Damien Mulley

The three biggest threats to a company that want to get media coverage are these:

The Control (or command) key, the C key and the V key. In other words copying and pasting.

Forget the idea about some journalist wearing down shoe leather, wearing a hat with a press card on it and beating down doors trying to find your companyjust because it’s amazing. Journalists these days have much more to do than ever before and have press releases clogging up their inboxes twenty four hours a day. Look at the amount of downsizing in newsrooms and the increasing reliance on syndication.

If you are a startup and you are run by geniuses, you still need to market yourself and you still need to get the attention of the press to aid in the marketing of your company. Why should a journalist give you coverage if you sit in your office and expect them to find you via some magic journalistic yellow pages?

With that in mind and via repeated suggestions from a few parties :), I’m going to run a half-day paid workshop on dealing with the media/doing PR from a Tech company perspective. If there’s interest of course. Maximum of 11 per session. Minimum of 9.

We’ll go through how Irish media works (from my perspective), how to approach journalists and build a working relationship with them, what makes good press copy, how to run a combined media campaign and some basic interview skills training for print and radio.

Interested? Then leave a comment or send me an email with a preference for Cork or Dublin.

Today’s Tuesday Pushee is 1Time.

Blurb:

1time is a web-based time and expense tracking application that allows you to easily keep track of real time project costs. It reduces non-billable time in your company and keeps everyone up to date. Each employee gets their own login and reminders so you don’t have to micro-manage recording timesheets. It is ideally suited to anyone who has a need to record time for billing or project cost analysis.

You can get a 30 day trial with them. It looks like a good and useful product for businesses and those who work for themselves. There’s nothing worse than trying to figure out AFTER the project what you spent on it timewise.

1Time added more features recently allowing you to give your clients access to their timesheets. Which while I’m sure would benefit the clients is probably a passive way of making you actually fill those sheets in and keep you motivated. Well that’s what I’d use it for. 🙂

More features too are on the way. Great to see a working product that is useful to existing businesses. Well done to Derek Organ.

Please spread the word about 1Time and blog about them. If you want your company/product mentioned, please fill in this linked form

Congratulations to HeyStaks, Locle, Playza, TouristR who were this morning announced the winners of the eircom web innovation fund.

From the press release:

The four chosen companies are:

1. HeyStaks – HeyStaks is a new approach to Web search that helps searchers to share their search experiences with friends, colleagues, and other searchers. HeyStaks is a browser plugin that works with Google and provides users with the ability to create so-called “search staks” as a way to organise and share their Google searches. For example, a group of friends planning a holiday abroad might create a “Holiday 2008” search stak. As they individually search for travel, accommodation and entertainment options, their selections will be shared with each other during future searches as specially highlighted search results. In this way all of the friends can see what results have been found to be useful during earlier searches, which may help them during their own searches for that perfect holiday package.

Research shows that HeyStaks can help searchers find information more quickly and in turn allow users to create and share many different types of search staks to reflect different topics of interest. In this way search staks can provide users with access to a form of Web search that is powered by their favourite search engine but customised for a particular topic of interest, based on their own search experiences or the search experiences of others.

The HeyStaks technology has been developed by Prof. Barry Smyth’s research group in University College Dublin and is the first spin-out of the new CLARITY research centre, a €16m Science Foundation Ireland research centre combining researchers from University College Dublin, Dublin City University, and the Tyndal National Institute.
2. Locle – Locle is a social mapping application for mobile phones that combines information from your mobile handset address book with social networks such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace to create mapping services that show users where their friends are. Locle is an enhanced mobile web experience that facilitates “here’s where I am, and here’s where my friends are” for social networks and groups.

Locle is a combination of a web service and downloadable mobile phone software. When the Locle mobile client is activated, it identifies the user’s location and presents the location of “friends” who also use the application. Friends can be both contacts from your mobile phone address book or contacts from your social networks. As well as letting you know where your “friends” are, Locle can also keep you up to date on relevant information to your location such as local events, news, weather and provide details on local restaurants, cinemas and ATM machines etc.
Locle is a Business Expansion Scheme qualified investment.
3. Playza – With most popular online games focused squarely at the adult gaming market, Playza is a new social gaming proposition for “Digital Natives” – our 12 to 24 year olds who have grown up in a digital media environment where mobile phones, social networking, multiplayer online gaming, and music downloading have always been the norm.

Playza is made up of a series of connected mini games in which players complete tasks and earn points. Online game players are encouraged to bring their gaming colleagues to Playza and social networkers can invite their online friends to join. The main objective of the game is to form and control player groups. By getting new members into their group, players will increase their standing and capabilities within the games. Playza users can also create their own page to host their game account and mini games. Within their page, users can create their own game groups, receive feedback and messages and post the game to their other sites or blogs such as MySpace or Facebook.

Playza combines the addictive nature of online gaming with the community features of a social networking portal.
4. TouristR – TouristR is an integrated full-service trip-planning advisor, which cuts out the online information overload and minimises planning problems. It not only helps the traveller to plan a more complex travel itinerary – such as a trip with multiple destinations on a fixed budget and timeline – but it also draws on content submitted by a community of users which will help the traveller to decide on a destination by getting a sense of the type of experience available at their chosen destination.

A new breed of unique Web 2.0 travel service, TouristR will feature stories, adventures and photographs of destinations submitted by users as well as aid the traveller who needs to factor in multiple elements to their trip such as budgetary, geographical, temporal and other personal preferences and restrictions.

The Irish Web Awards are a go. Contract signed with the Radisson SAS in Dublin for October 11th. Rick O’Shea will be the MC. You may have heard of him. Same informalities as the Blog Awards: no bland meal, no tux requirements, no having to pay to nominate a website, no paying 200 quid to attend. Also judging criteria will be public. It will not be a popularity contest so the site or people with the most friends will not win for anything other than having the best site out there.

Photo owned by Dan4th (cc)

There’s a pending announcement of the critera for the Web Awards (you can still contribute here) and the 20 or so categories for the Awards will be announced in two weeks.

I’ll be looking for sponsorship and require one headline sponsor and a sponsor for each category too. Like the Blog Awards, for category sponsorship I’d prefer to see smaller businesses with the intent that they will get as much from the Awards as those nominated. Now here’s a shocker. If you sponsor the overall event or any category then you CANNOT be nominated in any category.

If you’re interested in sponsorship (I don’t have prices worked out yet) then give me a bell on IrishAwards@gmail.com

Photo owned by Micah Sittig (cc)

Shopped this around to a few folks in the Web/Tech scene in Ireland and they liked the idea, so we’re going ahead with it. The Tuesday Push is 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. This co-ordinated way of highlighting our abilities will hopefully get tech companies heard a bit more and also foster more community spirit as we help each other out by getting everyone greater attention. We’ll need as much help from those in the tech scene in Ireland to work with us on this so please tune into participating blogs. Hopefully there’ll be a dedicated space for this project soon as well as a Twitter alert.

The premise is that everyone talks up a company (if they think it deserves to be) on a particular date. Every second Tuesday at it happens. Everyone tech and non tech alike are encouraged to talk about the company so that hopefully a tipping point is reached and a potential investor or journalist or partner hears/reads about the company.

If you want your company/product mentioned, please fill in this linked form. If you have a product announcement too, better again. You might consider timing it for a Tuesday Push. If you do partake please realise that you are encouraged to highlight the company of the week too, not just yourself. The more talking each other up, the better.

Today’s company is PutPlace. A blog post on them shall follow.