Infoworld reports on Oracle’s TOAD Killer application, Oracle SQL Developer. This product has been produced by an Engineering Team in the Oracle European Development Centre here in Dublin, so show a bit of Irish solidarity and give it a spin.

I saw some early versions of this software when I was working there and was very impressed.

Congratulations to Donal and his team for producing another great piece of software!

So jumped in a cab on Saturday night to head of to the Alexander Hotel. As soon as I mentioned the destination the taxi driver shoots back at me “Are you going to that Awards Ceremony?”. Turns out his brother in law was heading out to it and apparently bringing a bunch of mates.

When the taxi driver knows about it you have definitely hit a tipping point!

I shot a bunch of video on Saturday night at the blog awards and I think I caught most of the winners getting their awards. I missed the photo blog awards (sorry Donnacha) because I ran out of space and had to rejig the camera. Anyway I’ve posted it onto youtube for your edification.

So filthy weather didn’t prevent a full house for the first ever Irish Blog Awards. The categories were,

• Best fictional piece in a blog : Won by Annette from Thinking Out Loud
• best Comment/Commenter: Won by Kevin Breathnach
• Best Technology Blog/Blogger : Won by Tom Raftery
• Best Use of the Irish Language in a Blog : won by An tImeall
• Best Political Blog: Won by Slugger O’Toole
• Most Humourous Post: Won By Twenty Major – New York Diary
• Best Arts and Culture Blog : Won By Sinead Gleeson
• Best Group Blog: Won by The Community At Large
• Best Photo Blog: Won by Donnacha O’Caoimh
• Best Personal Blog: Won by Annette Thinking Out Loud
• Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere (Blogosphere sp. ed?): Won by Roger Galligan (Irishblogs.ie)
• Best Blog Post: Twenty Major – New York Diary
• Best Blog/Blogger: Twenty Major

The night was weird for a number of reasons. Firstly most people had never met in person, secondly it was mile after mile of crazily gorgeous looking women, thirdly it seemed to die after the awards with many people exiting very quickly.

I can’t help feeling the very radical and personal nature of blogging needs a different format. This is not a critcism of Damien who gets all kudos for a great night, more the fact that we as participants were too for passive in this particular event.

My take on the night was it was a complete success, but loose the raffle guys , even if I did win a wireless router (thanks and god bless pink 35), it was very village hall, very bingo.

Final bit of info, the guy who picked up Twenty Major’s awards told me his name, and if you want to know it, go ask him yourself 🙂

I took a bunch of photos that are now on flickr, if you’re in them and you don’t like your picture, give me a shout and I’ll zap it.

I see the Irish Blog Awards got a nice write up in the Irish Times print edition today. Of course the picture is not Damien, but TJ McIntyre his partner in crime at Digital Rights Ireland. Irish Times, doh!

InterTradeIreland held its fifth annual Private Equity Conference today in the Waterfront Hall in Belfast. HotHouse popped for my attendance so I slipped into a jacket (the invite coyly requested Business Attire) and slept sweetly all the way to Belfast on the Enterprise Express.

David McWilliams hosted the proceedings and kept the whole show from losing momentum that the gaps between speakers often engenders. He opened with a brief commentary identifying the complementary nature of the North and South of Ireland economies, with huge demand in the south and significant surpluses in the North. He went on to note that one of the problems for both sides of the border is the final resting home for all free cash on the Island is inevitably property. If we could redirect some of this into Entrepreneurial activity we could build much larger companies faster and cover the dead ground between an idea and a fully fledged startup via the business Angel.

Surprisingly for a Private Equity Conference there were no presentations from VC’s or signficant investors (although several VCs appeared on panel discussions). In general the the number of VCs in attendance were vastly outnumbered by the numbers of entrepreneurs and advisors. Of the Dublin VCs I spotted Shay Garvey from Delta, Brian Caulfield from Trinity Venture Capital and Niall Carroll of ACT (webhint to ACT: loose the Macromedia Flash front page guys will ya?).

