Copacetic

From the National Digital Research Centre website:

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

The NDRC is currently calling for project proposals under three newly launched programmes:

1. Entrepreneurial Internships Programme

2. CTR Feasibility Programme

3. Collaborative Translational Research Programme

1. Entrepreneurial Internships: This programme is designed to develop small scale projects with aspiring entrepreneurs to produce commercially focused applications in the web and mobile space. This investment programme is an avenue for individuals or small teams with links to a third level institution to pursue potential opportunities from idea to application in a supportive environment and among a set of peers. For more information about our Entrepreneurial Internship programme visit this page.

2. CTR Feasibility projects: We are investing in a programme to develop projects with established academics and companies that are potential collaborative translational research projects, but would benefit from upfront problem-solution and market validation. The focus of projects within the programme will be in the areas of health, education, entertainment and the environment. For more information about our CTR Feasibility programme visit this page.

3. Collaborative Translational Research projects: Having built a portfolio of collaborative translational research projects, the National Digital Research Centre is embarking on a second investment phase in further collaborative translational research.  As such, the NDRC is seeking to facilitate further collaborations between established academics and industry partners to develop commercially-focused research projects in the application areas of health, education, entertainment and the environment.

In this specific call, the NDRC is particularly interested in receiving proposals for environmental technologies – specifically targeted at energy efficiency as distinct from green energy generation – in a digital context. We are not, however, excluding good ideas in other digital application areas. For more information about our Collaborative Translational Research programme visit this page.

To register and access online forms for all of these programmes visit this page.

I attended TechCrunch 50 this year alongside my business partner Eamon Leonard and another presenting company, VidSchool which Sean Fee of Ifoods/LookandTaste fame is involved in.

Pat Phelan originally intended to join and we booked a Monster House on Fillmore and Fulton. Pat (the consummate deal maker) had to pull out at the last moment which left Eamon and I (of CloudSplit) sharing this mansion with Paul, Moneesh and Sean of VidSchool.

As failed entrants to the onstage event we had both been offered slots in the DemoPit. You get one day to showcase your company in a separate area from the stage through which the attendees have to pass to get to the auditorium. We chose Tuesday (as opposed to Monday) this gave us a chance  to attend on Monday and suss the place our prior to our full day.

Tuesday duly arrived and we headed down to the show. Its a brutal schedule with the show opening at 7.00am and running until 7.00pm the following evening. There is lots of advice to absorb on how best to pitch at TC50, but we followed some simple rules,

• Bring a pull up stand and put your message and pitch all in the top third. Nobody can see below this point. Many of the TC50 companies only used the default table logo provided by TC50. I found myself ignoring companies when I could not discern what the offering was.
• We brought along some tic-tacs that happened to be in the company colours. I don’t thing they got people to come up to our stand but being able to give something to people who listened did leave the whole presenting transaction with a nice soft end.
• You need two people. Otherwise food breaks/toilet visits leave the stand unmanned. There is always action in the DemoPit area so someone needs to be on stand at all time.
• Be prepared to get you pitch away in a few minutes

The Good

We went looking for validation of the CloudSplit offering and received that whole heartedly. We met key influencers at the investor, partner and customer level. This level of exposure to people WHO-REALLY-KNOW the software sector was invaluable.

Just the opportunity to present 200 times or more to genuinely insightful individuals who could really grasp what we were doing was a fantastic education. We now have a crystal clear vision of what we need to do in V1.0 and a goto market strategy honed by hours of feedback.

It also helped that the universal feedback was that CloudSplit was genuinely breaking new ground in a valuable and emerging market.

I would definitely target and time the launch of any new company so that it aligned with TC50.

The Bad

The DemoPit works as a competition in which the conference attendees get chips which they donate to the most interesting projects. The two with the most chips on each day get to present the product on stage. Its a nice idea but is open to all sorts of gaming ranging from booth hotties simply trading on their looks and accosting people for chips without pitching to wholesale buying of chips. Basically you can forget getting on stage on merit alone.

I can’t fix the booth hottie problem but it should be easy enough to fix the chip buying problem by making the containers piggy banks rather than jars so that once chips are donated they can’t be retrieved to be resold.

I also think there would be more liquidity in the market if the attending companies were compelled to donate their chips to other companies rather then bunging them into their own jar. This could be achieved by only giving chips to DemoPit companies on the day they are *not* presenting.

On plus side we got our first chip quite early on from Mark Kvamme of Sequoia so we really did care too much about winning or losing the competition after that piece of validation.

The Ugly

The awards ceremony was a shambolic disgrace. Mike Arrington threw all his toys out of the pram and stormed of stage. Why ? Who cares. It was an insult to the winners of the awards and made Arrington the story instead of the winners. It soured the whole event for me.

