Copacetic

We’ve quietly put up a proper website for PutPlace.com in the fast few days and as it hasn’t fallen over, consider this a mild invitation to run over there and pre-register for the beta. You can do the survey to boot and help make the world a safer place for Digital Content.

What does PutPlace do? Helps you to find, organise, secure and share  that huge and growing pile of photos, video, music, emails, documents and blog content that is building up day by day on you PC, phone, laptop and Media Centre.

So run along over there and register and we’ll send you a private beta invite real soon now.

BTW: Some of you may have come across us by our previous name Secantus, same product different name. It happens, we’ve got over it, you should too

I downloaded Hamachi today. What is hamachi? A very simple, secure way to connect a group of PCs together in a shared, private network. Its very slick, has good installation help and works just as expected.

Now we can all connect together and also connect with our (small number) of PCs and servers that live in the office.

You create a network, members join the network by entering a password and once they are on the network you have as access to their machine in an identical fashion to a machine on the same subnet. You can also access a web-server if they happen to have one running.

Its another piece of the jigsaw that includes hosted subversion, hosted servers, hosted email and calendar and hosted DNS management.

I’ve been adding people to my del.icio.us network without really know why or understanding it for the past while. So today I actually clicked on the link and finally copped on.

Its an RSS feed of all the links these people post, doh!

Anyway I’ve added it to bloglines, so thanks Conor (argolon), James (eirepreneur), Justin (jm), John (johnkeyes), Damien (mulley) and Walter (walterh).

Keep ‘em coming…

So instead of whining about it, I decided to scratch my itch. So here is a feed for Enterprise Ireland upcoming events scraped courtesy of feed43.com.

Add http://feed43.com/enterprise-ireland-events-2006.xml to your favourite feedreader. Service only guaranteed while they keep to a consistent format.

John Keyes has come up with a sweet hack to a problem I’ve been seeing since we switched to gmail for domains. He uses the stylish plugin for FireFox to restyle the google fixed font to be courier. Without this hack any formatting (e.g. —+ style boxes so beloved by Trac) all get screwed up. Run over there and try it out.

If you use IE your SOL….

Tom Murphy (one of Irelands most pre-eminent software PR guys) has moved his blog to a new home.

Tom is always worth a read.

I’m on holidays in West Cork (Kilcrohane if you must know) for the next two weeks. Mobile signal is pretty patchy and broadband is unheard off, so look for new posts at the end of August.

Joe.

Below is an invite to the latest Hot House program. I will be completing this program in October and I can highly recommend it to anybody trying to start a company in Dublin.

PDC Accepting Applications for Hothouse 12

Good afternoon All,

Just a quick email to let you know that PDC is now accepting applications for our twelfth Hothouse programme which will begin on Thursday September 21^st. If you know of anyone who the Programme might benefit I’d be grateful if you would forward this information on to them.

Hothouse is a 12-month support and incubation programme aimed at graduate entrepreneurs with a knowledge-intensive technology-based innovative idea and with plans to develop and grow a business which will trade globally. There are 16 places available.

Very briefly the supports that are provided through Hothouse are as follows:

• Incubation space here in Docklands Innovation Park, free of charge for the duration of the Programme
• A series of twelve 2-day workshops in a variety of areas ranging from strategic business planning to marketing, raising investment to intellectual property issues. The sessions are facilitated by industry experts and are practical in nature, using participant businesses as working case studies
• Student training grant of €550 per month for each of the 12 months
• Business counseling – participants are allocated a mentor to work with them in a strategic capacity
• Access to the wider PDC network – PDC have been delivering programmes such as Hothouse for over 15 years
• The opportunity to apply for CORD funding from Enterprise Ireland, which can be worth up to 50% of their previous year’s salary up to a maximum of €38,000
• A structured evaluation process helping participants to prepare and deliver a strong business plan and the opportunity to graduate with a Post-graduate Diploma in New Business Development conferred by the Dublin Institute of Technology, subject to submission of a business plan at the end of the year that reaches a certain standard
• Access to DIT resources and expertise

Applicants are required to submit a short business proposal, approx. 8 - 12 pages, outlining their business proposition and providing information about their target market, competition, revenue model and key milestones moving forward. We also require a copy of their own CV and would be grateful if they could provide short bios of other team members, where relevant. Applications should be submitted by e-mail to me at this address.

For further information you can check out http://www.pdc.ie/development/startup/outline.asp. If you have any further questions please let me know.

Warm Regards

Bernadette O’Reilly

Centre Manager

David McWilliams deflates our wealth illusion, with a salutary comparison with the property bubble in Japan,

A good example was the fact that in 1988 the land on which the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo sits was valued at more than the entire real estate of the State of California or Canada - the world’s second largest country. By that benchmark, Japan was indeed the wealthiest country in the world. Needless to say, it was all nonsense - not because the Japanese were not wealthy, they were; but the property bubble (which burst in 1990 with dire consequences) had overstated that wealth enormously. The Japanese had income which had been built up over generations from making stuff, but they were not as wealthy as they thought they were.

David goes on to state that when the bubble burst at least the Japanese had a wealth creation industry (manfacturing) to fall back on, what will we do when the so called softlanding catapults us out of our seats and into the aeroplane bulkhead?

We moved house recently and this prompted me to investigate an alternative to my existing broadband supplier (Eircom). I rang NTL last week had a pleasant conversation with with an Irish sales guy who gently persuaded me to ugrade to NTL digital to boot (ok, I was kind of planning to at some point so he caught me in a softened up state).

The NTL man arrived on Tuesday and with a bit of tinkering on my part I had broadband connected all over the house  via wireless by 6.00pm. Its the standard package  (3mb download, €30 a month) and according to the Irish ISPtest its about the same speed as my €45 a month Eircom package.

Two nice touches,

• They texted me to remind me that the guy was coming the day before he was due to arrive.
• I had a problem when I first connected so I followed the instructions taped to the top of the cable modem (power off PC, power off modem, turn on modem wait 30 secs, turn on PC) for a laugh, and hey presto it worked!

Good job NTL…