Copacetic

I’m at the NextWeb Conference on Friday.  Drop me a line if you fancy meeting up for a pint on Thursday or Friday.

Well we did it. This morning I sent out the first batch of private beta invitations for PutPlace. We expect to roll out invitations each Monday for the next few weeks and hopefully we should have sent out an invitation to everybody who registered to date within the next month or so.Big shout out to John, Darren and Gearoid for their trojan efforts in getting the beta to this point over the last month or so.  Also thanks to our valiant first run testers, Matt, Ivan and Sean.

This first version does backup (Windows only, Mac to follow shortly) as we reckon getting your stuff safe is a priority for most people. We have most of the heavy lifting done to allow publishing to places like Flickr and YouTube as we expect that to emerge in the next month or so.

Please register for the beta if you haven’t done so already…

Joe Drumgoole

CEO

Did a quick slot this morning with Ben Gavin, the WLR business presenter. I think it airs tonight on WLR (95.1/97.5 FM).

Its actually on tomorrow night  (2-May-2007) at 7.00pm. Doh! 

PutPlace got a great write up from Karlin Lilington in the Irish Times today.

Better ship that beta!

I did a piece on George Hook’s Radio show (podcast) today on Barcamp that turned into a full blown pitch for PutPlace.com. It turns out George needs to organise his digital life just like everyone else and wants to beta test the software on air when it goes into beta next month.

I didn’t completely screw up thanks to some excellent pointers from Sarah before hand. Still, a bit freaky sitting before the man so to speak.

 The Top Irish Web Apps are profiled today on Read-Write Web. PutPlace gets a mention,  yay!

I was at the Docklands Innovation Park Awards tonight to see Jonathan Mulligan of OpenPlain receive a cheque for €10,000 as the overall winner of the event.

OpenPlain is a subscription service that allows businesses to track the productivity of their employees by getting them to install a piece of software that monitors which applications are running and being used at any given point in time. It differs from the usual employee spyware in that it offers the user the ability to modify their own behaviour by showing them the stats that have been collected and comparing those stats with their peers. Yes I know, lots of people don’t like the idea of this kind of software, but so does Jon and more importantly he quantified it. 30% of customers won’t touch which leaves a very healthy 70% market share thank you very much.
Two other companies were up for the big prize. Pedantix (warning website has annoying audio), represented by Frank Fowley, and The Wealth Shop represented by Ray Langan.

Pedantix have developed automated software called FlightPAD. FlightPAD connects flight information display systems (aka, FIDS, the big board at the airport) with personal address systems and converts FIDS messages to PA messages that can be routed to wherever they are required. The software has been sold successfully to several Irish Airport authorities and their are obvious cross over markets to Malls, Train stations, bus stations etc.

The Wealth Shop is a retail play offering flat fee (€200) financial advice and planning to middle income earners (30-80k bracket) . They have software package that can produce a financial plan for each customer and they opened their first retail outlet in the OmniPark, Santry in Dec 2006. They have plans to open several more retail outlets over the coming year. I want Ray to do my presentations in the future, he was fantastic.
In general the quality of offerings and presentations were excellent and what was most encouraging was that all these businesses are currently revenue generating.
Three companies also won highly commended awards on the night, PutPlace.com (blush!), G20 Technologies and Tochar Technologies. The commended companies only got to do a 90 second elevator pitch, so I encourage you to visit their websites for the full story, as opposed to compressing it even more here.

The standard was universally high and it’s a crying shame there isn’t a dollar of VC available at the moment from the big players in the Irish market.

Enterprise Ireland where is that 175m when we need it?

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