• M50 Enterprise Platform program provides – free desk space for 1 year, training full-day twice monthly, end of the program pitch to investors, possibility to apply for EI Cord funding, different events over year. I just got on it for next year!
• EI Innovation voucher for €5,000. If you own or manage a small limited company with a company registration number and you have a business opportunity or problem that you want to explore, why not apply for an Innovation Voucher worth €5,000? One place you can use it is in Usability Lab.
• Studentfinance.ie – in case you want to get back in education, there is a lot of information how to get funding for that.
• Dublin Cycling actually costs only €10 for annual membership if you cycle less than 1/2 h every time. If I win over my fear of busses, I will return to cycling.
• Student Internships. If you have too much work and you need some help I think this program is brilliant. Thinking about it now.
• WiseStamp. Most amazing e-mail signatures you will get. Includes your latest blog post or twitter feed or links you need. Have to try it out.

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.

Ligo festival is about dressing up in traditional costumes, putting on flower crowns, singing and dancing traditional songs, making fireplaces and jumping over them, eating traditional cheese and drinking beer. I miss it very much since I first came to Ireland.

Here is some links you might find interesting.

Chrome Experiments is a very interesting project. I love just play around with it. And it works on other browsers too.

I love music on faq.ie and sometimes leave it in background. Almost as good as radio.

Friend of mine created new interesting project about discounts in grocery stores. It should be going good at recession, when everyone is searching for that. It’s name is Cheep Cheep.

If you don’t know something and what to learn it from experts in less than 5min – this site is for you. I actually spent too much time on it because it’s too interesting.

• 8th April 18:00 / Signature Speed Networking / Brooks Hotel, 59-62 Drury Street – 40 eur per person, very nice and quick business networking
• 9th April 19:00 / ALT.NET – Let’s discuss Domain-Driven Design / The Duke, off Grafton Street – free event for IT enthusiasts who want to make it better
• (In case you forgot – 12th April is Easter and 13th April is bank holiday)
• 14th April 19:00 / Webinar – Using Social Media to Attract More Customers / on the web, free event. I really love HubSpot webinars.
• 18th April / Digital Media Breakfast @ Galway /  It’s free but please register so we know how many are coming.
• 18th April 10:30 / Open Coffee Dublin / Taking place in new venue – Dakota
• 20th April 14:00 / it@cork Cloud Computing Event / The Cork International Airport Hotel  – 60 EUR for non-members
• 20th April 09:00 / Mini SeedCamp London – aims to connect the UK and Ireland’s thriving startup community, but the buck doesn’t stop there.
• 20th April 20:00 / Early Days of Computing in Ireland / you can watch it over web or go to 22 cycle road, Ballsbridge, D4
• 21st April 19:30 / Dublin Girl Geek Dinner / Herbstreet restaurant, Hannover Quay
• 23rd April 19:00 / Connector No.9 / free. With the economic downturn, there is a renewed interest in networking & business startups in Ireland.  Connector is here to help you get connected in the real world at face to face events.
• 23rd April / iPhone Developer days Dublin / Free event
• 24th April / iPhone Developer days Belfast / Free event
• 25th, 26th April / Silicon Ireland Brainstorm Weekend – launching first BrainStorm Weekend in Belfast. This event will enable would be entreprenuers, programmers, and developers to get involved to create a startup over a 2 day weekend. The startup will be equally owned by all involved.
• 25th April / BarCamp Belfast / University of Ulster, Belfast – there is 290 ppl going there up to date. Try out your first BarCamp, it is definetly worth it.
• 27th – 30th April / Digital Hub Lunchtime Seminars – a lot of intersting seminars you can go to at your lunchtime
• 29th April 10:00 / Marketing Event / The Digital Exchange Building – Free event for Marketing Managers, Owner Managers and anyone wishing to learn more about marketing their business.
• 29th April / Digital Tonic – Digital Media Networking / 3 Fade Street, Dublin 2 – Free of Charge
• 30th April – 1st May / Cambridge Wireless Conference
• 6th May / 121 Marketing First Wednesday Club – great way to meet fellow marketers or find way how to market your business
• 8th, 9th May / SLanguages Conference / Happening in Second Life game – even thought I’m not interested much in languages, it seems awesome for conference to happen over the game
• 21st, 22nd May / IIA Annual Congress & Awards / Early bird ticket can be bought till 17th of April, so don’t miss it

