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?

This map doesn’t reflect reality.

Damien Mulley has launched Share IT, a training program for startups, where trainers give freely of their time to help get other startups of the ground.

Chokers!

Amazon have release a cool Firefox extension for managing your EC2 Instances. Very Nice.

The official Barcamp Dublin site is at http://barcamp.org/BarCampIreland3 please add your name their if you are planning to attend and especially if you are planning to speak.

Tonight on TV, a new entrant, Pro-Tensium.

Full details on the blog. Kick off is Saturday 21st of April at the Digital Hub, just off Thomas St on Crane Street.

This non-story from Silicon Republic is a classic re-release press release number. UK workers are apparently walking out with valuable data on USB Keys, and before that floppy disks and before that printouts.

Stealing your employer’s data has always been trivially easy, USB Keys don’t make it harder or easier, they are just another one of many leaky channels in every employer workplace.

If you want to be secure you could give everyone a Compartmented Mode Workstation. A steal at 100k+…

Clay Shirky (I’m a fanboy) deconstructs Second Life in a great article that debunks the Second Life numbers and then goes on to juxtapose the success of games worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft and Everquest) with real virtual worlds (such as Second Life).

Interesting statistic : 85% of Second Life users abandon the game within three months.

I quote a great closing paragraph,

More generally, I suspect that the cases where 3D immersion works are, and will continue to be, those uses that most invite the mind to fill in or simply do without missing detail, whether because of a triggering of sexual desire, the fight or flight reflex (many games), avarice (gambling), or other areas where we are willing and even eager to make rapid inferences based on a paucity of data.