Maryrose Lyons blogging since 2003...

Vote Early, Vote Often

June 25, 2009 at 2:41 pm

From Web2Ireland.org:

The inaugural Techcrunch Europe Award nominees have been announced and there are plenty of Irish companies in there. It’s a public vote, so head on over and keep the flag flying for a lot of great apps and businesses.

The Irish are:

• Decisions For Heroes, Best Social Innovation (which benefits society), (Vote Here)
• Mobanode, Best Mobile Startup, (Vote Here)
• LouderVoice, Best Web Application Or Service, (Vote Here)
• Joe Drumgoole, Best Startup Founder(s), (Vote Here)
• Dial2Do, Best Mobile Startup, (Vote Here)
• Locle, Best Mobile Application, (Vote Here)
• MuzuTV, Best Entertainment Application or Service, (Vote Here)
• CoClarity, Best Enterprise/B2B Startup (Vote Here)

Good luck to you all.  You’ll be getting my votes – all 468 of them!

Posted in Awards | No Comments

Tags: Techcrunch Europe Award, Web2Ireland

It Is Broke, So Let’s Fix It

June 25, 2009 at 9:23 am

I’m a proud supporter of the Email Standards Project; a project born out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients.   Due to the lack of standards in email clients (ie. Outlook, Gmail, etc.) when we create email marketing templates we are very restricted with what we can do to make them render well in every client.  The Email Standards Project is a community effort to improve the standards and make life easier on us and better for clients.

There’s a big push on right now – and we’re looking at you Microsoft!

Microsoft has just confirmed that it intends to use the cripplied Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.

• This means for the next 5 years, we will have to continue to use tables for layouts on email designs.
• We’ll continue to be afraid to use CSS like float and position and background images are still a big no no.
• That’s not even considering the long list of bugs and quirks that break the simplest of layouts.

For many people out there in corporate-land, Outlook IS email.  It would make life so much better if Microsoft took the big step of addressing the problems that are inherent in Word rendering.  If you’ve ever tried to copy and paste text from a Word doc into, say, Wordpress and you see dodgy looking code… that’s the good ole Word rendering killing the beauty of your work.

Utilising The Power of Twitter

Outlook 2010 is still in beta and Microsoft has announced they want to hear your feedback on this decision.   Let them hear it!  It’s time for the email marketing and design community to rally together and encourage Microsoft to embrace web standards before it’s too late.

20,000 individuals sent a message to Microsoft since yesterday via Twitter. You can see all those lovely smiling faces here. This has forced Microsoft to respond – kudos for the speed of response, but a little sour in my opinion by trying to diss the Email Standards Project as “not representing a sanctioned standard or industry consensus in this area.”

If you are involved with email template design – either as a designer, client, or indeed recipient, please take the time out to add your voice to the throng.  If Apple and Yahoo are happy to work on standards, why not Microsoft?  If MS came to the table, it would be a huge benefit to everyone in the community.

Posted in Email Marketing, Twitter | 2 Comments

Tags: Email Marketing, Email Marketing Ireland, Email Standards Project, Microsoft Outlook 2010

If Only They’d Had That 6 Years Ago

June 16, 2009 at 9:41 am

Sabrina Dent wrote a good post recently about things she’s learned since working freelance. Her last point was about time.  In my experience, when you get your head around the importance of time and its impact on your business, it’s a turning point for you in terms of how much money you will make.

When I started my business I had the wrong perception of time.

I saw time as an infinite resource.  “I love what I do.  I love being self employed” was my way of thinking.  It didn’t matter to me if I worked very late at night.  Bank holiday weekends were viewed as a great opportunity to catch up.  I even invented a word that resonated with how positive and upbeat I was feeling – “Bizzy”.  Bizzy applies to the kind of week where you know at the start of it that you’re going to attempt to cram about three weeks work into it, but it’s got a positive vibe to it. It’s not a moany word, it’s an upbeat one with energy to it: bizzy. After 6 months my partner asked me to stop being bizzy and to  ‘look at’ the time I was spending working.  After 18 months my partner made me promise to turn over a new leaf for the coming year and stop working crazy hours and make more time for him.  This was my wake-up call; I knew that I had to make a change.

The reason start-up owners work deep into the night and weekends and bank holidays too is because they are battling against time.