See also Venture Network events, which happens weekly around Dublin and outside it

Two new networking groups I found – Southside B2B networking and Venture Network. Heard quite nice reviews about second one

Awesome MMORPG game for primary kids – Club Penguin (my daughter really loves it)

Some interesting things in news about social media - Twitter and social media will be taught primary schools in UK & UK is planning to monitor social sites.

And for those who missed it – IQ Content are still giving away 10k EUR for best business plan.

This post is split in different sections. First it’s my review, then there are links to presentations, other bloggers, pictures and even video.

My review of FOWA Dublin

For those who want to see what exactly was happening review #fowadublin on twitter and see what people had been writing.

While a lot of people wasn’t happy with the event, I’m quite glad I got there. I got my ticket to Fowa in courtesy of http://IrishDev.com. Presentations was quite interesting and I met a lot of people interesting people.

Here is my notes from all the presentations. I hope you might find something interesting for you. I didn’t attended last two presentations (as I had to run away), but I heard they were quite impressive. I was unable to spot presentations over the net. Even thought they did promised they will put them out somewhere, I couldn’t find them.

1. “How to sell your web app” by Ryan Carson (organiser of event)

Ryan Carson sold two businesses already and now is building third one. Here is his tips on building business for selling.

• Use balsamiq.com for mockups
• Obsess over numbers (e.g. time user upgrades from free accounts to paid)
• IT projects have around 60-70% profit margin
• Use your own app every day
• Dont plan to get acquired
• Separate Google Analyitics account from company account
• Start the domain transfer early (as it takes months)
• You will have to pay around 30k for lawyers and accountants when selling company
• Do serious tax planning
• When sale takes place, you have to work 100% of your time for about 4+ months to make it successful

2. “Unconventional Web Apps” by Contrast

To be honest I was sure they won’t be able to go through their 200 presentation slides in those 30min, but they really did it and it was awesome, funny and valuable. While it’s kinda hard to put points over their presentation, I could say in general they were talking about how and when break the conventions in web applications. E.g. layout of the home page or signup process. Their ending statement was “Break the rules, question them and have fun.”

3. “Apps for All in a Web 2.0 World” by Robin Christopherson

Really great talk about problems in web applications for those with disabilities.

• Captcha is one of the greatest enemy for blind people. Often even if they have sound version, it is not good enough to understand
• A lot of pages become completely unusable after JavaScript is switched off. So you have to check that before releasing your app.
• Each map should have text version for it. E.g. Google maps have great example.
• A lot of videos auto start. If person opens page like that, he don’t hear text with voice reader any more and can’t stop the video.
• Flickering images is bad for people with Epilepsy
• Videos without any text explenations might be confusing or even scary
• Image alt text is very important and you have to keep it up to date if site changes
• Flash sites are almost unaccessible for people that can’t see
• You have to check navigation by rows and keys (not only mouse)
• See more information at http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/

4. “How to build amazing web apps – Lessons learned from building Twitter.com” by Blaine Cook

Blaine talked mostly about Natural Social Networks and real time updates. His belief is that we are still in stone age for social media networking and it still gonna grow. It’s kinda hard to explain what he was talking about, but he did mention OpenID, OpenSocial, webhooks.org and others. Try to look it up for more info.

5. “The future is Ruby w/o Rails” by Emma Persky

Emma told her about her experience with Rails and w/o them. She believes that every project has to use programming language or framework best suited for that application. Using always Ruby on Rails aren’t the best option.

