coclarity

coClarity was selected as one of the companies on Webmission 09.

Mike Butcher of Techcrunch describes Webmission as:

taking 20 of the best UK and Irish Web Entrepreneurs out to Silicon Valley from 28 Mar to 3 Apr 09. The point is to enable the successful entrepreneurs to build relationships with great people in the US, meet US VCs, explore business opportunities and ultimately do business with potential US VCs, partners and clients.

The mission coincides with Web 2.0 Expo. It is supported by UK Trade & Invest, Oracle, Orrick, Web2.0Expo (O’Reilly and TechWeb), and the Technology Strategy Board (TSB). WebMission’s online presence is managed by Information Architects and PR by Braben. The trip is organised by WebMission Ltd, a joint venture between Polecat and Oli Barrett.

It’s great to be included with well established companies like Huddle and Trampoline Systems. In addition, there’s another Irish company from Cork Compliance & Risks.

Just over a year ago we took part in a similar mission organised by Irish Companies. That trip was a fantastic success. The companies who were on it, forged strong links, met amazing people and returned to Ireland with a can-do attitude.

We’re really looking forward to the trip. It’s a great opportunity to meet up with some of our advisors and customers who are based in Silicon Valley. We’re looking forward to finding some new ones as well.

Damien Mulley describes the Tuesday Push as “a way for the small but growing tech community in Ireland to make some noise about ourselves by picking a good example of an Irish Tech Company and highlighting their product(s) every second Tuesday.” Its another great idea from Damien, and a great example of taking positive action and doing something in these “interesting times”. Past Tuesday pushes included companies like PutPlace and Pix.ie.

This week’s push is for Dublin, Ireland based IGOpeople. “IGOpeople is a network for the real world, one place online where you can stay connected with the people, groups and organisations who matter to you”. Its essentially a set of threaded discussions with voting that people can use to interact with other individuals, groups of people or with an organisation (hence the IGO). Their business model is around subscriptions from business organisations.

The design of the site is excellent, modern but inobtrusive. It has some nice Ajaxy scrolling effects and rich-text textareas. The groups and discussion threads are well organised. It looks like business organisations are gravitating to the site as well so maybe some of them will do some listening.

I talked to Campbell Scott the CEO at Barcamp in Cork last November. It sounds like they have bigger plans for the product and altruistic goals about contributing to society. I think developed in Ruby on Rails (always a good sign). Darragh Curran from the technical team contributes to the Ruby Ireland group (another good sign).

Check it out.

After the business incubation day seminar I’m beginning to think this recession might be a good thing. At the very least there’s a bit of a silvery tinge on the dark clouds. You’ll find slides from the seminar on the EAC website, but as usual the more interesting stuff happened over the tea and biscuits.

During his talk, Richard Grey from Matheson Ormsby Prentice described the fairly complex legal process in bringing in VC investment. While smaller investments from angels might not need to go through all these steps some steps are still relevent. You can wait until you have a term sheet before getting a legal firm involved but the final term sheet should be fairly detailed (5-ish pages). The costs on the company side should be lower as the legal fees are mostly to respond to a term sheet (he mentioned a figure of approx 3000 euros).

Frank Walsh of Enterprise Equity gave an overview of the investment process from a VC point of view. In the midst of all the recession news they are still closing deals.

I asked Richard if they had any plans to open source neutral legal agreements like Y Combinator are doing with WSGR in the US. Unfortunately, the answer is no, but surely this is a great opportunity for some legal firm in Ireland.

Sometimes the best part of these kinds of seminars are the discussions with other attendees that happen afterwards. This is where the silverish lining emerged. Some people believed while the VCs are becoming more cautious they will still do deals albiet less deals and reduce the reduce the average investment. That might put them into the investment range of many of the Web/Software companies who are looking for €200-400k investments. This class of companies have been in a bit of an investment vaccum recently as commented by Fergus Burns in Joe Drumgoole’s post about VCs in crisis.

Then yesterday the Irish government announced a new plan to setup a €500 million investment fund involving three US-based venture capital companies backing small Irish and foreign-owned high-tech companies setting up in Ireland.

So I’m thinking maybe this recession is a good things for smaller companies, the 95% of companies who didn’t need enough cash to register on VC radar in the past. Maybe these companies will even get some of the help the government seem to be trying to give them in this latest announcement. Then again maybe I’m a niave optimist.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Apparently there’s an International Incubation Day (whatever will they think of next). It’s all happening this Monday 8th December 11am at the Enterprise Acceleration Centre on the LIT campus in Limerick. There’ll be tea, coffee, sandwiches, networking, and talks on the legal process (Richard Grey, Matheson Ormsby Prentice) and getting from agreement to a cheque (Frank Walsh, Enterprise Equity).

Given the current economic climate it will probably be a highly theoretical discussion. So if you want to talk to some VCs and ask them some sticky questions, Limerick could be the place to be on Monday.