I had the  great pleasure to have one of the founders of Muzu.tv, Ciaran Bollard attend the same HotHouse incubator program as myself, so it was great to get the following via email.

MUZU.TV is LIVE… at last!

MUZU.TV is now open in the UK and Ireland, so you can now Register at www.muzu.tv

WATCH – Gigs, Interviews, Behind the Scenes, Music Videos, Documentaries
PROGRAM – Your Music TV channels
BROADCAST – Your Music TV on the web

-Choose from thousands of legally available music videos, documentaries, live footage and interviews

-Add videos to your MUZU TV Player

-You can also Upload your own music content

-Embed the MUZU TV Player into your site

We pay you half the net revenue of all ad money generated from your stuff on MUZU.TV

WHAT TO DO NEXT:

REGISTER at www.muzu.tv

1. BROWSE the site and ADD videos to your MUZU TV Player (MY TV)

To add a video, simply click the + icon on your MUZU TV Player and the video currently playing will be added to your TV Player

2. UPLOAD your own vidoes to MUZU TV, by clicking on ‘UPLOAD’

3. EMBED your MUZU TV Player onto your site.

Go to ‘MY TV‘ and click the Embed button on the top right of your TV Player and the embed code will appear. Copy and Paste this code into your website or MySpace.

You can also build and customise your own MUZU TV Network and earn revenue on

content you own.  

For a step-by-step guide to all things MUZU TV, just click here, or contact support@muzu.tv with questions or feedback.

To start earning money with MUZU TV just email content@muzu.tv and we’ll send you our contract. 

Thanks,
The MUZU Team

MUZU TV – Your Music Network

Where bands, artists, festivals, venues, broadcasters, music magazines and more broadcast their music TV on the web.

WATCH – Gigs, Interviews, Behind the Scenes, Music Videos, Documentaries
CREATE – Your own Music TV channels
SHARE – Your Music TV on the web

Had a great first Open Coffee in the Digital Depot, Mike Butcher from Techcrunch UK was over and did a quick video of some of the hub startup founders. PutPlace provided the cakes and pastries and despite the weather we had a pretty good turnout.

Will definitely host again.

Hope to see you all at CrunchLudd tonight in 4 Dame Lane.

Iona sold for 162m.

I returned to Ireland in 1998 after 12 years working in London. For the previous few years I had watched in awe as the Iona behemoth had hoovered up technical talent from all over the globe, to create the single largest pool of super smart geeks Ireland has probably ever known.

A year before I arrived back they had gone public with some fanfare and there are plenty of good friends of mine still living in houses bought of the back of cash from options converted and exercised in the early boom years of 1999 and 2000.

The premise was connecting disparate lumps of a software together, a kind of philosophers stone that would glue your mess of corporate systems together.  The Object Management Group (OMG) defined a standard (called CORBA) and Chris Horn, Annrai O’Toole and Sean Baker along with some willing helpers built the first commercial implementation.

When you look at the founding members of the OMG, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Apple Computer, American Airlines you realise that straightaway Iona’s product had its market sector defined for it.  All they had to do was man the phones and the orders flooded in.

Consider this, in a much more stringent capital market, with no Irish VC industry to speak of, Iona managed to take a company public without raising any venture capital whatsoever. The old saw at Iona was that to double sales you just needed to double the number of people answering the phones.

Once public they had their ups and downs and sailed up on the back of the dot com boom, unfortunately their fall was a might as everyone else’s and they never really recovered.

Where did it go wrong for Iona? They found it impossible to separate themselves from their CORBA legacy and as a result missed the boat on Java, EJB (they apparently turned down an opportunity to buy WebLogic at one point) and finally the Web itself.

But without Iona, where would the Irish Software Industry be today? Iona people form the backbone of a whole new generation of Irish software companies.

Here’s hoping we see similar success from this generation.

We’re delighted to host OpenCoffee here at the Digital Depot on James St. Hope to see you all here on Thursday.

Fergus Burns sent me a link to this (long) article by Steve Yegge called "Done and Gets Things Smart". Its a rephrasing of the Joel Spolsky adage for hiring engineers, they have to be "Smart and get things done".

Steve’s premise is that we all suffer from the Dunning Kruger effect.

Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.

Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.

Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.

If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

So as interviewers we are screwed, because we can’t recognise our own incompetence.

He then goes on recommend hiring these super human seed engineers having robbed you of all hope of succeeding in that task.

So, first of all Dunning  Kruger is probably eliminated to some extent by being aware of Dunning Kruger. Second of all Competency based interviewing can address many of Steve’s concerns.

What is competency based interviewing? Well we define a set of competencies we expect our hires to demonstrate e.g. writes great code, can deliver products on team, works effectively in teams etc. etc.  You can be more or less detailed in the definition of your competencies. In Oracle the competencies list was broken down by level and role and ran to many pages.

