Copacetic

I used to slag my buddy Caelen King about the crappy name he chose for his medical tourism search engine RevaHealth.com. Well, he bit the bullet recently and changed the name to the much better whatclinic.com. He also shared some great stats with me,

• Whatclinic.com now has over half a million visitors a month up from 190,000 at the start of the year
• Every day 800 people submit email inquiries to clinics on our site an an additional 900 people call clinics on our site.
• The main treatment categories being looked for are; dental, doctors  plastic and beauty
• The average treatment value being looked for €2,000
• We do business in 20 different countries
• UK is now our strongest market and is growing exceptionally well

Whatclinic.com doesn’t just do overseas, it covers Ireland. For instance here are searches for Dublin and Newry.

With Anglo just having dropped another 8.2bn this quarter its great to see a business thriving amidst all the misery and woe.

Here’s a slideshare of Caelen that shows how they go about there business.

You’re an Entrepreneur, right? You want to know how to do your business right? Right?

Ok, well get your ass over to the Enterprise Ireland and apply for the iGAP program. I attended this six month program last year and it was quite simply the best enterpreneur training I have ever done and you are talking to a guy who has been on a lot of training programs in the past few years.

Why is is so great? Well its designed to help people build online businesses. It has and outstanding posse of trainers including Ed Bussey (COO of Zyb), Jonathan Dillon (ex M&A at Yahoo), Sean Ellis (Marketing at Logmein, Drobox and Uproar Games), Oren Michels (CEO at Mashery) and a host of local experts.

The whole program is run by Brian Caulfield who may be the single most successful serial entrepreneur of our generation.

You couldn’t pay these guys to give you 30 minutes of their time normally, but each one of them has offered up several days of his time to give an oversight of their particular area of expertise.

You will leave iGAP with a killer pitch deck and the ability to deliver it, a believeable business model and customer acquisition plan and the knowledge that it has all be vetted and reviewed by some of the best in the business.

You have got to have rocks in your head the size of Gibraltar not to apply today. Go, now!

I highly recommend that anyone who cares about the irish economy to read Morgan Kelly‘s “The Irish Credit Bubble” (pdf link).

You need to blow past the economic formula in the first few pages and get into the meat of the analysis. In summary, in 2009 we opened our main parachute and a grand piano popped out in its place. In 2010 we will open the reserve ‘chute to find an anchor attached.

Some nice quotes:

“The destruction of the Irish entrepreneurial class may prove one of the most enduring and costly consequences of the property bubble”

“The mis-management of Irish financial institutions was amplified by the presence of a genuinely rogue bank, Anglo Irish”

“Since the seventeenth century, financial innovation has consisted in banks finding new ways to lose money”

“However, the question remains of why, given that Ireland’s bankers were probably no more reckless, its regulators no more spineless, and its politicians no more clueless than their counterparts elsewhere, how did Ireland come to have a far larger credit boom than other wealthy economies, with the exception of Iceland?”

“The issue therefore is not whether the Irish bank bailout will restore the Irish banks so that they can function as independent commercial entities: it cannot. Rather it is whether the Irish government’s commitments to bank bond holders when added to its existing spending commitments, will overwhelm the fiscal capacity of the Irish state, forcing outside entities such as the IMF and EU to intervene and impose a resolution on the Irish banking system”

Read it and weep.

From the National Digital Research Centre website:

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

The NDRC is currently calling for project proposals under three newly launched programmes:

1. Entrepreneurial Internships Programme

2. CTR Feasibility Programme

3. Collaborative Translational Research Programme

1. Entrepreneurial Internships: This programme is designed to develop small scale projects with aspiring entrepreneurs to produce commercially focused applications in the web and mobile space. This investment programme is an avenue for individuals or small teams with links to a third level institution to pursue potential opportunities from idea to application in a supportive environment and among a set of peers. For more information about our Entrepreneurial Internship programme visit this page.

2. CTR Feasibility projects: We are investing in a programme to develop projects with established academics and companies that are potential collaborative translational research projects, but would benefit from upfront problem-solution and market validation. The focus of projects within the programme will be in the areas of health, education, entertainment and the environment. For more information about our CTR Feasibility programme visit this page.

3. Collaborative Translational Research projects: Having built a portfolio of collaborative translational research projects, the National Digital Research Centre is embarking on a second investment phase in further collaborative translational research.  As such, the NDRC is seeking to facilitate further collaborations between established academics and industry partners to develop commercially-focused research projects in the application areas of health, education, entertainment and the environment.

