Via Gareth Coen, I just heard about two events being held later this month - on the 27th and the 29th of February in Dublin and Belfast respectively - called xCellerate 2008. The central theme is “Bringing Silicon Valley to Ireland” and it is geared towards Irish technology startups. There will be angel and venture capital investors attending from both sides of the Atlantic, as well as successful Internet entrepreneurs on the panel. To receive a 40% discount on registration, use the code “web2″. (There is a small problem in that this event clashes with the Irish Web Technologies Conference at which I’m due to speak.)
Archive for the 'Ireland' Category
I attended an inaugural dinner last Tuesday for a proposed new association to represent those in the interactive digital content / media delivery and consumption space (thanks to Paul Walsh for organising, and to Microsoft / Blacknight for sponsoring). I was happy to meet some new people and to talk to many familiar faces at Jaipur (see Paul Campbell’s headshots).
As both an academic and a some-time developer, I was keen to see how third-level institutions and students could benefit from such an organisation, and I was also interested to find out how content providers such as boards.ie could represent their interests to other members, including mobile services and legislators. But I also tried to nail down in some manner what domain this association would target (ignoring the whole “name” issue): was it mobile content, web content, broadcast content, and was there a division or an overlap with other representative groups (IIA, etc.)? I didn’t get an exact response from anyone but I think this will evolve in the coming weeks…
More reports from Maryrose Lyons, Paul Campbell, Joe Drumgoole, Dennis Deery, and Paul Walsh himself.
We recently announced the programme schedule for the 5th International Conference on Social Software (and the co-located workshop on social network portability), to be held in Cork in six weeks time. We have an interesting set of keynote speakers and invited panellists so far (with one keynote to be confirmed).
Also, the list of accepted presentations at the conference is varied and interesting, with some familiar faces and some new ones shown below. (In all, we accepted six presentations from practitioners, two from developers and six from academics. We’ve interspersed these in the schedule, but grouped by related topics.)
Finally, I’d like to thank our reviewers, without whose help the selection would have been an impossible task. (The breakdown of our committee was seven academics and 15 non-academics).
If you are interested in participating, I’d advise booking tickets as soon as possible as we do have an upper limit of 200 attendees. We will have a drinks reception in UCC’s Aula Maxima on the Sunday, followed by an optional blogger’s dinner for those interested. On Monday, the main conference dinner will be held in the Kingsley Hotel.
Call for Participation for XTech 2008
Proposals for presentations and tutorials are invited for XTech 2008, Europe’s premier web technologies conference. The deadline for submitting proposals is January 25th, 2008.
XTech 2008 will be held from May 6-9th 2008, in Dublin, Ireland.
XTech’s theme this year is “The Web on the Move”, focusing on the emerging portability of data, applications and identity on the internet. We will explore the benefits, issues, practicalities and fun of a web built on open standards, open source and commodity technology.
XTech presentations should inspire, educate and challenge. Your audience will be people like you, responsible for steering the technological direction of their organizations and the web as a whole.
Last year’s schedule can be viewed on the XTech 2007 web site.
Please direct any questions to the conference chair, Edd Dumbill.
View the calls for participation and submit a proposal
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
- Social platforms
- Design patterns for social software
- Social network interoperability
- Internet application platforms (Facebook F8, OpenSocial, etc.)
- Identity management
- OpenID
- Practical security
- OAuth
- Ajax
- jQuery, YUI, other toolkits
- Offline applications
- Comet
- Professional Javascript
- Flex
- The web of data
- Collective intelligence
- Semantic technologies
- Search
- Markup and meaning
- Freebase, Twine, Google Base
- The place of XML on the web
- Data and databases
- Client-side databases
- REST-oriented databases (e.g. CouchDB)
- XML and RDF
- Messaging architectures
- XQuery
- Operations and programming
- Web application frameworks
- Virtualization and appliances
- Application scaling
- Multicore and concurrency oriented programming
- Mobile devices
- Commodity mobiles
- Android, iPhone
- Hardware hacking and personal prototyping
- Geolocation
- Getting the mobile mindset
(Note: DERI will be a co-host of this event.)
John O’Donohue, poet and philosopher, is being laid to rest in my home parish of Fanore in the Burren, County Clare today. John passed away suddenly last week while on holiday in France. I remember John as a friendly, kind and intelligent man, and I was lucky enough to attend some of his inspirational sermons when he visited Fanore church during his time as a priest. He received his PhD from Tubingen in 1990, was a renowned expert on the philosopher Hegels, and he wrote many influential books on Celtic spirituality. John was certainly the most important ambassador for the the Burren and Connemara that I can think of, and he also spoke Irish as his native language while living in County Galway. I know that many others will join with me in sending sincere thoughts to his family and friends at this time.