Bert Twaalfhoven spoke first. Bert founded and is still heavily involved in the Indivers consortium of (primarily) manfacturing companies. Bert has been an entpreneur all his life and placed a huge stock in identifying failure as well as sucess. He himself has had 17 failures and 37 successes in his life. When interviewing people he asks them about their failures and if they haven’t had any he won’t hire them. He went on to comment on clusters (the first of many) saying that many of his failures were related to failing to align his businesses with the appropriate development clusters around the world with regarding to manfacturing, IT etc. Regarding startups he cautioned to expect at least 30 months of looses and in his estimation it took at least 5 years to create a business.

Gordon Murray, a professor of Enterpreneurial Management had some unfashionable (but to my mind true) things to say about investment and the role of government. He had twelve points to make about VCs and the following of his twelve rang true for me,

• Europe is Not America, we can borrow ideas from America but we have to find our own fundamental solutions.
• If you think all men are born equal don’t become a venture capitalist – VCs award merit and excellence.
• Market Failure is what happens when you don’t give me money – A rational financial analysis is what happens when I don’t give you money.
• Governments have as much chance of being successful VCs as England has of winning the next X world cup (X=any sport)
• Its fatuous to expect VCs to invest in bad deals
• VCs love seed capital – as long as they don’t have to provide it
• Keiner Perkins requires investors to wait 10 years for a return on their money (Governments typically want it back in three)
• Specialist buyers don’t care that a piece of software was developed in a small village in th fijords of Norway e.g. regional development and venture capital are incompatible in their requirements (its hard to create a cluster in Waterford when all the ecomomics forces speak to Dublin)

He echoed the comments of many other speakers about the economies of scale not existing in Ireland. We need to expand to a pan-european view of investment, develop key clusters of technology and poor the investment in en-mass rather than spreading it thinly over hundreds of companies who can’t help each other. Risk capital is not social philanthrophy.

There was then a panel the discussion at which Niall Carroll of ACT (Is Niall Carroll the scariest VC on this Island? everytime I see him he puts the shits up me) threw up some interesting statistics,

• There are 50% less VC firms now than there were in 2000
• Europe’s GNP is the same as the US but we only have about one fifth of the VC available. In the US pension funds invest 7% in VC enterprises in Europe its only 2%.
• There are the same number of startups in Europe as a whole as in the US

Colin Walsh of Crescent Capital was asked what the most popular exit strategy for Northern Ireland companies, his answer, Recievership.

After Lunch David White the Director of Innovation Policy for the EU talked at length about the EUs role in fostering innovation. He pointed out some key demographics for Europe relevant to anybody starting a business,

• Low birth rate
• Aging population (many with early retirement options)
• One third of companies will change ownership in the next ten years due to owner retirement

If we want continued growth (in order to pay for our existing and future lifestyle) we need one or more of,

• Land or other resources
• More people in the labour market
• More innovation

Its obvious which one David was plugging. Governments don’t create innovation, they create the conditions for innovation. Those conditions are,

• Entrepreneurs : People with ideas and vision, who percieve a market and identify niches
• Technical Staff: To build the solution, solve the problems of delivery
• Additonal Skills: Management, ICT
• Capital: Money to fund the venture
• Marketplace: A regulated place to do business where all participants conform to a set of agreed standards.

He identified clusters as a safe zone where small companies can work together to get off the ground, help each other and reinforce the effectiveness of external investment. Clusters need,

• Universities to generate a pool of talent
• Large technical companies to provide validation, expertise and a launchpad for the smaller companies offerings
• Incubators to provide day to day support
• Actors/Advisors in the areas of Intellectual property, HR etc.

These clusters must be regional or sub-regional (there is no such thing as an EU cluster). Governments roll is to make sure clusters don’t become too insular and introverted.

David’s final comments were around VC and they reflected Niall Caroll’s stats. European VCs are too small in general and make too many small investments. The net return on VC across Europe averages 0%, whereas in the US it runs at a whopping 20%.

Alan Gilmore of Meridio wrapped up with a Dos and Don’t of raising Venture Capital. Most of this stuff was old news to me except for one bit of advice, VCs hate investing to pay debt.

The conference was pretty good overall and the quality of the speakers was universally high. I would have preferred more input from the floor, but that is always a hard thing to manage. I was surprised to find that the VC’s had to pay fees like everybody else. I think the disco model of “girls get in for free” would work a treat in this instance.

