The Hothouse Venture Programme is a year-long comprehensive support and incubation programme for graduate entrepreneurs with industry experience and a technology-based business idea. There are 16 places available on each Programme. Participants must have left full-time employment and be working full-time on developing their new business. The programme offers participants a number of supports including:

Incubation space in the entrepreneurial environment of Docklands Innovation Park on East Wall Road

• Management development training facilitated by industry experts
• Strategic business counselling
• Access to an extensive enterprise and investment network
• Access to the resources of DIT, including technologies to licence, student teams, facilities such as lab space and equipment
• The opportunity to be conferred with a CPD post-graduate diploma in New Business Development
• Access to grant funding through Enterprise Ireland CORD grant which could provide you with up to 50% of your previous year’s salary paid to you on a monthly basis over the course of the Programme.

The guideline requirements for this grant are

• Potential to have turnover of €1million and 10 employees within three years
• Have strong export potential
• Have some new or unique technology

Please click here for further information about the Programme.

Hothouse 18 will commence on Thursday 24th September 2009. The deadline for submission of applications is Friday 31st July. We will be interviewing applicants over the course of July and August and making final decisions before the end of August, in order that those that may need to give notice at a current job have ample time to work out their notice period. If you have any questions or would like to discuss the Programme in more detail please contact Sara at 01 2401 307 or sara.hogan@hothouse.ie.

To apply for the Hothouse Venture programme, click here.

Dylan Collins of Jolt Games crystallizes my views on what needs to be done in Ireland with startups in the Irish Independent today,

Collins argues passionately about why Ireland needs to be providing greater support for its young technology entrepreneurs. "If Ireland wants to achieve this knowledge economy it should be prepared to invest at low seed levels.

"If Enterprise Ireland was to make 200 or 300 grants available every year at €50,000 a pop for entrepreneurs to build an online product and go to market. For €50,000, you can get three or four guys in a room for three or four months and they will build a product and go to market. If we had 300 of these groups every year, you would create a digital ecosystem.

"In the US, groups like Y Combinator are funding businesses at low levels and, in Europe, The Founders Fund is doing this.

"There are venture capitalists in the US waiting to bet on young businesses. It’s remarkable this hasn’t happened in Ireland yet. We should be supporting our young right now, instead of scaring them to death.

"For €10m a year, you could have 200 companies a year and 5pc of them could emerge as Ireland’s answer to Microsoft or Nokia," says Collins.

We recently had a blocked drain that required sluicing copious amounts of water through it (as well as a bit of poking with a sharp stick) in order to unblock it. No problemo. Unfortunately the copious water sluicing drained our water tank in the attic.

What does this mean? Well you get airlocks in the pipe system. Airlocks mean no water. A bubble of air sits in the pipe between the tap and the tank and blocks the water getting through. So you need to get rid of the air. God bless Google, lets just whack in “plumbing airlocks” into Google and get lots of hits.

The basic theory is you use the pressure in the working tap to force the airlock out of the the blocked tap. Requires pipes and jubilee clips, basically you need to have been a plumber once.

However nobody seems to get airlocks in mixer taps. Well I had a brainwave tonight. So as indicated in the picture attach a balloon to the tap. Then;

1. Open the airlocked tap
2. Open the tap with water flowing
3. Let the balloon fill
4. Close the tap with water flowing
5. Now with the airlocked tap still open, squeeze the balloon to allow the water to force the air out
6. Rinse and repeat until the balloon starts to fill because water has started to flow

Sorted.

A few hundred quid in plumbing fees saved and me with a big shit-eating DIY grin on my face.

This is pretty good news for anybody in Third Level who wants to stretch their budgets. Amazon is now offering grants to enable free use of their Cloud Infrastructure.

When I entered college in 1978, the state of the art in campus computing consisted of a room full of IBM 029 Key Punch machines, an IBM 370 Model 168 mainframe, and job queues where my card deck would wait for hours in order to get a few seconds of precious CPU time. Today’s kids have it a lot easier, first with desktop PCs and now with cloud computing providing them access to as many CPU cycles and as much RAM as they need for their class projects and research.

Our new AWS in Education program is designed to allow the academic community to take advantage of the Amazon Web Services for teaching and for research. Educators, academic researchers, students, and student entrepreneurs from all over the world can apply for free AWS usage credits in the form of teaching grants, research grants, and project grants. Read on to learn more about what we’ve put together.

More importantly the small print says Amazon offers :

Solutions for university administrators looking to use cloud computing to be more efficient and cost-effective in the university’s IT Infrastructure

Jeff Barr  confirmed to me by email today that these grants are available to Irish Institutions.

Go apply.

Came across the Odysseus website today. (tagged a lot on twitter with #ODCSSS). Check out their mission statement,

Odysseus is innovative trans-institutional approach to the provision of a feeder pathways from undergraduate research experience into postgraduate research in new 4th Level Ireland Masters and PhD programmes

First of all there seems to be a second “a” in the first line. Second its unintelligible gibberish.

