coclarity

Great news. On Monday we pitched and demoed coClarity to an investor panel as part of the end-of-year LEAP programme showcase. At the evening reception, we found out we won the “Innovation and Market Entry” award. We were as happy as windmills in a storm.

At the reception we did a three-minute pitch to everyone who attended the showcase. Unfortunately, we’d been distracted by the other big event that evening (Apple’s WWDC), so the three-minute pitch was only two minutes long.

We were delighted to get the award (and money), but we were just as happy to get fantastic feedback and questions from the judging panel. Our bank manager was at the reception too, and he was happy to see the cheque.

We’d also like to congratulate the other winners on the night, Off We Go Publishing, and Pedigree Cattle. We’d like thank Donncha and Graham who run the EAC and LEAP. We’d also like to thank the other 11 companies who were on the LEAP programme this year. We learned a huge amount from each other.

So if you’re thinking of starting a business and you’re based in the mid-west of Ireland, check out LEAP. You will learn a lot and you might even win a cheque as tall as you.

This week’s Tuesday Push is for Decisions for Heroes.

This is how Robin Blandford describes Decisions for Heroes on their website:

Decisions For Heroes is a web application that saves lives. We do this by helping rescue teams record and analyse their rescue operations. Teams like Mountain Rescue, Coast Guard, Lifeboats, and other Search & Rescue units use our service to document their incidents, techniques, casualty care, and training exercises, building up a profile of each of their rescuers and the geographical area they respond to.

Decisions for Heroes was launched on Tuesday this week in Dublin Ireland.

I’ve met Robin a few times and he’s a great example to any budding entrepreneur in Ireland. First off, he’s done this the hard way. He’s the sole founder of Decisions for Heroes. He’s picked a very specific niche in an area he’s very passionate about. He makes the most of opportunities when they appear. Frankly, I don’t know how he does it all.

The main site design is different, with an eye catching video on the home page. Go on, give it a visit. If you’re an entrepreneur, follow Robin’s blog. If you’re a rescue worker, buy decisions for heroes.

RevaHealth is this week’s Tuesday Push.

RevaHealth helps you find healthcare anywhere in the world. They also have review ratings for the different healthcare providers.

Caelen King, RevaHealth’s CEO is a great help to other startups in Ireland. Caelen spoke at the recent Bizcamp unconferences in Dublin and Limerick. He’s been very generous with advice about his experiences successfully raising money over a million euros for RevaHealth. You can even catch him on YouTube talking at the Limerick Bizcamp. Their blog has loads of advice for web startups ranging from SEO tips to A/B testing.

Sometimes when I look at review sites on the web, I wonder if the good reviews were written by the company CEO’s brother and if the bad reviews were written by their competitor. I kind of expect this when I’m looking for hotels but when it comes to healthcare I’d expect people would want more reassurance that the reviews are valid. In the fine print of the review guidelines, RevaHealth do warn reviewers of the measures they take to find false reviews. This is kind of buried in the details though, and I think customers would be reassured if they knew this up front.

I did a quick test and checked for entries for three doctors I know in Limerick. All three were in RevaHealth but as you’d expect there was no details beyond phone numbers and addresses. In one case the Google map was pointing to the wrong place although I’d expect this is more a problem with Google interpreting the address incorrectly.

For other more specialist treatments RevaHealth has an impressive array of information on healthcare providers including patient reviews and prices. So if you’re looking for a dentist in Romania or a GP in Limerick, RevaHealth is a great place to start.

Update: RevaHealth.com is now WhatClinic.com, and has expanded to cover healthcare providers in the UK.

Enterprise Ireland are running a number of 2-evening workshops in April and May. Many of them are happening in the Munster area. You’ll find more details on the EI website.

Well Webmission is over. I’m in New York on the way back, tired, waiting for a plane to Shannon. First impressions? An exhilarating week for coClarity, meetings with potential investors, potential partners and old friends. From an overall economy point of view I detected some good news, some green shoots seem to be appear for early stage funding for startups. However, some VCs and funded companies are still hurting. Imagine a humidifier and a dehumidifier sealed in a room, fighting it out.

Mike Butcher wrote a post about the early part of the Webmission week. You can even see the back of my balding head in the photo. I’m the one talking to Joe Kiernan and Diane Roberts.

I remember my last visit to Silicon Valley with PaddysValley in late 2007. Mark Zawacki from Milestone Group said something like, “Its not a question of whether there’ll be a recession or not but whether there will be a recession or a depression.” How prescient he turned out to be. This time the mood in the Bay Area seems to indicate a corner’s been turned. I talked to CEOs in a number of early stage startups including HeyZap, DropBox, Skout and Echodio and all believed the funding environment was improving. When the worldwide economy starts to turn around it’s probably going to start in Silicon Valley.

While early stage funding seems to be making a comeback, the VCs and later-stage funding is still in disarray, companies are having to raise money to fund operations as bank credit has evaporated even for companies with impeccable records.

We visited a private incubator called Plug And Play. Business incubator managers of Ireland: this is the future. Plug And Play have startup office space, in-house experienced mentors, turnkey services, hosting and they invest in some of the startups too. Its all geared to increasing the velocity of their startups. Some of their EIRs (Entrepreneurs in Residence) said this is the best time to start a company. While its harder to raise money, and that money is more expensive, rents are low and talent is available. Normally PlugAndPlay would see five startups a week getting funding, at the moment that is down to three (still not zero). As you can see from the photo below, they have a steady stream of investors coming through.

The contrast between Webmission and PaddysValley was interesting. Webmission was more organised and all of the companies were at a more mature stage, some of them were even profitable. PaddysValley was more spontaneous and chaotic (in a good way), we did after all meet Jerry Yang, Marc Andresson and the guys from Twitter. Webmission’s pitch event attracted less than 10 investors whereas the PaddysValley event organised by Enterprise Ireland probably pulled in over thirty, albeit in better economic times. At Webmission everyone got the chance to pitch.

One of the highlights of the trip was watching Keith Bohanna blag his way into a party at Micheal Birch’s house.

The entrepreneurs on Webmission were an impressive bunch. Most were profitable and established businesses, some of whom were more interested in establishing a presence in the US than raising funding. The companies included: Artesian Solutions, Booking Bug, Brave New Talent, Business IT Online, Compliance And Risks, Corebridge, Mtivity, ProofHQ, Viapost, Replify, Yuuguu, Zemanta, Huddle and Trampoline Systems.

Two of the companies were Irish, Compliance and Risks from Cork and Replify from Belfast. Compliance and Risks do exactly what it says in the name. Replify build an impressive SSL/TCP/file-server/web-app accelerator that can be deployed as a virtual appliance.

From a coClarity point of view I had a very productive week. I met potential investors, partners and customers. Something concrete will definitely come of the trip. I spent three days at or around Web 2.0 Expo and found most of the collaboration technologies still taking the same approaches that I saw at Enterprise 2.0 last year. One of the more interesting new technologies I saw was Socialtext’s Desktop product, a nice combination of REST APIs and an Air application.

Anyway, that’s not the half of it. I’ll be going through my notes in the next few days, and I’ll write another post when I’ve had a chance to reflect on everything.