Copacetic

Watch Al Gore at TED, he’s funny!

• Web 1.0 was about reading, Web 2.0 is about writing
• Web 1.0 was about companies, Web 2.0 is about communities
• Web 1.0 was about client-server, Web 2.0 is about peer to peer
• Web 1.0 was about HTML, Web 2.0 is about XML
• Web 1.0 was about home pages, Web 2.0 is about blogs
• Web 1.0 was about portals, Web 2.0 is about RSS
• Web 1.0 was about taxonomy, Web 2.0 is about tags
• Web 1.0 was about wires, Web 2.0 is about wireless
• Web 1.0 was about owning, Web 2.0 is about sharing
• Web 1.0 was about IPOs, Web 2.0 is about trade sales
• Web 1.0 was about Netscape, Web 2.0 is about Google
• Web 1.0 was about web forms, Web 2.0 is about web applications
• Web 1.0 was about screen scraping, Web 2.0 is about APIs
• Web 1.0 was about dialup, Web 2.0 is about broadband
• Web 1.0 was about hardware costs, Web 2.0 is about bandwidth costs

Enterprise Ireland has just circulated copies of the presentations made at the recent Web 2.0 conference at DCU.I’ve taken the liberty of converting these to HTML and providing them here.

• Judy Gibbons, Accel Partners,

• Web 2.0, The Virtuous Circle

• Digital Lifestyle Aggregators (Mark’s talk didn’t really have a title)

• Web 2.0, Key Factors for Success

• Web 2.0, The Investors Perspective

• Web 2.0, The Exits

In addition to the speakers the following Irish companies made presentations regarding their businesses.

• Sxoop - PXN8
• Infacta - A Technology Marketing Company
• Herbert Street Technologies - Encryption Technology for Business
• InnerWorkings - Briefing to Web 2.0 Ireland Conference
• Alatto - Mobile Search
• Tablane - Your Internet Research Tool
• Nooked -RSS Marketing Made Simple

Apologies if I got the ordering of the Irish companies wrong, but I an working from memory.

If any of the original authors would prefer not to have their content hosted here, drop me a line and I’ll remove it.

(Apologies for the weird indentation, wordpress voimits all over nested lists)

Myhome.ie an excellent example of a defensible business that doesn’t need patents. Its got the estate agents on the hook and the punters are following. Very difficult to compete against and even more difficult to dislodge. However if I was to start a myhome.ie clone tomorrow here is what I’d add in order to compete.

1. Add free text search based on Street name, area, county. Use smart search capabilities to guess the appropriate search
2. Allow users to personalise search by geography so that searches are limited to on or more geographic locations (e.g. clontarf, Dublin) and a specific price zone (€800K to €1.2m) or house type (terraced) or other feature (south facing, back garden, off street parking)
3. Place search screen next to AJAX map of search area and blip properties on and off the map as search criteria are entered
4. Mousing over a house location on the map pops a DHTML window with a thumbnail of the property and the price. You can click from here to the brochure
5. Attach a PDF copy of the brochure to the web description
6. Provide an RSS feed for houses meeting my search criteria and support the use of multiple searches for this feed
7. Post selling prices of houses on the web when available
8. Allow searching of history of house sales (e.g. when was this house sold before and for what price)
9. Shrink the top banner and in general make the adverts more inobtrusive
10. Produce price graph and stats for areas and house types

Techwire reports on this beergut in reverse. All you need now is a backpack full of ice.

I run a small startup called Secantus. We are running on a tight budget and are currently focussed on development. I recently inquired as to the price of joining the Irish Software Association. Get this, the special deal startup price for companies like mine is €800!

To put it in perspective, my subversion hosting, and a dedicated hosted server costs about the same price. The loose rule of thumb is you can get a Web 2.0 company started for around $100,000. €800 is about $1000 at todays prices so I’m going to blow 1% of my share capital on membership of a local club.

The HotHouse incubator program in Dublin stamps out ten to fifteen new startups every six months, a significant proportion of which are Software companies. I don’t know of any that have joined the ISA. If the ISA truely wants to represent the Irish Software community then they are going to have to make a bigger effort to include the startups.

Is there even an appetite to recruit this kind of member in the ISA? You would think in this Web 2.0 world they would have a click here to join button on the website with a credit card form and integrated wiki, email and forums. But no its a very sedate email and inquiry form (no mailto: links for these guys, you’ll cut and paste the address like we did in the old days) an once you get access, rest assured its no Alice and Wonderland website in the members area.

So what could they do,

• Drop the fees to something that doesn’t make me sweat, think less than €100
• Take credit card bookings directly on the site
• Add wiki, forums, mail groups, blogs and company editable web pages to this site. All this technology is freeable available and can even be purchased for next to nothing as a hosted option.
• Target the startup companies, these companies are the future of the industry. Where was the ISA are the recent Enterprise Ireland Web 2.0 event? Will they be at the next one in Cork?

If they did this I’d join, what about you?

From one of my PDC training courses (apologies, I can’t remember which one),

We judge ourselves by our intentions, we judge others by their actions

Sarah asks some pretty hard questions about life before birth in a thought provoking article over on GUBU.

Another idea I want to unburden here, please feel free to make millions of dollars, send me a postcard if you do.

Entertainment distributed on USB keys for use by travellers

Loaded by a vending machine that takes credit cards. The vending machine in turn loaded over a broadband connection every few days. The content could injected into the USB key (which could be sold as part of the package) with the content embedded in a player program. The player program is designed to timeout with the timeout being set to around 48 hours. After that you can discard the data and use the key as normal. Next time just reload the same key with a different set of movies/shows.

A nice little hook up with the airlines and they enable your USB port on your seat for a fee in coach, for free in business class and boom a whole launchpad market right at your fingertips.

Go on, make me proud…