So you have define what you want, but how do you test for it at interview time? You use STARs. A STAR is a Situation or Task, the Action you took and the Result. You are  looking for specific activity that the individual was engaged in. So you immediately drill into sentences that start with "we", "the team", "the group" etc. The essence of the process is to establish what the individual did.

So you get the situation or task and you found out how they responded and what the result was. e.g. did they succeed, was the customer happy, was money made etc.

Once you have accumulated a bunch of STARs you look for contrary evidence. If the candidate has convinced you of his programming prowess, lets look for examples of failure, delay, poor performance. More importantly if you think you have a complete duffer, see if you can find where they might have succeeded.

On of the best forums for drilling into a programmers technical knowledge is a presentation. At PutPlace we ask for a sample of work or a presentation on a previous project. Then the engineering team grills the candidate for an hour or more.

So what do we look for in PutPlace?

• Technical excellence : A demonstrable track record of successful product delivery where the individual was the lead engineer
• Innovation: The ability to create novel solutions to significant product challenges
• Team Work : No prima donnas, the people must be engaging and socially equipped to integrate with the team
• Enthusiastic: a bit of vavavoom goes a long way. Energy is infectious
• Discipline: The ability to control their own work without micro management
• Magic: Something special they bring to the team that we don’t have already. Different for everbody, but if you don’t have a spark you are not going to make it over the line.

For the seed engineers that Steve talks about, you need people who can transcend mere code cutting and take a whole product view that encompasses user experience, product roadmap, process, delivery, scheduling and user delight.

How do you find people like this? Well if your like me and you’ve run five successful product teams in 5  companies in the last ten years then you have a big black book of the good guys. Be aware none of these guys is never going to appear on monster.ie. If you’re starting out do what Steve says and ask around.

I already have my next 5 engineers tagged for hiring, some I’ve spoken to, some I just know about. If you don’t know who your next 5 are, you are in trouble.

As avid users of Firefox, PutPlace is delighted to help sponsor the FireFox 3 Dublin launch party alongside Blacknight, Segala, Wubud and BT.

The venue is CineWorld on Parnell St.

Registration to attend is required. Over 100 people have already registered so make sure you get your name on the list before it’s closed.

The IIEA has been soliciting comments to a number of questions they posed to the great and the good in the Irish software sector. After receiving their email for the third time today (once from the ISA, once from the Digital Media Forum and once directly), I put together this response.

1. What are the current policy (or other) opportunities & challenges
that Ireland faces in the digital sector?

We compete in a global market place where the rate of creation of experts in the digital sector (which I think needs clearer definition BTW) in countries like India and China far outstrips our own. Our key challenge is to do an end run around the numbers game and position ourselves in key markets that play to our strengths and nullify the numerical advantages of our global competitors. Our first clear advantage is the baked in creativity of the Irish population. At a recent conference in Dublin (http://www.knowledgecity.ie/) one speaker made a clear link between a city’s artistic and creative output and their business productivity and innovation. Ireland is clearly a leader in this area and yet we kill  our (digital) children at birth by starving them of the oxygen they need, capital. Worse we discourage would be enterpreneurs by littering the startup arena with the carcasses  of failed companies who died for lack of money. Two recent examples should serve to demonstrate the problem. CleverCactus was a company started by Diego Duval and Paul Kenny some years ago. The company collapsed because it failed to raise funds. Diego Duval then moved to the US where he was head hunted by Marc Andressen (founder of Netscape) to build his software for his new company Ning.

More recently we have the boys of Auctomatic who moved straight past GO to start their company in the US because their chances of success were so much higher.  Most VCs work on a 10 to 1 ratio, that is, invest in ten companies to get one big winner who will fund all the rest. The government needs to take the same approach and at the same time it has to realise that the matching funding model promulgated by EI will not address the infant mortality or “failure to start” issues that are pandemic in the Irish software industry.

So we need more capital at an earlier stage without strings attached. This is a key requirement for a thriving startup industry. The matching funds model works really well as you move up the value chain and stops the government making large investment mistakes.