I think everybody works long hours in the first year because there are just so many things to do and so little hours in the day!  Identifying your partners and getting your systems working gobbles up so much time.   When you’re first starting out in business, and you need to get some printing done, you have to get quotes from a number of printers and work out who you’re going to give the business to.  At financial year end, you’ve got to find a good accountant.  This involves meeting one or two and deciding who you like.  Establishing your network of suppliers takes time.

I used to spend long hours on hold to my broadband provider, my mobile provider, hosting companies, payment processing companies… I spent ages chasing Bank of Ireland who had hit me with charges on credit cards that I just didn’t have.  I got very angry with utility companies not billing me for months, then hitting me with a very large bill that needed to be paid within 28 days.  Money was so tight those days that I just didn’t have an extra €100 to cover unexpected electricity bills.  I didn’t have a car.  So travelling to meetings by bus ate up more precious time.

There are lots of annoying things that get in the way of trying to do the business.

When you spend your day on the phone to tech support, meeting men in suits who you view as a necessary eveil, etc. it’s hardly surprising that it’s not until the wee small hours that the real work gets done.

But that doesn’t have to be the case. Not any more.  Especially not if you live in Limerick.

Introducing Greenhouse Incubator

It’s an incubation space for start-ups to nurture their idea for 6 months – unaffected by all the time-consuming stuff that goes along with starting a new business.  Time to spend on your business, not on securing office space, getting your head around the IP registration process, etc.

It’s open for online applications now.   If you have a business idea and you’d like to put yourself forward to get minded by those who know, while you develop that idea, then you should apply to be a part of the first batch now.

What do you have to do? Complete the online application – don’t worry, they do not want a business plan or projections for the next 15 years – and if your idea is good enough, you might be invited to come in and pitch your idea in the first week in July.

What then? The best pitches will be offered a place in the space in Limerick. It’s centrally located on O’Connell Street.  Now that is central – O’Connell Street and Sarsfield House are the only addresses this Dub knows!   You get to work in alongside other entrepreneurs like yourself, all with the same goal of developing your business and not having to worry about the ancillary things like:

• Legal (registering IP
• Maintaining an office
• Marketing & PR
• Finance

What’s the catch? There is no catch.  The team behind Greenhouse Incubator do not charge you for this.  They take a piece of equity (2 – 10%) from your business.  You could look at it like this – at the moment 10% of nothing is nothing, so what have you got to lose?  Or you could look at it like this – if they’re bought in to your success they will do everything in their power to help you succeed.  (I like that one!)

What a team you’ll have behind you. Greenhouse Incubator is the brainchild of Evert Bopp, an experienced technology entrepreneur.  He’s assembled a Board of heavy hitters made up of:

• Pat Phelan, the King of Telecoms
• Richard O’Donnell, software entrepreneur
• Kevin Thompstone, ex CEO of Shannon Development

These guys are just the kind of people you want behind you.  Think of the contacts!  The introductions.  The wisdom.

There has been a lot written about people starting their own businesses of late.  In these current economic times, they are to be applauded.  But I’ve written before about how these tough times are bringing out the best in people.  Evert Bopp and his team are to be applauded for taking the bureaucracy out of start-up support and bringing a good news out of Limerick that doesn’t involve rugby.

Posted in Advertising, Business Culture Ireland, Zeitgeist | 1 Comment

Tags: Greenhouse Incubator, Start Up, Start Your Own Business Ireland

African Stories

June 12, 2009 at 8:59 am

I’m going to Reboot in a couple of weeks. Last night, I was checking out reboot.dk to see what to expect this year, I landed on Jonathan Marks’ proposal “In Search of African Genius” and got stuck there!  It’s a long time since I’ve watched videos from start to finish without scrolling.  It’s even longer since I’ve reached a page where I’ve wanted to watch every video posted there (and the related ones on the side!).  All credit to Jonathan for the quality of interviews and videos, produced on his travels around the globe working with technologists, management and creatives on the mix of traditional and emerging media.

I’m also attending the Digital Media Forum event at the Kenyan Embassy today.  This event is aimed at people with an interest in Africa, doing business in Kenya, and learning about Kenya’s drive into the IT sector.  I hope I get a chance to learn more about inspiring people like Salim Amim from A24media.

A24Media (Kenya)

Watch the Jonathan Marks interview Salim Amim.

Salim Amim is based in Nairobi, Kenya.  He set up A24Media a few years ago to act as a pan-African source of content for media.  Content producers on the ground in Africa supply stories to them.  Producers are paid well (60%) and get to keep copyright of their work.  Last year about 150 stories were sold yielding €2500 – €3000 per story for the content producers.  This money can then be used to buy equipment or to train friends.  It’s only the beginning and I think it’s very exciting to think that citizen journalism is being brought to the storytellers of Africa.