Google completed their acquisition of writely.com today.

TechCrunch recently reviewed The Online Storage gang, a group of companies that provide online virtual storage using a variety of business models. While this was an interesting article I found it disatisfying from a number of perspectives,

• The article failed to normalise the pricing model so that a prospective purchaser could do a comparison between the different vendors offerings.
• They conflated the business models of pure virtual storage players (e.g. XDrive, Box.net), structured vendors (flickr, eSnips and Multiply), backup vendors (Mozy) and ISPs (GoDaddy).
• The comparision table was a flickr image and therefore difficult to read

So what distinguishes these different vendors and their relative marketing positions? As indicated above I would divide the market into four kinds of offerings,

• Virtual Storage Vendors: Virtual Storage vendors offer online disk space and price according to quota allocations. Their primary costs are related to spinning disks (see Nik Cubrilovic’s excellent analysis) which means power consumption, network bandwidth and collocation footprint and maintainance dominate the equation. Their revenue model is therefore strictly pay for use as it is hard to interject an advertising stream into a pipe of raw data. You can tell a Virtual Storage vendor by the fact that they will have a Storage Plan link somewhere on there front page, that details the rising scale of prices with increasing demand for storage. If virtual storage follows the model of local storage, reads will dominate over writes.
• Structured Storage Vendors: Structured storage vendors offer storage for a particular type of file (the most well known being flickr, but Glide is also a strong rising contender). They have a similar cost structure to their Virtual Storage companions but can augment their revenue with advertising. They therefore often use a Free+Premium model where the basic service is free and you pay for additional enhanced services. Bandwidth limits for free users are a useful model for these vendors as it allows them to easily predict future demand.
• Backup Vendors: Backup vendors are focussed on recovery from failure or deletion. They are in the insurance business and although most model their services like the virtual storage vendors their costs should in theory be substantially lower as in the backup model writes dominate over reads and these vendors should be able to utilise tape storage to dramatically reduce their data centre costs.

I have produced a comparison table that splits the vendors along these lines using the TechCrunch list as a starting point and adding a list of Remote backup vendors culled from a number of websites on the net.

The table is split into three groups Virtual Storage Vendors, Remote Backup vendors and Sharing/Structured Storage Vendors. I have not done much analysis on the structured storage vendors as a I don’t see those guys as the focus of this study which is trying to determine what price virtual storage is likely to be. More work on the Sharing guys may follow.

I’ve included three prototypical plans for 5, 10 and 20GB of storage. I should point out that even 20GB will barely store the average user’s music collection, never mind their photos. Yet, very few vendors (AllMyData is the notable exception) quote for disk space over the 50GB limit. I then map the vendor’s closest plan in each case and normalise the table to generate a comparsion column for 5, 10 and 20GB of storage. The data for 20GB is graphed on the graph tab for easy comparison.

Some interesting points to note,

• Virtual Storage parallels backup storage in price. The most expensive backup vendor (BackupCellar) is $500 more expensive per year that the most expensive Virtual Storage Vendor (iStorage). This shouldn’t be the case as backups storaged on tape have sub-cent prices per Gigabyte year compared to holding all the data online on a power hungry, failure prone spindle.
• The differential price between the mid-range and highest price vendors is over 75%. There is some serious price gouging going on here (yes I’m talking to you and you).
• The business Models are all identical. They all offer a storage plan and the concept of a remote disk. Only AllMyData has anything different to offer in terms of offering up storage on your local disk to reduce your cost of purchase. Their pricing is also so wildly out of line with the competition (in a good way) that you have to ask yourself if they might have made a miscalculation.

Of course the likelihood is that Google is going to put most of these vendors to the sword when the launch (if they launch?) their GDrive product.

Until then caveat emptor, it pays to shop around.

Om Malik talks about Apple quietly poaching marketing share of the large Storage vendors (Dell, EMC, HP etc.). Anything priced at under $2 per GB is definitely worth looking at, and hey, finally a reason to introduce the Mac into your organisation…..

Paul, my neighbour complains that nothing on my site interests him. So Paul, this one’s for you by special request….

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