Silicon Republic reports recently that,

Enterprise Ireland said that to date it has committed some €148.75m to eight seed and venture funds which have succeeded in raising in excess of €500m for investment in early-stage and growing companies

Feargal O Moráin, executive director of Enterprise Ireland, goes on to say,

The 2007-2012 Seed and Venture Capital (VC) Programme, the third such programme to date, has been extremely successful in raising finance for investment in Irish companies at all stages of development … With over half a billion raised for investment to date, this is of particular benefit to seed and early-stage Irish companies

Eh, no Fergal this is of no benefit to  seed and early stage Irish companies. I have no record of any of the VCs that have raised funds investing in any seed or early stage companies to date. The reality is once EI throws it money into the VC pot is has zero control over how that money is disbursed by the VCs. Nor should it have, that’s not howVCs interact with their limited partners (which is what EI is).

Luckily we have the director general of the IVCA, Regina Breheny who offers a more honest assessment of where this money will go (again in Silicon Republic),

Most of our investments would be in software firms that can grow to scale, not in dot.com companies or because someone has a nice widget … Funding in Irish companies is at its highest now since 2001, but much of these are follow-on investments in existing companies. There is still a lot of work to be done in raising money to seed new start-ups. Venture capitalists are currently raising money but it’s debatable how much of these funds will go into new plays in the next five years

So thanks for the millions EI, but we are unlikely to put it where you want it to go.

I’m all for a thriving VC market in Ireland but my own view is that EI’s co-investment strategy is a more effective vehicle for ensuring that Irish early stage and seed startups get the required funding they need.

It will be very interesting to review the protfolios of the irish VCs (Delta Partners, the AIB Seed Capital Fund, Atlantic Bridge Ventures, Kernel Capital Partners and Fountain Healthcare Partners)  who have taken the EI shilling at the end of their current investment cycle.

I met Caelen King at the recent Web 2.0 Expo conference. Caelen is a member of the Baltimore Software alumni and has recently launched http://whatclinic.com, a place to Compare Dentists and Cosmetic Clinics Worldwide.

Sounds dull (unless you have a toothache or want bigger breasts) but Caelen really knows his customer acquistion stuff and has some very clever ideas about growing his market. Great to see Irish companies competing in this kind of space.

Update:

WhatClinic.com has recently expanded into Dentists in the UK and Plastic Surgery in the UK.

We have put together a free storage cheat sheet on the PutPlace blog. Go on, 250GB 124GB is not to be sniffed at 🙂

Check the stupidity of the guy/gal who put up this posters at Phibsboro cross roads.

Now you see it.                      Now you don’t.

FAIL.

Silicon Republic announces today “Half of Ireland ‘computer illiterates’“.

If this means half of Ireland is computer literate I’d call that success.

Before the procedure…

They Say…	They Mean…
This won’t hurt at all	This will probably hurt a little
You may feel some pressure	This will probably hurt you
You might feel a slight prick	This is definitely going to hurt you
There might been some stinging	You will have to muffle a cry of pain
This may hurt a little	You will need restraints, I’m watching for a violent response
This will hurt	You may prefer death, in fact people have died from the pain alone during this procedure

PutPlace.com has been a Blacknight customer until very recently. We moved because it made more sense for us to place our hosting in EC2 (close to our S3 storage)  rather than at a remote location (bandwidth costs between an EC2 host and S3 bucket are $0) .

I can’t remember how long we hosted with Blacknight becuase their were no events to mark the passage of time. No outages, no notices of compromised credit cards, no issues whatsoever, just plain sailng all the way, solid, dependable and stable.

I still use blacknight for all my personal stuff (like this blog) and Michele continues to go beyond the call of duty in donating domains to worthy causes for free.

There are lots of good hosting providers out there but I will continue to recommend blacknight for anyone looking for an Irish based hosting solution.

Well done to all the crew at Blacknight.

Salim Ismail is in town next Monday (12th May) and suggested a meetup somewhere in Dublin. The Market Bar is traditionally where we hold these events, so if you’d like to shoot the breeze with Salim and lower a few beers at the same time come on down to Market Bar at 7.30pm on Monday.

Better make that 6.30pm Salim has to split at 7.30pm to make his flight.

Speak your tweets, just make a call.

Twitterfone launched last night, the latest venture from Pat Phelan and the Dial2do boys Ivan and Sean.

TechCrunch and Damien Mulley have the scoop. I’ve used it and it is just too easy to use.

Well done lads, keep ’em coming!