If I was Mike I’d be keeping a pretty low profile as well.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6622696&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

New Technologies, Platforms and Delivery Modes presented by Joe Drumgoole, CEO of Cloudsplit.com from Path Pacific on Vimeo.

We (Eamon, Sean, Moneesh, Paul) are all back at base Fillmore after a punishing 7 to 7 session on the DemoPit. Unlike normal conferences there is no let up at TC50 so ourselves and VidSchool were cracking our jawbones all day long.

Exhausting but very rewarding work. Both companies recieved huge validation for their offerings and like most SV events I have attended our calendars are full for the next few days.

The straight juice, there is no better place to launch a tech company.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the CRO database in the past few weeks, so I wrote this python script called croscraper.py to do a quick lookup on companies.

Usage is:

backus:~/Documents/workspace/CloudSplit/src/croscrape jpd$ python croscraper.py -h
Usage: croscraper.py <list of files>

Options:
 --version             show program's version number and exit
 -h, --help            show this help message and exit
 -c COMPANY, --company=COMPANY
 return information on company named <company>
 -d, --debug           turn on debugging
backus:~/Documents/workspace/CloudSplit/src/croscrape jpd$

To look up a specific company name or part of a name try,

backus:~/Documents/workspace/CloudSplit/src/croscrape jpd$ python croscraper.py -c cloud
{'Number': '44950', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'BLUE CLOUD LIMITED', 'Address': '46, LOWER LEESON STREET, DUBLIN 2.  '}
{'Number': '332318', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'CLOUD 9 DESIGN LIMITED', 'Address': '21 CLOISTER AVENUE BLACKROCK CO DUBLIN '}
{'Number': '102707', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'CLOUD DANCER LIMITED', 'Address': '18, MERRION SQUARE, DUBLIN 2.  '}
{'Number': '&', 'Type': '361040', 'Name': 'CLOUD ELECTRICAL ', 'Address': ' COMMUNICATION SERVICES LIMITED'}
{'Number': '472475', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'CLOUD IGNITE LIMITED', 'Address': 'BAYVIEW HOUSE 49 NORTH STRAND ROAD DUBLIN 3 '}
{'Number': '466027', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'THE CLOUD NETWORKS (IRELAND) LIMITED', 'Address': "C/O O'MAHONY DONNELLY 10 MCCURTAIN HILL CLONAKILTY CO CORK"}
{'Number': '328355', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'CLOUD NINE BEDS LIMITED', 'Address': 'Unit T1 Coolmine Industrial Estate Clonsilla Road Dublin 15'}
{'Number': '124102', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'CLOUD NINE HAIRLINE (SALES) LIMITED', 'Address': 'BALLYMOUNT ROAD, DUBLIN 12.  '}
{'Number': '55964', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'CLOUD NINE PROMOTIONS LIMITED', 'Address': '********NO ADDRESS DETAILS******* ********NO ADDRESS DETAILS******* ********NO ADDRESS DETAILS******* ********NO ADDRESS DETAILS*******'}
{'Number': '311145', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'DILL CLOUD LIMITED', 'Address': '6 RICHMOND ROAD DRUMCONDRA DUBLIN 3 '}
{'Number': '316954', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'MUSHROOM CLOUD PRODUCTIONS LIMITED', 'Address': '3RD FLOOR WESTLAND SQUARE DUBLIN 2 '}
{'Number': '44954', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'RED CLOUD LIMITED', 'Address': '6, CAVENDISH ROW, DUBLIN.  '}
{'Number': '433681', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'ROLLIN CLOUD LIMITED', 'Address': '44 BELGRAVE SQUARE WEST RATHMINES DUBLIN 6 '}
{'Number': '175728', 'Type': 'Company', 'Name': 'SOLAR CLOUD LIMITED', 'Address': '38, ENNAFORT ROAD, RAHENY, DUBLIN 5. '}
backus:~/Documents/workspace/CloudSplit/src/croscrape jpd$

Gee look at all those cloud companies

It is left as an exercise to the reader to port the program to Google App Engine or get more data out of the CRO. I may do some more work on this in the future.

You will need Python installed to run this program. It has only been tested on a Mac.

Myself and Eamon Leonard (with the gang from EchoLibre) have been cooking up a startup to capitalise on the huge growth in demand for Cloud Computing.

Our guess is that understanding the cost of the cloud is going to exercise people greatly in the future and CLoudSplit has been created to address that need.

CloudSplit will,

• Track your cloud spend in real time
• Give you a clear understanding of what you are spending and where
• Send you alerts if your spending exceeds a threshold you define
• Initiate a stoploss to cut off your cloud spend should you exceed your stop loss threshold

We plan to expand on these services in the future and are targeting users of Infrastructure as a Service products such as Amazon and Azure. So if you use those services and you want to understand your costs swing on over to CloudSplit.com and register your interest.

You can also follow us on twitter.