For many small companies, this approach could be an attractive way of generating much-needed revenue. You can learn more about licensing and the overall service at the IRC website . I’ve found the E.I. tech transfer consultants to be very helpful.

Eddie Hobbs opened the proceedings and was very entertaining, as always.

It seemed strange somehow to see people like Hugh MacLeod, Marc Canter and Salim Ismail, whose blogs I read almost daily, presenting in a standard conference format. It also confirmed for me the depth, scope and quality of writing that can be found in blogs as against any other publishing or delivery medium. Hugh seemed a bit nervous or perhaps was just out of his usual context; he was at his best answering questions from the audience. Marc Canter was very entertaining and could have done with a longer time slot.
Salim gave an excellent overview of his work with start-ups; good advice about keeping development costs down; using marketing and PR; performance-driven compensation for founders and key employees; and speed-to-market. Salim could have handled a entire conference stream by himself. Tom Raftery has posted information on the upcoming BarCamp Southeast event on Salim’s latest venture, Confabb - built for almost nothing with usage skyrocketing!

Jeff Nolan, CEO of Teqlo, gave a very interesting talk on pricing and ROI for online businesses. I hope copies of this, and the other presentations, will become available.
Of the home-grown presenters, Conor Kenny talked about creating his family’s online book-selling business, Tony Kenny (no relation, I assume?) gave an excellent presentation on the benefits and issues around his experiences with open-source software in the public service. Eamonn Fallon gave a great presentation on building daft.ie.

Congratulations to all at it@cork for a very worthwhile event.

Aiming for Saturday, January 20. ‘07

Contact me if you are interested in attending.

“Structure101 v2 goes beta today. With it you can walk through the code-base in slices from the class-level, to the package-level and up through the design levels, spotting tangles and seeing how far they have spread.”

I like Chris’ analogy of using the product to do a CAT scan on your code base.

What to you think?

Zinadoo allows users to build free mobile websites and to use these with a range of text messaging services. They are already planning to trial the system in China by the end of 2006. More on this next week when the wraps are finally off.
Good luck to Helene and the Zinadoo team.

BarCamp Ireland is finally going ahead on September 30 and looks like being a super event.

Sadly, I’ll have to settle for the photos and podcasts.

In a previous post I mentioned the FEIW project running at WIT and now Enterprise Ireland have announced a major conference: Female Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century. It has a impressive line-up of speakers, including Louise Grubb, CEO of Nutriscience, a Waterford-based company and an alumnus of the South East Enterprise Platform Programme (SEEPP). The conference appears to focused at the policy level and should help to raise awareness of the broader issues.

It takes place at E.I’s headquarter’s in Glasnevin on September 26 and the conference brochure and registration form is available on the Enterprise Ireland website.

The FEIW project, which is run jointly by WIT’s Centre for Entrepreneurship and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth , is putting together a very interesting programme for female entrepreneurs. Its well-recognised that women are less likely to start businesses and this project aims to address the issues they face through a unique training programe for a group of 20 female entrepreneurs.
It gets underway on September 11 and I’ll be following its progress here.

The resolution on the hybrid (road over satellite image) and the satellite versions is a bit vague but can only get better. Very neat - no more problems with giving driving directions.