IT Awards I was a bit worried going to another awards in only jeans. Well, my worries passed away as I saw those 5 guys with the red wigs standing in the front entry.

Even knowing that it is Ireland, I thought we might be late. Yeah, we didn’t get free drinks for 1,5 hour, but only 0,5 hour free. Crowd was amazing and of course there was only like 1/5 women. I found a good way to meet people. I came to person and said like “Hi, I think I know you from Twitter, you said you will come”. And then they say like “yes” or “no” and we keep talking.

Award ceremony should have started at 9pm, but people were too busy with free drinks so it actually started later. Rick O’Shea was the person who grow beard to make give awards in IWA. And he made ceremony so funny that people didn’t even care who was nominated and who won, they just kept yelling, applauding and giving out comments. It was most fun event I have been in Ireland.

There was 22 awards in total (including Grand Prix) and you can review them HERE. I’m too lazy to comment for all of them, however I want to mention quite a few which made impression on me in some kind of way.

First award was Best Online Publication and it was won by Irish Times. They didn’t came to IWA so Rick made a funny comment that he doesn’t care if that award ends in someones closet by the end of the evening.

Best Radio website award went to Phantom FM. And I really, really love this radio so cheers for them.

Best Podcaster was Playlist Mix. I really wanted Mumcentric to win you know. At least them I knew…

Best Technology Site. Silicon Republic won this one and they was shortlisted for two categories. Suits them well.

Best New Web Application/Service was won by Pool Daddy. One of friends of mine works there so cheers for them!

Best Goverment Website gave me complete laugh. The first page design with deer and name Aras Kids made it a great joke for rest of the evening.

Well… and then it came to Best Council Website and presentation disappeared. Windows started with some “low battery” error and public went insane with cheers. Rick asked some from the red wigs to come in front and make a dance. He did it pretty well, I’m sure there is a lot of photos everywhere now.

Best eCommerce / Services Website was won by Spicendipity. I often see girl owning it in IBW so I’m glad about her.

Best Practise was won by Pix.ie and Most Beautiful Website was won by Twitterfone. No news here.

And our companies website AgileTech actually was short-listed for Most Acessible Website. But award was given to Kanchi.

The Best Forum website and Grand Prix went to boards.ie
There was actually two people in the room who never opened it. I secretly actually wanted IBW forum to win. But from other side I wanted to see CuLT in live as he is developer for boards.ie and anime forums.

So that’s about it. Photos should be in Flickr, Pix.ie (I couldn’t find in Pix.ie) and Twitter. Just search for IWA08. I didn’t took my camera unfortunately as it was full with photos from ZOO (I went there in the same day). However I took few pictures with the cheapest Vodofone phone in Ireland. If you can stand them, you can look at them:

Yesterday Inspired IT Awards took place in the Mansion House. Our company was invited as we got short-listed for “SME Project of the Year Award”. Venue was completely terrific with star-light on ceilings, colorful lights all over place and professional staff. We got complimentary wine and amazing food.

Thought we didn’t win award, I’m happy to be short-listed. Inspired IT Award 2008 went to AIB for Olympus programme.

Here is some pictures:

Would you want to note your business for award and get some publicity? Do you know what awards are available there and which ones you can apply for?

As a year comes to the end there is more and more awards coming around the corner. Even this week there is to of them – Inspired IT Awards and Irish Web Awards.

If you didn’t had time to apply for those there is still few left and you can try others next year.

So here is small list for me and you just to note down awards in IT and business in Ireland. If you know some more – that’s great, add it as comment! I would love to extend my list to keep track of them!

IT Awards

• Net Visionary Awards powered by Irish Internet Association
• Irish Web Awards sponsored by Movie Star
• Inspired IT Awards sponsored by companies like Dell, SAS, HP etc.
• Golden Spider Awards sponsored by Eircom, Arekibo and Business and Finance journal
• Digital Media Awards sponsored by Ashville Media Awards
• ICT Excellence Awards sponsored by lenovo

Business Awards

• SFA Small firms business Awards (it is now open)
• Business Achievers Awards sponsored by Ulster Bank (it is now open)
• Women Mean Business Awards sponsored by DCEB (once per year in summer)
• DCEB Female Entrepreneur Awards sponsored by DCEB as well (it is now open)
• Irish Women in Business Conference has few awards organised by people in Irish Women in Business Forum

I’m all exited over tomorrows Inspired IT Awards Gala Dinner 2008. It is very official black tie evening till late at night. I really hope I will get some award and I’m happy that we got short-listed. I went shopping today and bought the best coat in my life. I haven’t been shopping for ages as I’m always so busy with business stuff. Awards was a good excuse to buy something.

Wish me luck tomorrow and I will post some photos of evening later.