Copacetic

Things you need to know about Irish VCs:

• Nobody has made out like a bandit yet. This biggest IT success in this generation, Iona didn’t take a penny from Irish VC companies, worst luck.
• They are nervous of being a leader in any market and will look for preliminary validation in UK, Europe and the US.
• They tend not to micro-invest (amounts below €100,000) and they won’t make you a single round company (i.e. invest €5,000,000 or more in the first round). The micro-investment limit is a function of the size of the market and the macro-investment is a function of my first point
• They pretty much know as much about the US investment market as you and me (which is to say, not much)
• They aren’t all bastards, thieves or arseholes (insert favourite invective here). They mostly want success just like you. There are some bastards in there though, just like any business. Caveat emptor
• They are not your business partners, they are shareholders, its different
• They are trade sale specialists and very few have any experience of an IPO. If you pitch that as an exit expect raised eyebrows at the very least
• Expect due diligence to take at least three months and often six. Expect the detail of the process to be both annoying and invasive, learn to live with it
• The decision to invest will not be based on your 30 page business plan, although the decision not to invest maybe
• No serious investor attend First Tuesday
• A personal introduction from a shared colleague beats a royal flush

A pretty good list of the Irish VCs can be found on the Irish Venture Capital Association Website.

So there I am installing Microsoft Office for Mac. Nice installation program, couple of forms, no sweat. Then you punch in the product ID and the installer pops a dialog with a product support ID that you are supposed to keep in case of problems. But the dopey developer forget to set the text to be selectable so you can’t cut and paste the ID anywhere sensible.

Dumb and Dumber…..

I’ve just started playing with a tool from performancing.com that adds a cool little text editor (very Web 2.0) into FireFox to allow you to blog entries. Its got a better interface than Wordpress (I’m still on 1.5.2) and seems to have some support for del.icio.us tags. It also allows me to select from the predefined categories, which is where writely.com lets you down. Best of all its free.

Another good reason to delay migrating to flock.

These are the things I want from an Internet Bank and AIB doesn’t do this for me at the moment.

• See all my previous transactions for a least 6 months back on all my accounts
• Download my transactions in .csv format
• Issue and stop standing orders
• View all my standing orders from all accounts on one page
• View all my direct debits from all accounts on one page
• Email my personal banker to initiate bank transactions
• Request cheque books, PIN numbers
• Search my transaction history (I mean for feck sake, this is 2006!)
• Annotate each transaction with a note
• Use the back button (and it sure as hell isn’t AJAX causing this problem)

I should point out that while working at CR2 in 1998 we built all of these features into a product called BankWorld.

Anybody know if Rabobank does any of this? They have been banging on about their Internet Banking on the radio of late.

The pseudo-science of female beauty products is amazing to behold. Here are some of the more bonkers “active ingredients” I jotted down while waiting for a prescription in a pharmacy last night.

• Co-Resistium
• Liposomes
• Ceramides
• Adrenalyse
• Adenoxine
• Ubiquinone
• Retinol
• Phyto Flavone

This white paper contains a cracking comprehensive review of Open Source Content Management Systems. I have personal experience of Plone and MediaWiki and I can vouch for the accuracy of their analysis.

I read a fair few blogs. However on several of them there are topics I could care less about. For instance although I read Darren’s blog regularily, I couldn’t give a rats ass about his posts on the National Hockey league (sorry Darren). What I want is to be able to exclude his posts on the NHL based on the tags he sets for those entries.

Can you do that for me bloglines? Pretty Please?

HotHouse is a program designed to get early stage startups over the growing pains. My own company (Secantus) is part of HotHouse 10 and HotHouse 11 is currently looking for applicants.

This is a fantastic program that offers participants

• Superb training in all aspects of running a business (marketing, sales, finanace etc.)
• Free office space with broadband, phone and fax services
• A monthly stipend of €550

Finally it is the opportunity to share the experience of creating a new business with ten or more like minded individuals.

Full details are available on the Project Development Centre Website.

IF you like the idea of software as a service and remotely hosted CRM, but balk at salesforce.com’s pricing, you should take a look at a local solution from Irish hosting provider Blacknight. For €42a year (yes a year) it provides a complete CRM solution based on SugarCRM. That includes unlimited users and the ability to share your data with arbitrary customers/distributors etc.

A truely great piece of software combined with a great price, whats not to like?

Astute readers will have noted my chagrin at the iMac not supporting the wanky codec that my JVC Everio Video Camera supports (JVC carries some of the blame here).

Anyway it turns out there is a fantastic freeware program that will convert the everio .MOD files (and a bunch of other formats) to .MOV (i.e. quicktime) files. It needs some work to build it and some helper files that I built tonight. But it works a treat and grabs the audio and video correctly. I’ll play with it some more to make sure it doesn’t have any screwy problems. If you can’t wait the basic program is called ffmpegX. I’m putting together a package of the helper programs which should be ready tomorrow (I need to work out how to ftp up from an iMac).