Well, I was privileged to watch what was the first video broadcast of an Open Coffee club meeting in Ireland. This was a fantastic achievement by the guys in Limerick. For those of you who don't know what the Open Coffee Club is, its basically an informal get together of tech enthusiasts and business people to share ideas and network. I've heard said that the athmosphere is very infectious at these meetings and you certainly won't argue with this, if you watch the video of the event.
The great thing about the video streaming of the event is that not only was I able to watch what was going on, I could send any questions I had by instant message. This is truly ground breaking as a number of commenters have pointed out. All of this great organisation and initiative came about without financial help and mainly through the impetus of bloggers and blogging. More on that later.
Secondly, the guys who presented were very impressive. 2 kids (the oldest was 18 I believe), who had the self belief to rent out offices in Limerick to pursue their software projects, had failed completely to get any support from investors or Enterprise Ireland, decided to move over to Silicon Valley to try their luck with the famous Ycombinator funding group headed by Paul Graham. They got accepted by the Ycombinator program and although their product isn't released yet, there are encouraging signals that their product will be a success. The software seems to be a form of monitoring tool that helps Ebay Power Sellers to track efficiently their sales and stock levels. That may be an oversimplification. For more info check out http://auctomatic.com/. There account of their experiences trying to get funding and their approval of the Ycombinator system was illuminating. They also spoke a little bit about the unusual technology they use to creat their software. That was a bit over my head, but I'm sure would have been interesting to any serious programmers tuning in.
All in all a fantastic event and testimony to the ever growing influence of blogging and social network initiatives in Ireland.
Surely the time is now, for Enterprise Ireland and the investing community in Ireland to start pushing and supporting all these initiatives and in particular investing in innovative social networking and other tech startups. If 2 kids can do this, so can many more in my opinion. There just needs to be the right supportive environment for it to happen.
This brings me back to blogging. Ultimately all of the initiatives that have happened in the last few years have been seeded by discussions started on blogs. Events like barcamp, podcamp and OpenCoffee Club were first mooted by bloggers and their continuing success has been sustained by constant promotion and discussion within the blogosphere. So rather then seeing bloggers as a collection of malcontents, the lazy stereotype employed by some media commentators, there should be a recognition now of the power of blogging to create real social and commercial initiative. Enterprise Ireland and other government bodies, should be looking at every possible way they can support the blogging community and help it prosper.
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