I much prefer the paragraph buried in the body text.

The primary goal of this school is to afford exceptional undergraduate students the opportunity to participate and contribute to exciting yet challenging research projects at leading research facilities and inspire them to go on to undertake research careers

I propose they throw away the first and use the second. the second paragraph describes a pretty good idea.

So you are Catholic and you care that your religious organisations in this country perpetrated the most heinous crimes on the children of this country.

Then show it by withholding your contributions where it counts, in the collection basket.  CORI saved itself over half a billion euros in that shameful deal that Michael Woods brokered all those years ago, so they have plenty to survive on for the next few years.

Instead drop that money in a charity that will do some good, preferably one without religious links.

(thanks to my wife Ann for this idea)

From Amazon this morning,

Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,

We are excited to announce the limited beta of AWS Import/Export, a new offering that accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity.

You can use AWS Import/Export for:

• Data Migration – If you have data you need to upload into the AWS cloud for the first time, AWS Import/Export is often much faster than transferring that data via the Internet.
• Offsite Backup – Send full or incremental backups to Amazon S3 for reliable and redundant offsite storage.
• Direct Data Interchange – If you regularly receive content on portable storage devices from your business associates, you can have them send it directly to AWS for import into your Amazon S3 buckets.
• Disaster Recovery – In the event you need to quickly retrieve a large backup stored in Amazon S3, use AWS Import/Export to transfer the data to a portable storage device and deliver it to your site.

The AWS Import/Export Beta currently supports importing data into Amazon S3 buckets in the US, and participation is limited. Export and EU support will be added in the coming months. For more information and to be considered for participation, please see the AWS Import/Export Detail Page.

We hope you find this new capability useful, and we look forward to your feedback.

Sincerely,

The AWS Import/Export Team

The AWS Import/Export Detail Page has a more information on when it makes sense to use the service,

When to Use AWS Import/Export

If you have large amounts of data to load and an Internet connection with limited bandwidth, the time required to prepare and ship a portable storage device to AWS can be a small percentage of the time it would take to transfer your data over the internet. If loading your data over the Internet would take a week or more, you should consider using AWS Import/Export.

Below is a table that provides guidance on when it’ll take at least week to transfer your data over the Internet into AWS (and hence, when you should consider using AWS Import/Export). For example, if you have a 10Mbps connection and expect to utilize 80% of your network capacity for the data transfer, for uploads of 600GB or more, it’ll take you at least a week to transfer to AWS over the Internet and you should consider using AWS Import/Export.

Available Internet Connection	Theoretical Min. Number of Days to Transfer  1TB at 80% Network Utilization	When to Consider AWS Import/Export?
T1 (1.544Mbps)	82 days	100GB or more
10Mbps	13 days	600GB or more
T3 (44.736Mbps)	3 days	2TB or more
100Mbps	1 to 2 days	5TB or more
1000Mbps	Less than 1 day	60TB or more

For more details regarding data loading costs see the AWS Import/Export Calculator.

Watch this video to get an overview of Wolfram Alpha. What alpha does is make the web computable. How? by combining natural language queries, large public datasets and the Mathematica compute engine. Alpha brings all these pieces together to generate new information from data as opposed to slavishly returning the mob results that Google collects. This is information generation from first principles.

This is going to do to Google what Google did to Microsoft? Why?

• Wolfram is a private held company which will never be for sale. Stephen Wolfram is privately wealthy and isn’t interested in selling at any price, he wants to change the world. This eliminates Googles fist tack which is the early purchase of potential competitors.
• Mathematica is a heavily defended piece of Wolfram technology which is at the heart of the smarts running Alpha. Mathematica was first released in 1988 so they have been building and improving it for over 20 years.  So don’t expect some open source project to reproduce its capabilities.  As for MS and Google, well they have some catching up to do.
• The interface implicitly supports rendered output as opposed to textual results and combination of results
• The natural language interface will open it up to everyone
• The mathematica link means this will make real the software plus service mantra of Microsoft. BTW Microsoft is nowhere in this market.
• Add a REST API and suddenly you have taken much of what we do in cloud computing off the me nu
• Its a lot easier to clone Google search into alpha than it is to clone Wolfram Alpha into Google
• Its not just search, notice the bit where you can fill in form data to refine a calculation. Expect to see more of this including the ability to build complex computations with streaming real time results
• Crowd sourcing results will rapidly allow them to eliminate the less useful results

Questions:

• Whats the business model?
• Will it link with mathematica?
• Will they provide an API?
• How will Google and Microsoft react?
• Does Amazon have a part to play?

Did this presentation out at the IADT today.  Apart from one person say “I don’t understand anything you said” I think it went ok.

Still some work to do but its getting there. You can see the theme developing on my back catalog on slideshare.net.

w595 Jan 09 006

Originally uploaded by Joe Drumgoole

I have a bushel of this stuff growing like a weed (at least 100 packs worth) in my back garden in Dublin.

Rosemary is hardy as nails, lives comfortably through Irish winters. Why we have to import it from Spain is beyond me.