You can also read this tribute to John on the Huffington Post, and view some recent articles about John from the Galway Advertiser (1, 2). KLCS-TV, a PBS station in Los Angeles, will feature a special tribute to John at 8:00 PM tonight on the show “Between the Lines”. There will be a public memorial service for John in Galway on February 2nd. More information on John is available from his official website and (in German) from Wikipedia.de. You can also listen to interviews with John from NPR in 1999 and 2005.
I’m happy to announce that we have four interesting and varied keynote speakers lined up for the BlogTalk 2008 conference on social software in Cork this March.
- Nova Spivack - Founder and CEO, Radar Networks
Nova is the entrepreneur behind the Twine “knowledge networking” application, which allows users to share, organise, and find information with people they trust. He will talk about semantic social software for consumers. - Rashmi Sinha - Founder, Uzanto
Rashmi led the team that produced SlideShare, a popular presentation-sharing service that some have described as “YouTube for PowerPoint”. She will talk about lessons learned from designing social software applications. - Salim Ismail - Head of Brickhouse, Yahoo!
Salim is a successful investor and entrepreneur, with expertise in a variety of early-stage startups and Web 2.0 companies including Confabb and PubSub. He will talk about entrepreneurship and social media. - Final speaker has been selected but has yet to be 100% confirmed.
You can see further details and longer biographies of the keynote speakers at 2008.blogtalk.net/invitedspeakers. We will also have two invited panel sessions, the details of which will be announced shortly.
I’m happy to announce that Gerry Shanahan has recently been appointed as Managing Director of boards.ie Ltd. We are also now looking for a full-time tech developer with LAMP expertise.
boards.ie has increased its daily visits from 30k per day in November 2005 to around 60k per day at present. Thanks to all our readers, posters and moderators for your continued support.
Well done to the Paddy’s Valley Irish entrepreneurs who gave great pitches to venture capitalists in the Bay Area. And thanks to Damien for the videos. Here are the links.
- Joe Drumgoole, PutPlace (pitch, Q&A, site)
- Marcus Mac Innes, Pix.ie (pitch, site)
- Jan Blanchard, Tourist Republic (pitch, Q&A, site)
- Hélène Haughney, Nubiq (pitch, site)
- Alan O’Rourke, Toddle (pitch, site)
There are also some “behind the scenes” vodcasts at paddyvalley.blip.tv and an associated social network at paddysvalley.ning.com.
We had a very interesting event in DERI last week - the DERI Entrepreneurial Forum #2 - where six CEOs from the west of Ireland gave us their views on entrepreurship. There was some frank sharing of professional and personal experiences on both starting and running a company in Ireland.
The speakers were Jan Blanchard, CEO of Tourist Republic; John Brosnan, CEO of Netfort Technologies; Greg Cawley, CEO of Traventec; Julian Ellison, CEO of Tablane; Alan Duggan, CEO of Nephin Games; and Karl Flannery, CEO of Storm.
I think it was very useful for buddying entrepreneurs in DERI to engage these CEOs and to exchange ideas about their “dos and do nots”. (We even got some book recommendations from Jan!)
(Aside: God, I hate it when Google do their link tracking stuff for searches. I just want to be able to right click and copy a link, not have to copy some text on a page or click through, CTRL+L and CTRL+C. Stop it Google, you have enough tracking information already!)
A WebCamp “Social Network Portability” workshop has been announced to be co-located with BlogTalk on 2nd March 2008. You can view the wiki page for this event.
“Social network portability” is a term that has been used to describe the ability to reuse one’s own profile and contacts across various social networking sites and social media applications. At this workshop, presentations will be combined with breakout sessions to discuss all aspects of portability for social networking sites (including accounts, friends, activities / content, and applications).
Topics of relevance include, but are not limited to, social network centralisation versus decentralisation, OpenSocial, microformats including XHTML Friends Network (XFN) and hCard, authentication and authorisation, OpenID single sign-on, Bloom filters, categorising friends and personas, FOAF, ownership of your published content, SIOC, the OpenFriend format, the Social Network Aggregation Protocol (SNAP), aggregation and privacy, permissions and context, and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).
You can register for this workshop in conjunction with BlogTalk 2008. If you are interested in speaking or otherwise participating in the workshop, please add your name under the Speakers or Participants headings on the wiki page at http://webcamp.org/SocialNetworkPortability.
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