I can pitch you a 60 second idea, in fact I have a limitless universe of 60 second ideas. But nobody is investing in your idea after 60 seconds. And I have worse news, nobody is going to invest in you after your pitch at NextWeb, or Essential Web ’07 or any of the other favourite rites of passage for startups.

What investors are going to invest in is simple,

• Market opportunity: A big and growing market, without strong incumbents, where you’re company has an unfair advantage.
• Great Team: Stupidly off the scale technical brilliance will get you somewhere here, but is that you? Are you as smart as Sergey and Larry. No I didn’t think so, So great team means great engineering guy, great marketing, great sales guy and/or great “did it before” guy. Or some combination of the above.
• Style, Fashion, Vogue: Investors are herd animals, advertising, social networks and media sites are big at the moment. If you’re pitching something else, prepare to queue.

One minute pitches are the entrepreneur equivalent of shitting in a bottle. Very dificult to achieve and one you’ve done it nobody is interested in the results.

Conor talks about bootstrapping startups in Ireland and the idea sounds good at first blush, but this is Ireland, not America or India. When YCombinator gets to pick the best of Stanford or Andy Bechtolsheim gives 100,000 dollars to two guys with an idea  the demographics have already done there work.

Populations of multi-millions trumps populations of 4 million everytime. I hate to burst people’s bubble, but we simply won’t generate as many entrepreneurs in Ireland as India or the USA, and even if we could we don’t have a touchstone tech  centre where you can go and expect to find them.

What can we do? Go back earlier in the supply chain, get this stuff into the schools, and then we have some hope.  Sorry to rain on the parade guys.

ReadWriteWeb has a nice writeup on Glubble, a Firefox plugin for Parental control. It has some nice features including,

 Glubble lets you set up child accounts in two flavors: for kids who can read, and kids who can’t. The main difference is that the pre-read accounts, as they are called, don’t display a URL and search bar, so kids instead navigate by clicking on icons and links to pre-defined sites.

…

Glubble comes preloaded with a set of approved websites. These include kid friendly sites like Fisher Price, Barbie.com, Animal Planet, Disney, and Nickelodeon. It also appears that every site in the Yahoo! Kids Directory is available for kids protected by Glubble (at least, every site I clicked on worked). Yahoo! Kids lists over 57,000 web sites in its directory, so there are a fair number to get started with.

So lock up your Internet Explorer and go Glubble.

Thank you.

Please ignore.

I was out for pints last night with Mark Taylor who is Eircom’s new Web 2.0 Evangelist (who knew?). He was asking about events for Web 2.0 geeks in Dublin which got me thinking about Open Coffee.

Anybody on for an Open Coffee event in Dublin? Any suggested venues?

 As my commenters have pointed out Open Coffee is alive and kicking in Dublin  at the Morrison Hotel.  I just missed one today. Serves me right for not googling it first.

Anyway the next one is two weeks away and I’ve just added it to my calendar. Hope to see you there. 

Here is me on  the Redcouch at NextWeb. Memo to self,  push glasses up on nose before doing video interviews.

a great quote, from a great man. (via Joel)

So when I say “inch by inch” — that’s what I mean. To create a usable piece of software, you have to fight for every fix, every feature, every little accomodation that will get one more person up the curve. There are no shortcuts. Luck is involved, but you don’t win by being lucky, it happens because you fought for every inch

Titanic Dry Dock

Originally uploaded by Joe Drumgoole

I was in belfast a while back and I took this snap of theTitanic dry dock. A piece of history.

The Fridge of Shame

Originally uploaded by Joe Drumgoole

Please defrost me.

(You know who you are).