In this specific call, the NDRC is particularly interested in receiving proposals for environmental technologies – specifically targeted at energy efficiency as distinct from green energy generation – in a digital context. We are not, however, excluding good ideas in other digital application areas. For more information about our Collaborative Translational Research programme visit this page.

To register and access online forms for all of these programmes visit this page.

I attended TechCrunch 50 this year alongside my business partner Eamon Leonard and another presenting company, VidSchool which Sean Fee of Ifoods/LookandTaste fame is involved in.

Pat Phelan originally intended to join and we booked a Monster House on Fillmore and Fulton. Pat (the consummate deal maker) had to pull out at the last moment which left Eamon and I (of CloudSplit) sharing this mansion with Paul, Moneesh and Sean of VidSchool.

As failed entrants to the onstage event we had both been offered slots in the DemoPit. You get one day to showcase your company in a separate area from the stage through which the attendees have to pass to get to the auditorium. We chose Tuesday (as opposed to Monday) this gave us a chance  to attend on Monday and suss the place our prior to our full day.

Tuesday duly arrived and we headed down to the show. Its a brutal schedule with the show opening at 7.00am and running until 7.00pm the following evening. There is lots of advice to absorb on how best to pitch at TC50, but we followed some simple rules,

• Bring a pull up stand and put your message and pitch all in the top third. Nobody can see below this point. Many of the TC50 companies only used the default table logo provided by TC50. I found myself ignoring companies when I could not discern what the offering was.
• We brought along some tic-tacs that happened to be in the company colours. I don’t thing they got people to come up to our stand but being able to give something to people who listened did leave the whole presenting transaction with a nice soft end.
• You need two people. Otherwise food breaks/toilet visits leave the stand unmanned. There is always action in the DemoPit area so someone needs to be on stand at all time.
• Be prepared to get you pitch away in a few minutes

The Good

We went looking for validation of the CloudSplit offering and received that whole heartedly. We met key influencers at the investor, partner and customer level. This level of exposure to people WHO-REALLY-KNOW the software sector was invaluable.

Just the opportunity to present 200 times or more to genuinely insightful individuals who could really grasp what we were doing was a fantastic education. We now have a crystal clear vision of what we need to do in V1.0 and a goto market strategy honed by hours of feedback.

It also helped that the universal feedback was that CloudSplit was genuinely breaking new ground in a valuable and emerging market.

I would definitely target and time the launch of any new company so that it aligned with TC50.

The Bad

The DemoPit works as a competition in which the conference attendees get chips which they donate to the most interesting projects. The two with the most chips on each day get to present the product on stage. Its a nice idea but is open to all sorts of gaming ranging from booth hotties simply trading on their looks and accosting people for chips without pitching to wholesale buying of chips. Basically you can forget getting on stage on merit alone.

I can’t fix the booth hottie problem but it should be easy enough to fix the chip buying problem by making the containers piggy banks rather than jars so that once chips are donated they can’t be retrieved to be resold.

I also think there would be more liquidity in the market if the attending companies were compelled to donate their chips to other companies rather then bunging them into their own jar. This could be achieved by only giving chips to DemoPit companies on the day they are *not* presenting.

On plus side we got our first chip quite early on from Mark Kvamme of Sequoia so we really did care too much about winning or losing the competition after that piece of validation.

The Ugly

The awards ceremony was a shambolic disgrace. Mike Arrington threw all his toys out of the pram and stormed of stage. Why ? Who cares. It was an insult to the winners of the awards and made Arrington the story instead of the winners. It soured the whole event for me.

If I was Mike I’d be keeping a pretty low profile as well.

New Technologies, Platforms and Delivery Modes presented by Joe Drumgoole, CEO of Cloudsplit.com from Path Pacific on Vimeo.

We (Eamon, Sean, Moneesh, Paul) are all back at base Fillmore after a punishing 7 to 7 session on the DemoPit. Unlike normal conferences there is no let up at TC50 so ourselves and VidSchool were cracking our jawbones all day long.

Exhausting but very rewarding work. Both companies recieved huge validation for their offerings and like most SV events I have attended our calendars are full for the next few days.

The straight juice, there is no better place to launch a tech company.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the CRO database in the past few weeks, so I wrote this python script called croscraper.py to do a quick lookup on companies.

