I found this RESOURCES FOR THE ENTREPRENEUR web page at MIT today. Articles look pretty relevant to anybody starting a VC backed company.

ApacheCon 2006 is being held in Dublin this year. Hard to turn down an opportunity to tech up, especially with no flight or hotel costs to stuff up your justification email.

• Freshmeat announcement page (update : fixed borked link)
• Celtix Home Page
• Product page from the Iona Website
• The Celtix Demo page

The BBC languages home page shows yet again what a fabulous resource the BBC website is. You can learn French, German, Spanish, Italian and a host of others.

Jeff Clavier has posted his Web 2.0 – Key Factors for Success presentation on his blog. It was a great presentation, pity Jeff only invests in the valley :-(.

Ken lets us know about RoadDeaths.net. I wonder if they could use some of the feeds that Damien Mulley rounded up? I couldn’t see any reference to a feed like that on the site.

Final quibble, shouldn’t it be RoadDeaths.ie?

InfoWorld reports on the launch of Celtix Iona’s new Open Source ESB. Iona are a little late to the Open Source party but I would expect the Celtix product to put up a pretty good showing on the technical front.

However they suffer from the same problem as Cape Clear, how do you compete on the one hand against tier one incumbents like Oracle and IBM and also hold the line against OpenSource experts like Apache and JBoss?

If egos could be massaged, one way to compete would be to merge both companies back into a single entity. The original goals of Cape Clear (low cost commodity products in the XML/CORBA/J2EE space) were lost long ago and they now range across the same prospect base as Iona.

Chris is safely ensconced on the board as chairman so any old enmity could be smoothed over by the new Iona CEO Peter Zotto. Give Annrai back his old job as CTO, tag him as a serial entrepreneur (did it twice!) and move all the Cape Clear staff back from the pugatory of Donnybrook to the central location of Shelbourne Road.

Job done!

I’m watching Iraq – the Hidden War on Channel 4. Some basic information,

• You can’t report in Iraq in the traditional sense because if the kidnappers don’t kill you the america military will. So the Western media huddle in the Green Zone and the Iraqi media get shot at (and killed) by the americans and the locals
• You can get access to the highest echelon of political activity (Jon Snow interviews the president or some such plenipotentiary) but you can’t interview anybody on the ground (see point 1)
• The day to day bloodbath that is the reality of Iraq is not represented by International media. So we don’t see the deaths, the “response to impact” bodies and the blood (buckets of it)
• Bloggers are providing a lot of the key information to the new services as they can’t do any on the ground reporting themselves (see point 1)
• The green zone is an information desert
• Moving dead bodies is hard work
• Would we support the Iraq War if we actually knew what was going on?

Check out John’s link to a great Web 2.0 quiz.

Silicon Republic reports on Digital Realty Trust’s acquisition of a 20,000 sq. ft. (whatever happen to the Metric system? ed.) data centre in Clonshaugh. They go on to say,

Digital Realty’s strategy of acquiring property assets at the bottom of a cycle in the telecoms market and reconditioning them in time for growth in an uncanny way matches Ken Peterson’s own methodology. Peterson made his fortune in the US by buying aluminium plants while at the bottom of an economic cycle and later selling them on when prices recovered.

So apparently we are at the bottom of the property market cycle….