Dylan Collins of Jolt Games crystallizes my views on what needs to be done in Ireland with startups in the Irish Independent today,
Collins argues passionately about why Ireland needs to be providing greater support for its young technology entrepreneurs. "If Ireland wants to achieve this knowledge economy it should be prepared to invest at low seed levels.
"If Enterprise Ireland was to make 200 or 300 grants available every year at €50,000 a pop for entrepreneurs to build an online product and go to market. For €50,000, you can get three or four guys in a room for three or four months and they will build a product and go to market. If we had 300 of these groups every year, you would create a digital ecosystem.
"In the US, groups like Y Combinator are funding businesses at low levels and, in Europe, The Founders Fund is doing this.
"There are venture capitalists in the US waiting to bet on young businesses. It’s remarkable this hasn’t happened in Ireland yet. We should be supporting our young right now, instead of scaring them to death.
"For €10m a year, you could have 200 companies a year and 5pc of them could emerge as Ireland’s answer to Microsoft or Nokia," says Collins.
Grainne Tallon, Apr 15 03:51 pm:Dublin Business Innovation Centre is running a Two Day Marketing Workshop specifically aimed at owner/managers of small enterprises like yours. The workshop will take place on 24th & 25th April 2009 in the Guinness Enterprise Centre, Taylor’s Lane, Dublin 8 (see Flyer attached).
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
Early stage Entrepreneurs with an existing or near completed Business Plan, seeking information on Marketing and Marketing Plans.
Entrepreneurs with an existing Business Plan, requiring Marketing expertise to complete or strengthen the Marketing section of their plan.
The subjects are both topical and necessary to empower you with the knowledge needed to manage your marketing programme more efficiently. The Programme will enable you to understand and implement the Marketing Plan. The interactive hands-on workshop will cover modules in Marketing: Market Research, Market Analysis, SWOT, Brand Building, Optimizing Performance. Each module will be based on interactive activities using a practical approach, with participants performing tasks to complete each module. Lunch included each day. Participants who complete the course will receive a rebate of €100 plus a copy of the Software used in this workshop.
To reserve your place please contact me in Dublin Business Innovation Centre on 6713111 or e-mail me at info@dbic.ie.
I have justed added the complete list of Enterprise Ireland HPSUs to the Irish Startups Search Engine. Nip on over there and see if you can find yourself.
I thought it would be useful to document how I configure the http://Startup-Ireland.org blog as a useful guide to other businesses who are setting up a web presence.
Register your domain name. I use GoDaddy because its cheap, but its not everyones favourite registrar.
Find a hosting company, this blog is hosted on webfaction.com (I need some stuff that only webfaction supply) but normally I would recommend blacknight.com.
Point your DNS name at the host you have purchased, you will need access to advanced DNS functionality for this. Get a geek to help you if you get stuck here.
Install some blogging software. I’m a dyed in the wool wordpress guy. Both Blacknight and Webfaction have auto installers for wordpress which makes configuration very straightforward. The rest of this guide is specific to wordpress.
Setup yourself as a user on the blogging software so your posts don’t appear under the user “admin”, this is a classic rookie mistake.
Change the title and other settings to customise your blog to yourself .
Pick a nice theme. Thre are plenty to choose from.
Enable akismet the wordpress spam protector. For this you will need to register at wordpress.com and get a key.
Burn your feed. This meana delivering your RSS feed through the feedburner interface. This will allow you to track your readers anc collect lots of other useful information about your blog. This requires two steps. First you should install the Wordpress Feedburner plugin. Then burn your feed and use the output to configure the plugin.
Add the subscribe to comments plugin. This makes commenting more interactive and promotes better discussion on posts by sending all comments to all commenting participants.
