Barry Downes

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November 20, 2006

Nubiq Board Meeting

Chaired the Nubiq (www.nubiq.com) board meeting on Friday. I must say I am thrilled at the progress the company has made on its initial service Zinadoo (www.Zinadoo.com) since launch. Helene and her team have done a great job. I'm really looking forward to the next release of the service late December and I am tremendously excited about the new services planned. Nubiq/Zinadoo if flying!!

Posted by at 3:57 PM | Comments (0)

JBoss fills out 'stack' with integration

Interesting article on JBoss, which is now part of Linux distributor Red Hat, is assembling a "stack" of open-source software components for building a services-oriented architecture.

http://news.com.com/2100-7339_3-6136634.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-5&subj=news

Posted by at 3:54 PM | Comments (0)

November 16, 2006

NESTA

Joined a lunch with the CEO of NESTA on Monday, Jonathan Kestenbaum. NESTA is a UK based Trust of STG 600 m that supports Innovation in the UK. Jonathan was in Ireland to look at what we are doing and understand what lessons can be learned for the UK. Really interesting group at the lunch including Brian Cogan from Forfas, Dermot O’Doherty from Intertrade Ireland, Niall Carroll from ACT Venture Capital (VC), Neil Leyden from the Digital Media Forum, Dermot Berkery from Delta Partners (VC) and Tanya McGill from NESTA.

There was a lot of discussion around what is working and not working in Innovation in Ireland, how the UK is different and what it could learn. Some key things that I took away are how all of the Irish participants, who each come from different parts of the Innovation value chain, shared both a common vision and great ambition for Innovation in Ireland. Jonathan summarised this very succinctly when he said that in Ireland we don’t really have any other choice but to drive hard to Innovate and commercialise as that is the only way we will be able to keep our boom going (post the coming real estate crash) but in the UK this is not yet accepted by everyone. Our advantage was that the debate in favour for policies that support and encourage Innovation and commercialisation has been won. That the dogs in the street know that after the real estate crash it will be places like the WIT and the research and innovation that we create, that will be our only chance of not returning to the bad old days of the 80s and mass emigration.

However, there are still issues to be addressed – I took the opportunity to highlight the funding gap that exists between government funding for innovation (ie EI) and private funding (ie VC). This is still a problem that we need to address to help get Innovations commercialised and Campus Companies off the ground. Brian Cogan supported this with some recent research that indicated that it was the first 200K – 500K of private cash that was the hardest to obtain. So more work has to be done here. I’m actively working in this area at the moment but will save this for another post.

So the conclusion? There is only one way forward for a modern 21st Century economy if it wants to keep growing – Innovation. Its not always obvious but the work we are doing here will be creating jobs (outside of WIT) for years to come and will hopefully contribute to keeping Ireland moving forward after the crash predicted by David McWilliams actually occurs.

Posted by at 3:13 PM | Comments (0)