it@cork Annual Conference Announced

October 7, 2008 – 1:59 pm

The it@cork annual conference has just been announced. Its title is “GREEN IT: Reduce CO2, Raise Profits” and it’s on November 26 in the lovely Radisson SAS Hotel in Cork.

The line-up looks like an excellent mix with the focus being clearly on Green as it relates to IT and Business. I particularly like the profit angle given the turmoil the world is going through right now

The is an Early Bird Discount available - Book on or before October 31 and it’s €250 for members, €350 for non members.

The agenda is as follows:

07.30 Heads of IT breakfast sponsored by Certification Europe

08.00 Arrival coffee & registration

08.45 Welcome from Donal Manning, Chairman, it@cork

08.55 SETTING THE SCENE George Lee, Economics Editor, RTE

09.35 - Green IT: Moving Beyond the 2% Solution, Douglas Neal, Research Fellow, Leading Edge Programme

10.05 - SMART2020: ICT and climate change. Opportunities or Threat? Chris Tuppen, Director Sustainable Development, BT

10.35 Q&A Moderated by Tom Raftery. Lead analyst, energy and sustainability practice, Redmonk

10.50 Coffee sponsored by Complete Telecom

11 20 - Virtual Worlds: making organizations greener, Pierre-Olivier Carles, Co-Chief Stonfield InWorld

11.40 - Measuring the energy footprint of everything on Earth, Gavin Starks, Director, AMEE

12.00 - The Electric Grid 2.0, Fergus Wheatly, General Manager, Allied Solar Ltd

12.20 - Q&A Moderated by Damien Mulley, Mulley Communications

12.35 LUNCH sponsored by Lenovo

13.45 - Situation normal, everything must change, Simon Wardley, Independent Consultant

14.35 The Business Challenges of the Future Low Carbon Economy, Niall Brady, Green Sigma Technical Development Manager, IBM

14. 55 Green IT @ STRATO, Rene Weinholtz, Executive Director for IT & Innovation, STRATO

15.15 Q&A Moderated by Dan Barry, Enterprise Ireland

15.30 Coffee Sponsored by Premiere Global Services

16.00 Green Computing - A leadership role, Tom Moriarty, EMEA Regulatory and Environmental Manager, DELL

16.30 Green ICT - How ICT will help deliver ESB’s Sustainability Strategy, Padraig McManus, CEO, ESB

17.00 Q&A Moderated by Tom Raftery followed by drinks reception sponsored by Smart Telecom

After October 31st, the rate is €300 for members and €400 for non members.

See you there!

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Events | Comments (2)

Special OpenCoffee on Monday 13th (Not Friday!)

October 7, 2008 – 1:16 pm

We’re running a special one-off OpenCoffee this coming Monday (13th) instead of the usual Friday. It’s a bit unusual in that we’ve invited a speaker to come in and talk about how he grew his business and raised funding. That person is Tom Keane, President of Nitrosell. He has a long history in the software biz and I know I’m not the only one who has a ton of questions to ask him.

This OpenCoffee is a joint one with SohoSolo and is on in the NSC at 9am. Coffee and buns sponsored by CorkBIC and SohoSolo. Thanks to John Fitzgerald for arranging this with Tom.

Here’s some background on Tom and Nitrosell:

Tom Keane is an engineering graduate of University College Cork and Trinity College Dublin and has over twenty five years experience at a senior level in the software business. Before co-founding NitroSell, Tom worked as a Software Engineer and ICT architect for leading software companies, including Motorola, Ericsson, Compaq, and Accenture. During 2007 and 2008 Tom was a member of the prestigious Microsoft S+S (Software plus Services) Partner Advisory Council, which met regularly in Seattle to discuss and advise on Microsoft’s strategic new cloud computing products, campaigns, competitive positioning and go-to-market strategies. Fellow council members included CEOs and Presidents of companies including BT Tradespaces, Best Buy, Siemens, EMC/Conchango, Mamut, WebTrends, and Telus. Tom is an experienced presenter and regularly gets invited to speak on emerging technology and entrepreneurial matters.

NitroSell “makes it easy for Retailers to increase their profits by extending their business with online multi-channel sales solutions”. NitroSell customer numbers are increasing every month and currently just under 400 retailers are running NitroSell eCommerce that web-enable 900 retail businesses across the US, Europe and beyond. The number of NitroSell registered end-user accounts broke the 2 million mark in Sept 2008 and over 600,000 individual products are for sale across the NitroSell WebStore base which attract over almost 2.5 million unique visits per month.

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Announcements | Comments (2)

BarCamp Cork II on November 1st

September 30, 2008 – 8:31 am

It has been over two years since the last one, but BarCamp is finally coming back to Cork. It’s soon, very soon, only four weeks away. The venue is the lovely Webworks building in the City Centre, just like the last time.

We have a strong vision for this event and we need your help to make it happen on the day. Please read the first set of posts and give us your feedback. If you think you’ll be attending, please register. As always with BarCamps, it is completely free with the costs being taken care of by our kind sponsors.

If you wish to sponsor or help, please read the “what we need” post.

We have two mottos for BarCampCork II “talking with, not talking at” and “less talking, more doing”.

If you don’t know what a BarCamp/Unconference is or have never attended one, here is a simple description from the main BarCamp site:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.

Every attendee of BarCamp is expected to contribute in some way. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to give a talk. But at the very least, you should take part in lots of the discussions that occur and share the knowledge you have in your area of expertise.