6. “Yet another web app? Or a successful business?” by Morgan McKeagney, IQ Content

His talk about why few web apps are successful and few aren’t were really impressive. What makes anotomy of success is: product, team&personalities, value, punters, commercial-savvy, local to global. His example was great : there was two groups U2 and The Blades. While second had much better songs, singers and publicity, U2 got global. Why? Because they  had “Vital Financial Breakthrough”. At the end of the day it is always – which one makes more money?

7. “How to build desktop apps that help your web app succeed?” by Matthew Ogle, Last.fm

Matthew told about his experience of building and growing last.fm with using “scrobble” and attention data. He mentioned that it is very important to make application Open Sourced if it is using user data. New software will be launched soon by last.fm – Buffin

8. “Web application horror stories” by Simon Willsison, Freelance

This was my most favorite presentation. We all love to hear how big companies failed on security and how we can improve our own apps not to fail similar.

• XSS – never let inject JavaScript. Don’t let inject HTML or CSS either. (e.g. “sany is my hero” – myspace worm, UTF-7 hole in Google.)
• SQL injection – worst case scenario you can let people do
• CSRF. Protection would be adding the crumb, but you have to protect the crumb by all possibilities. For example, if you have XSS hole, you will have CSRF problems as well. (e.g. Digg allowed to enter script that diggs post. Gmail got filter hacked. ING got funds transfers proceeded.)
• Login CSRF – to avoid it, force user to sign up on trused account
• Clickjacking – new attack with invisible frames (e.g. Flickr had “Don’t click this” worm.). Possible solution would be frame busting, but it will still fail in case of Clicky Game (e.g. how fast you can click on buttons on the game?)
• Do protect Admin access! (e.g. MacRoom life had problems with someone writting that Steve Jobs is dead. Twitter had problems with teenagers hacking admin account.)

Few bad points I was unhappy about

First thing – the wireless was crap. Most of the attendies used either macbooks or iPhones and it was almost impossible to get connection.

Second thing – you had to buy drinks and food. For the price I paid for this event I expected at least get some free drinks or suggestions where to go eat (only sandwitches provided by bar). I heard Contract and IGOpeople both payed €200 for drinks for ppl at the bar. Great to hear that.

ANNOUNCING PRIZE (you can still apply for this)

Announcing IQ prize of €10,000

Slideshows and other info on presentations

Web Security Horror Stories Presentation

Web Security Horror Stories Notes

More info on Sun StartUp Workshop

Notes by Renate Valdes Olmos

How to build webb apps to succeed Notes

Apps for All in the Web 2.0 world Notes

Blog posts about FOWA Dublin

FOWA by Andy (quite unhappy review of the FOWA)

Fuck the Real World by Peter (about one of the last presentations)

Fuck the Real World prsentation review by Thomas Wittek

Unhappy FOWA review by Peter

FOWA Review by Dave Concannon (quite short and very nice review)

John Keys review of all talks

Lessons Learned from FOWA by Kabling

Great speakers, poorly organised by John Breslin

Photos from FOWA Dublin

Flickr FOWA Dublin tag pics

One pic of “Fuck the Real World” speaker

Another pic of “Fuck the Real World” speaker (ppl really loved the presentation)

Paul Seys photos on Flickr

Photo by blurredfocus.co.uk

Paul Seys TwitPic (the one in middle is organiser)

Last.fm presentator on Mobypicture

Fowa crowd on Mobypicture

Movie on after party

The Official FOWA wrap party will be taking place at The

Dandelion Club on March 6th 2009. See youtube

Few useful links for businesses & IT

Free Irish Fax number – great way if you are just starting your business

Updated List of Irish Marketing Comms Blog – if you are doing your own marketing

Few technical people might love U-Buntu Ireland Resources. The mailing list isn’t really spamming me and they have quite a few meetups.

Just something to read

10 Harsh Thruths About Corporation websites

How to become Happy Freelancer

Few out-of-work links

Our friends came over and were searching for best outlet shops in Dublin. While there were few, somebody suggested them to try out Kildare Village. Didn’t know about it before.

Though it’s past the Valentines I’m completely in love with these animated e-cards