Usage is:

backus:~/Documents/workspace/CloudSplit/src/croscrape jpd$ python croscraper.py -h
Usage: croscraper.py <list of files>

Options:
 --version             show program's version number and exit
 -h, --help            show this help message and exit
 -c COMPANY, --company=COMPANY
 return information on company named <company>
 -d, --debug           turn on debugging
backus:~/Documents/workspace/CloudSplit/src/croscrape jpd$

To look up a specific company name or part of a name try,

backus:~/Documents/workspace/CloudSplit/src/croscrape jpd$ python croscraper.py -c cloud
{'Number': '44950', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'BLUE CLOUD LIMITED', 'Address': '46, LOWER LEESON STREET, DUBLIN 2.  '}
{'Number': '332318', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'CLOUD 9 DESIGN LIMITED', 'Address': '21 CLOISTER AVENUE BLACKROCK CO DUBLIN '}
{'Number': '102707', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'CLOUD DANCER LIMITED', 'Address': '18, MERRION SQUARE, DUBLIN 2.  '}
{'Number': '&', 'Type': '361040', 'Name': 'CLOUD ELECTRICAL ', 'Address': ' COMMUNICATION SERVICES LIMITED'}
{'Number': '472475', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'CLOUD IGNITE LIMITED', 'Address': 'BAYVIEW HOUSE 49 NORTH STRAND ROAD DUBLIN 3 '}
{'Number': '466027', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'THE CLOUD NETWORKS (IRELAND) LIMITED', 'Address': "C/O O'MAHONY DONNELLY 10 MCCURTAIN HILL CLONAKILTY CO CORK"}
{'Number': '328355', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'CLOUD NINE BEDS LIMITED', 'Address': 'Unit T1 Coolmine Industrial Estate Clonsilla Road Dublin 15'}
{'Number': '124102', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'CLOUD NINE HAIRLINE (SALES) LIMITED', 'Address': 'BALLYMOUNT ROAD, DUBLIN 12.  '}
{'Number': '55964', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'CLOUD NINE PROMOTIONS LIMITED', 'Address': '********NO ADDRESS DETAILS******* ********NO ADDRESS DETAILS******* ********NO ADDRESS DETAILS******* ********NO ADDRESS DETAILS*******'}
{'Number': '311145', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'DILL CLOUD LIMITED', 'Address': '6 RICHMOND ROAD DRUMCONDRA DUBLIN 3 '}
{'Number': '316954', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'MUSHROOM CLOUD PRODUCTIONS LIMITED', 'Address': '3RD FLOOR WESTLAND SQUARE DUBLIN 2 '}
{'Number': '44954', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'RED CLOUD LIMITED', 'Address': '6, CAVENDISH ROW, DUBLIN.  '}
{'Number': '433681', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'ROLLIN CLOUD LIMITED', 'Address': '44 BELGRAVE SQUARE WEST RATHMINES DUBLIN 6 '}
{'Number': '175728', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'SOLAR CLOUD LIMITED', 'Address': '38, ENNAFORT ROAD, RAHENY, DUBLIN 5. '}
backus:~/Documents/workspace/CloudSplit/src/croscrape jpd$

Gee look at all those cloud companies

It is left as an exercise to the reader to port the program to Google App Engine or get more data out of the CRO. I may do some more work on this in the future.

You will need Python installed to run this program. It has only been tested on a Mac.

Myself and Eamon Leonard (with the gang from EchoLibre) have been cooking up a startup to capitalise on the huge growth in demand for Cloud Computing.

Our guess is that understanding the cost of the cloud is going to exercise people greatly in the future and CLoudSplit has been created to address that need.

CloudSplit will,

• Track your cloud spend in real time
• Give you a clear understanding of what you are spending and where
• Send you alerts if your spending exceeds a threshold you define
• Initiate a stoploss to cut off your cloud spend should you exceed your stop loss threshold

We plan to expand on these services in the future and are targeting users of Infrastructure as a Service products such as Amazon and Azure. So if you use those services and you want to understand your costs swing on over to CloudSplit.com and register your interest.

You can also follow us on twitter.

Chris Horn was looking for information on technology company exits since 2000. I had some data and with the help of some twitter buddies I grabbed a bunch of others last night.

Some of the numbers are in Euros (very few) and some exits are undisclosed so we can say with some degree of certainty that the the total exit values are,

1.6 billion dollars

That sounds like a lot of money (well it used to until our developers and banks blew 90bn) but we need to factor in a few other things get a proper understanding of whether this represents a real return on investment.

• How much was invested (we could probably total EI and IVCA figures to get this number)
• How much employment was generated (this represents tax income to the exchequer and economic activity)
• How many are still employing people in Ireland today

Only when we have this data will we understand the true meaning of the 1.6bn USD.

Incidentally most of the data was retrieved from the excellent Thomas Crosbie Holdings Archives. I recommend site specific searching of this archive use the google site directive. For example to find stuff on Iona,

site:http://archives.tcm.ie/ iona

I have been tagging and information I find with the delicious.com tag #irishexits. Can I suggest anyone else looking do the same.