We’d love to see you down in Cork and we encourage anyone based outside of Ireland who reads this blog to consider flying in for the day.

Sign-up now.

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Announcements, Events | Comments (0)

Today’s OpenCoffee in The Rubicon

September 26, 2008 – 5:15 am

The next OCC is today in the Rubicon Centre in CIT at our usual time of 10am-12. We’ll have one informal demo from a new attendee.

I was also contacted by Brian O’Flaherty from UCC who will be there. The directors of the Masters in Business Information Systems (MBIS) programme at UCC are looking to work with Cork companies in the development of products and services for business. For more details see http://afis.ucc.ie/boflaherty/invitation2008.htm

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Announcements | Comments (0)

A fun Friday in Luigi’s

September 14, 2008 – 1:35 pm

Friday’s OpenCoffee was a very lighthearted occasion with 15+ attendees and plenty of technology being passed around. I was pleased to see some new faces too.

A few badly taken pictures:

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A video of all the tiny laptops and PDAs that were on display:

The next session is in the Rubicon in CIT on Sep 26th from 10-12.

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Reports | Comments (0)

This week’s Cork OCC in Luigi Malones

September 10, 2008 – 9:05 am

This week’s Cork OpenCoffee is back to our old haunt of Luigi Malones from 10-12 on Friday.

As always with Luigi’s, we have no formal demos. However we may have Diarmuid Wrenne and Gordon Murray doing a head2head between their Medion and Asus teeny-tiny laptops. Hopefully we’ll broadcast that live on Qik.com. I’ll also be showing an early version of LouderVoice for Business if anyone wants a look.

If you have anything you want to show off and would like a mention here on the blog, just drop me a line.

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Announcements | Comments (0)

Next OCC in Rubicon Centre in CIT

August 15, 2008 – 2:08 pm

Well that was a fantastic event today in the NSC. We easily had more than 30 people between OCC regulars and SohoSolo people and some new faces to both.

Thanks again to CorkBIC for hosting and sponsoring.

The networking seemed to work particularly well and I was thrilled to meet some new faces whose products and services were very impressive.

The next OCC is in two weeks on Aug 29th in the Rubicon back to our usual time of 10am.

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Announcements | Comments (0)

Next OpenCoffee in NSC on Friday

August 13, 2008 – 7:54 pm

The next Cork OCC is on this Friday in the board room of the NSC in Mahon. It is a bit different from our normal get-together for two reasons. The first is that it starts at 9am instead of the usual 10. The second is that it’s a joint event with SohoSolo. This means we’ll have a bigger group that usual. There won’t be a formal demo but we will hear a short intro about SohoSolo and the other services of CorkBIC who have been strong supporters of OpenCoffee since it started. They are also kindly are sponsoring the refreshments.

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Announcements | Comments (0)

SeedCamp Prep Session

August 4, 2008 – 9:18 am

Given the interest expressed in having a SeedCamp prep session, Gordon Murray has arranged  a room in Oriel House Hotel in Ballincollig, Cork for Thursday August 7th starting at around 9am.

It will be quite informal, the aim is to get practical advice from each other on answering some of the questions on the application form so that you promote your business or idea as best as possible.

He’ll have printouts of the questions with him on the day. For anyone who’d like to work on it beforehand, here’s a link to the the Seedcamp application PDF.

Some further information about the Oriel house location over on his blog.

Unfortunately the closing date for doing video pitches is Wednesday but hopefully that won’t stop people giving the webcam a go. Robin Blandford of Decisions for Heroes already has.

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Community | Comments (0)

A note from Saul Klein

July 24, 2008 – 6:04 pm

As many of you probably know, Saul Klein kicked off OpenCoffee in London early last year. Here is an email he sent to a lot of the organisers earlier. Some great stuff with a very nice plug for Ireland.

Wow. There are now over 80 of you all round the world (see www.opencoffeeclub.org) - its pretty amazing how its spread over the last year and we have new locations starting every month.

For those of you who’ve been hosting an OCC for sometime, you know that we’ve mentioned on a few occasions that it would be cool to have better communication between groups to better share contacts, learnings and just generally leverage the fact that we are now truly global to take the pulse of the startup community better worldwide.

In this spirit, and since I have been shamefully poor at getting this done, I wanted to introduce Alasdair & Michael who are on the Seedcamp team and are going to help me better administrate and add some value to our Ning network presence at www.opencoffeeclub.org.

Michael & Alasdair will be help me to better figure out best ways we can share between moderators — ideas in the past have been Facebook group, mailing list etc — so let us know what you think would work best and who’s up for it.

Some great stuff going on by the way, just to highlight a few locations:

I also wanted to let you all know that Seedcamp applications are open at the moment - the deadline for applying is August 10th. We’d really appreciate it if you can spread the word to your local founders who are keen to access the network of mentors, validation and access to capital that Seedcamp provides. There is already some great OCC-Seedcamp action going on in our star early adopters in Ireland :)

We’d also love to invite any of you that would like to come along to Seedcamp week (Sept 15-19th) in London - last year was a blast and it would all the richer for the international perspective you all bring. Please let Michael, Alasdair or Reshma (who runs Seedcamp) know if you’d like to attend.

Thanks again for flying the OCC flag. I hope alls well with you, that you’re having a great middle of the year — who knows if its summer or winter where you are :)

Best
Saul

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Community | Comments (0)