2. Which emerging trends are potentially dominant in the digital sector?

The key trends are,

• Software as a Service: Nobody wants to own software, they want the capability that the software can delivery. Software as a service eliminates the need to have a large maintainance staff, capital expenditure on hardware and locked down long term commitments. The old school packaged software industry (where Microsoft made its bread and butter) based its business model on the large bundle of highly valued intellectual property it delivered, and devil take the high road if you only needed 10% of it. Open Source is changing those economics.
• Open Source : Once you have software as a service you are no longer concerned with creating intellectual property, instead you must deliver consistent service with high value SLAs. Capital acquisition costs of proprietary software packages can hugely impact the bottom line in such businesses. As a result we see Linux. Apache, MySQL, Perl, Python and PHP (the LAMP stack) proliferating in such businesses. So we see Amazon, Oracle, IBM. Google, Yahoo and even Apple adopting open source stacks as their defacto platform creating a virtuous circle where these companies rotate back in modifications to the software they adopted.
• Web 2.0 : The ability to interact with software on the web as if it was your desktop has essentially made the desktop and the home PC a redundant cache of data. Web 2.0 promotes the creation of peer relationships between people, data and processes, which is the natural way we interact with the world.
• Cloud Computing : The ability to host everything in the cloud and the advent of unlimited computing power available to the man in the street (via services like Amazon’s S3 and EC2 service) completely changes the dynamics of launching a web business. Now scaling to 100,000 users is a running cost rather than a capital cost (previously require 1m euros or more up front spend) and a succesful business can compete on a global scale with the biggest competitors overseas.
• Global Distribution: The ability to reach a global audience from a home PC complete disintermediates the old channels of communication removing the “validity” of traditonal media networks.
• Simple Content Creation: Any moderately technically smart individual can now create, edit, mashup and publish rich media out including video, graphics, audio and art work with little training and no special tools

3. In which niches can Ireland become a world leader?

Software is the best way to leverage our brain power. Hardware plays are too capital intensive and the production centres that are cheapest are typically based in the Asian basin. But what kind of software? Well with software we can play in any of the spaces above, However the current focus of the sector is on wholly proprietary software development which is dangerous direction to move in when the rest of the world is going Open Source. Our geographic location and the availability of significant wind and water power generation resources could make us an easy choice for future data centres and  if I had to pick one  of the above areas I would focus on cloud computing (the presence of Google’s European HQ doubly strengthens our hand in this area).

4. What is the most important strategic investment of relevance to the
digital sector that Ireland could make at this point to enhance its
competitiveness in the next 10 years?

• Focus on generating more maths and science graduates
• Get a “back to work| program going for women who have fallen out of the workforce to have families. This program should include retraining and incentives to employers to encourage utilisation of this “lost generation”.
• More hard cash (no matching funds required) to early stage (pre revenue) startups
• Univeral low cost broadband to create an early stage Irish market for Irish software products
• Green energy (cheap, green power makes us a natural location for data centres)
• Some mechanism to encourage adoption of Irish Software products within the EU
  

5. What are the next three steps that Government should take?

• Tighter integration of SFI, IDA and EI activities
• Discourage the Third level Institutions obsession with Intellectual property, patents, copyrights etc. SFI should incent Universities using different measures that are not related to IP and focus more on creating successful industries based on the software sector
• Make indigenous software production a cornerstone of the governments economic strategy

Scoot on over to the PutPlace blog and see what we have to say about the new MobileMe service  from Apple.

Silicon Republic reports recently that,

Enterprise Ireland said that to date it has committed some €148.75m to eight seed and venture funds which have succeeded in raising in excess of €500m for investment in early-stage and growing companies

Feargal O Moráin, executive director of Enterprise Ireland, goes on to say,

The 2007-2012 Seed and Venture Capital (VC) Programme, the third such programme to date, has been extremely successful in raising finance for investment in Irish companies at all stages of development … With over half a billion raised for investment to date, this is of particular benefit to seed and early-stage Irish companies

Eh, no Fergal this is of no benefit to  seed and early stage Irish companies. I have no record of any of the VCs that have raised funds investing in any seed or early stage companies to date. The reality is once EI throws it money into the VC pot is has zero control over how that money is disbursed by the VCs. Nor should it have, that’s not howVCs interact with their limited partners (which is what EI is).

Luckily we have the director general of the IVCA, Regina Breheny who offers a more honest assessment of where this money will go (again in Silicon Republic),

Most of our investments would be in software firms that can grow to scale, not in dot.com companies or because someone has a nice widget … Funding in Irish companies is at its highest now since 2001, but much of these are follow-on investments in existing companies. There is still a lot of work to be done in raising money to seed new start-ups. Venture capitalists are currently raising money but it’s debatable how much of these funds will go into new plays in the next five years

So thanks for the millions EI, but we are unlikely to put it where you want it to go.

I’m all for a thriving VC market in Ireland but my own view is that EI’s co-investment strategy is a more effective vehicle for ensuring that Irish early stage and seed startups get the required funding they need.

It will be very interesting to review the protfolios of the irish VCs (Delta Partners, the AIB Seed Capital Fund, Atlantic Bridge Ventures, Kernel Capital Partners and Fountain Healthcare Partners)  who have taken the EI shilling at the end of their current investment cycle.

I met Caelen King at the recent Web 2.0 Expo conference. Caelen is a member of the Baltimore Software alumni and has recently launched http://whatclinic.com, a place to Compare Dentists and Cosmetic Clinics Worldwide.

Sounds dull (unless you have a toothache or want bigger breasts) but Caelen really knows his customer acquistion stuff and has some very clever ideas about growing his market. Great to see Irish companies competing in this kind of space.

Update:

WhatClinic.com has recently expanded into Dentists in the UK and Plastic Surgery in the UK.