I dropped into the sensational Bloggers Lunch yesterday evening. Niall Harbison from ifoods.tv cooked up a storm in his flat and filled his bath with beer for good measure.

The food was absolutely delicious and double points to Niall for preparing it all in the kitchen of his flat. I didn’t manage to snap what for me was his star dish of the night, Scallops on Black Pudding, Yum!

Stuck in an airport several months ago I finally overcame my age long prejudice against a book I pigeonholed into “self help shite” when I was much younger and dumber. So I grabbed Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends and Influence People” of the shelf and finally realised what I’d been missing.

I’ll quote something from the introduction from his wife which should strike a chord with bloggers everywhere,

Dale Carnegie wrote as he spoke, in an intensively exuberant, colloquial, conversational manner

I can’t think of better advice.

If you read this book (and you’re as old as me) you’ll hear lots of stuff that sounds familiar. The difference with Dale is, he said it first and its all in one convenient package.

His front page (of my edition) says it all. But the method is the key and for that you need the book itself.

• Get out of a mental rut think new thoughts, acquire new visions, discover new ambitions
• Make friends quickly and easily
• Increase your popularity
• Win people to your way of thinking
• Increase your influence, your prestige, your ability to get things done
• Handle complaints, avoid  arguments, keep your human contacts smooth and pleasant
• Become a better speaker, a more entertaining conversationalist
• Arouse enthusiasm among your associates

Do like Dale says and succeed.

In these times of layoffs and recession I thought a search engine for all the Irish job sites might be useful. So here it is courtesy of Google’s Customised Search Engine.

Its permanent home is https://joedrumgoole.com/blog/irish-recruitment-sites-search-engine/.

Just wanted to clear up some Misquotes in today’s Silicon Republic Article “Ireland 2.0“.

• I didn’t found Generics Software, that was the first Irish Startup I worked for after leaving College. Generics was founded by Han Jurgens Kugler and Michaeal Mac An Airchinnigh
• I think Ireland should focus on creating companies with exit valuations in the 10m range not sales in the 10m range

Otherwise a great article.

Everything you need to know about the current economic crash, all in one place.

For starters read “Liar’s Poker” by Michael Lewis. The tag line is “Two Cities, True Greed” and in it he tracks the rise of Salomon Brothers, the investment bank that invented and popularised the securitisation of home owners mortgages. These are the financial tools that we used to create the subprime crisis.

Need take a look at “When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management“. Which documents how the LTCM hedge nearly brought about the collapse of the investment banking system in 1998. Interesting fact, the top Salomon trader in Liar’s Poker is John Meriwether, who went on to found Long Term Capital Management.

Now for a lickety split overview of the current sub prime crisis watch this.

Then for a deeper understanding of how banks make money out of nothing. This one is long, but worth. You’ll never look at a bank again without thinking about the term “fiat currency”.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-9050474362583451279&hl=en&fs=true

Finally to wrap it all up with a bow, read Michael Lewis’s article on Portfolio.com, “The End of Wall Street’s Boom“. In the interview he talks to an analyst who predicted the whole crash.

We have the good fortune to have Brian Caulfield on the board at PutPlace.com. At a board meeting yesterday Brian gave a chilling analysis of the state of VC across the globe. Afterwards he sent me a bunch of links supporting his analysis.

In short whatever problems you have raising money for your startup, the VCs are seeing those problems double.

VC’s raise money from what are called Limited Partners (LPs). When a VC announces the closure of a round what they have actually got is a commitment from the LPs to provide funds to support investments over the 10 year lifetime of a typical VC fund.

As the VC makes investments they make cash calls on the LPs to support those investments (Enterprise Ireland’s 175m is still sitting in a government account somewhere, even though most of it has been committed) so throughout the lifetime of a fund the LPs continue to feed cash into the fund.

Most LPs are in fact pension funds and those funds are experiencing the same smack upside the head that the rest of the financial system is still reeling from.  So they have asset pools that have halved in value and as a result they have no liquidity to meet the cash calls of the VCs they have invested in.

This is resulting in a VC double whammy (and by extension companies looking for VC money). The first problem is that LPs are writing off their existing investments in VCs and trying to withdraw from any future commitments to the fund. Legal issues abound here and we can potentially expect to see some LPs  sued for this behaviour.

The second problem is that LPs who are honouring their commitments are approaching VCs en mass and saying “don’t make any investments as we won’t be able to meet your cash calls for the next while”.

The net effect of both these issues is the same, VC money is drying up faster than Sahara rain drops.

So, raise as much as you can, at whatever price you can, plan to have at least 12 months cash in the bank and get to break even ASAP.

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/the-cash-panic-sweeping-the-vc-industry

http://venturebeat.com/2008/11/07/cash-panic-sweeping-vc-industry-the-capital-calls-problem/

http://www.pehub.com/22812/lps-are-on-the-ropes/

Shot this video on the 26-Oct-08 after several days of rain, pretty spectacular for a small town in the West of Ireland. Especially as this is right in the Centre of Ennistimon.

This was posted as a comment to a previous post on the subject of the EI web site.

New comment on your post #710 “Ten Ways to Improve the Enterprise Ireland Web Site”
Author : PathPacific.com (IP: 213.79.48.76 , dsl-48-76.dsl.netsource.ie)
E-mail : solutions@pathpacific.com
URL    : http://www.pathpacific.com
Whois  : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=213.79.48.76
Comment:
Please help Enterprise Ireland improve their Websites
Enterprise Ireland are carrying out a major review of all their websites.  Please help them improve by taking this short 5-minute survey.   Your feedback will have a direct impact on how Enterprise Ireland should improve their online web service for You.
Engage by clicking on the link below (Survey Monkey)
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=445v5TdRpfDaCX3fk_2bVcqA_3d_3d

Its a pretty short survey, but the first question is a stinker. As my final comment on the survey I asked this question,

How come EI is still using SurveyMonkey for surveys when we have an excellent indigenous product in the shape of PollDaddy?

PutPlace is an avid user of Amazon web services applications. Yesterday, in London, we got an opportunity to talk about how we use Amazon here at PutPlace.

Key takeaways for me from listening to the other speakers were,

• Using Amazon doesn’t insulate you from failures
• Lots of people using S3 and EC2, not so many on SimpleDB and SQS
• The per-transaction fees can really start to hurt if you start to get traction
• SimpleDB is a cool place to store your grid topology dynamically especially if you use another provider alongside Amazon
• EC2 nodes come up really quickly compared to other grid providers
• Lots of people use Nagios with EC2 for monitoring

The Amazon guys (Simone and Adam with a later appearance by Werner) gave strong hints that we would see all the following features in 2009,

• EC2 hosting in Europe
• An Amazon supported Content Distribution Network
• Integrated Load balancing and Monitoring

Tom speaks the truth about the loony policies of the IEDR.