Salim’s mission is to ‘build the history of the continent’.  He’s doing this by providing distribution of video content, by digitising his father’s archive of images, and by backing up news stories.  His father was Mohamed “Mo” Amin, a Kenyan photojournalist noted for his pictures and videotapes of Ethiopian famine.  Apart from famine, Mo contributed exclusive photos of the fall of Idi Amin and of Mengistu Haile Mariam, and was author of numerous books, including Journey Through Pakistan, and covered various themes like East African Wildlife and the Uganda Railway.  Amin died when his Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 on November 23, 1996 was hijacked and he tried to rally passengers to overpower them.

Human Smuggling Off The Coast of Libya

Mama Mikes (Kenya)

I’m also reminded of Segeni Ng’Ethe of Mamamikes.com who I also met at Reboot last year.  His business is about enabling migrants overseas to send remittances home – but they are converted into vouchers for supermarket shopping, school fees, even birthday cakes!  Sending cash might fall into the hands of someone who’s fond of the drink, so his business is about getting cash into the hands of those who are doing the caring. I love the concept and looking at the site, it seems they’re thriving!  Read blog post with Segeni Ng’Ethe.

I fell in love with Africa when I travelled there in 1997/98.  It was this love for the place and the people that gave me such passion for working on The Rose Project website.  Today I’m happy to be writing about non-development-aid related stories, positive tales of entrepreneurs going for it.  I’m going to keep an eye on Jonathan Marks’ videos – I promise to keep you updated too.

Posted in Cool Sites, Events | 1 Comment

Tags: A24 Media, Africa Video Content, Jonathan Marks, kenya, mamamikes, Reboot 12

License To Print Money

June 10, 2009 at 12:21 pm

I’ve just finished reading Naomi Klein’s eye-opening book “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”. A must-read, it has made me alter how I will consume news about wars and the economy.  It made me re-think four years of economics at Trinity where we were thought that Friedman was good and Keynes was bad.  Klein takes us through a guided tour of the shocking imposition of Friedmanism on countries such as Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Iraq… and, when there were no wars to profit from – United States of America. She outlines how, under Bush, the American Government turned on itself – devouring itself from within through outsourcing of lucrative contracts for its own operation. Everything is outsourced to large corporations: “big business and big government combining their formidable powers to regulate and control the citizenry.”

It seems like there’s a little bit of the same thing going on here in Ireland.

My recent experience at Deans Grange Business Park highlighted just how easy it is to make money in this country if you’re in with the right people in Government.

Take NCPS (National Car Park Services) for example. A licence to print money if ever there was one.  A privately owned and operated car clamping company.  They have no regulator.  They can simply send in their vans to clamp you.  Charge you any fee they like.  And they don’t have a functioning customer service department.

• I was giving training to a client located at Deans Grange Business Park.  Normally you don’t expect to pay for parking at a business park.  I arrived in the morning, parked my car, and by afternoon I’d been clamped.  I had to pay a fee of €125 to get free.  Dublin City Council charge €80 to get unclamped.  Seemingly NCPS the guys who got me can charge any fee they like – because they are privately owned.
• The problem was that there was totally inadequate signage in Deans Grange Business Park to alert drivers to the fact that they had to pay for parking.  There was one small sign, located near a railing half way down the car park on the left.  The parking meter was located there also, but on the morning in question both the single sign and the meter were obscured by white vans parked in the car park.

Looking left again, nothing at the entry gate

See over there past the white van....you can't actually see it because the van is in the way. But that's where the sign is and the parking meter.

So what did I do?

• I wrote a letter to the Company Secretary bringing the lack of signage to their attention.  I was ignored.
• I telephoned the office, got on to his secretary and was referred on to the Complaints Officer, who sent me a standard PFO letter in which he states “there is a large notice at the entrance informing you that pay & display is in operation and there are two more at the car park spaces.”.  That is simply not true.  I wrote back to tell him that and he has since ignored me.
• I have telephoned the office but have never been successful in getting past their receptionist.  They are always ‘busy’.  (Busy counting their mountains of cash more like).

What did I do next?

What can you do?

Opt in for Email!

Walking The Talk is a quarterly email communication from Brightspark. View latest edition and sign up here!