Copacetic

The Hothouse Venture Programme is a year-long comprehensive support and incubation programme for graduate entrepreneurs with industry experience and a technology-based business idea. There are 16 places available on each Programme. Participants must have left full-time employment and be working full-time on developing their new business. The programme offers participants a number of supports including:

Incubation space in the entrepreneurial environment of Docklands Innovation Park on East Wall Road

• Management development training facilitated by industry experts
• Strategic business counselling
• Access to an extensive enterprise and investment network
• Access to the resources of DIT, including technologies to licence, student teams, facilities such as lab space and equipment
• The opportunity to be conferred with a CPD post-graduate diploma in New Business Development
• Access to grant funding through Enterprise Ireland CORD grant which could provide you with up to 50% of your previous year’s salary paid to you on a monthly basis over the course of the Programme.

The guideline requirements for this grant are

• Potential to have turnover of €1million and 10 employees within three years
• Have strong export potential
• Have some new or unique technology

Please click here for further information about the Programme.

Hothouse 18 will commence on Thursday 24th September 2009. The deadline for submission of applications is Friday 31st July. We will be interviewing applicants over the course of July and August and making final decisions before the end of August, in order that those that may need to give notice at a current job have ample time to work out their notice period. If you have any questions or would like to discuss the Programme in more detail please contact Sara at 01 2401 307 or sara.hogan@hothouse.ie.

To apply for the Hothouse Venture programme, click here.

Dylan Collins of Jolt Games crystallizes my views on what needs to be done in Ireland with startups in the Irish Independent today,

Collins argues passionately about why Ireland needs to be providing greater support for its young technology entrepreneurs. "If Ireland wants to achieve this knowledge economy it should be prepared to invest at low seed levels.

"If Enterprise Ireland was to make 200 or 300 grants available every year at €50,000 a pop for entrepreneurs to build an online product and go to market. For €50,000, you can get three or four guys in a room for three or four months and they will build a product and go to market. If we had 300 of these groups every year, you would create a digital ecosystem.

"In the US, groups like Y Combinator are funding businesses at low levels and, in Europe, The Founders Fund is doing this.

"There are venture capitalists in the US waiting to bet on young businesses. It’s remarkable this hasn’t happened in Ireland yet. We should be supporting our young right now, instead of scaring them to death.

"For €10m a year, you could have 200 companies a year and 5pc of them could emerge as Ireland’s answer to Microsoft or Nokia," says Collins.

We recently had a blocked drain that required sluicing copious amounts of water through it (as well as a bit of poking with a sharp stick) in order to unblock it. No problemo. Unfortunately the copious water sluicing drained our water tank in the attic.

What does this mean? Well you get airlocks in the pipe system. Airlocks mean no water. A bubble of air sits in the pipe between the tap and the tank and blocks the water getting through. So you need to get rid of the air. God bless Google, lets just whack in “plumbing airlocks” into Google and get lots of hits.

The basic theory is you use the pressure in the working tap to force the airlock out of the the blocked tap. Requires pipes and jubilee clips, basically you need to have been a plumber once.

However nobody seems to get airlocks in mixer taps. Well I had a brainwave tonight. So as indicated in the picture attach a balloon to the tap. Then;

1. Open the airlocked tap
2. Open the tap with water flowing
3. Let the balloon fill
4. Close the tap with water flowing
5. Now with the airlocked tap still open, squeeze the balloon to allow the water to force the air out
6. Rinse and repeat until the balloon starts to fill because water has started to flow

Sorted.

A few hundred quid in plumbing fees saved and me with a big shit-eating DIY grin on my face.

This is pretty good news for anybody in Third Level who wants to stretch their budgets. Amazon is now offering grants to enable free use of their Cloud Infrastructure.

When I entered college in 1978, the state of the art in campus computing consisted of a room full of IBM 029 Key Punch machines, an IBM 370 Model 168 mainframe, and job queues where my card deck would wait for hours in order to get a few seconds of precious CPU time. Today’s kids have it a lot easier, first with desktop PCs and now with cloud computing providing them access to as many CPU cycles and as much RAM as they need for their class projects and research.

Our new AWS in Education program is designed to allow the academic community to take advantage of the Amazon Web Services for teaching and for research. Educators, academic researchers, students, and student entrepreneurs from all over the world can apply for free AWS usage credits in the form of teaching grants, research grants, and project grants. Read on to learn more about what we’ve put together.

More importantly the small print says Amazon offers :

Solutions for university administrators looking to use cloud computing to be more efficient and cost-effective in the university’s IT Infrastructure

Jeff Barr  confirmed to me by email today that these grants are available to Irish Institutions.

Go apply.

Came across the Odysseus website today. (tagged a lot on twitter with #ODCSSS). Check out their mission statement,

Odysseus is innovative trans-institutional approach to the provision of a feeder pathways from undergraduate research experience into postgraduate research in new 4th Level Ireland Masters and PhD programmes

First of all there seems to be a second “a” in the first line. Second its unintelligible gibberish.

I much prefer the paragraph buried in the body text.

The primary goal of this school is to afford exceptional undergraduate students the opportunity to participate and contribute to exciting yet challenging research projects at leading research facilities and inspire them to go on to undertake research careers

I propose they throw away the first and use the second. the second paragraph describes a pretty good idea.