Developing eWrite

Conor O’Neill, the driving force behind Corks Open Coffee asked if I would be interested in helping the ongoing organising of Cork Open Coffee.

The OpenCoffee Club was started in London to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow

I jumped (as much as one can via email) at the chance. Im not the only one who thinks Conor’s energy is amazing with his various involvments. It isn’t fair however to expect him to continually drive energy into Open Coffee every second week. He has asked if myself and Ciara Crossan could share the load with him, each of us taking responsibility for an Open Coffee every 3 sessions.

This week on Friday the 7th I’m the point man and Open Coffee is in Luigi Malones, Emmet place, Cork from roughly 10am to 12pm.

Hopefully Ciara and I will be able to match Conor’s energy and his ability to stand up and kick off the session each time. Im usually the quiet one so It’ll be good for me to be shoved in front of people to talk from time to time.

Thank you Conor.

Oh, if you have any groovy new technology or something interesting to demo to the group, let me know. I’ll be sending out the reminder email soon and I could mention it in the email. I could bring along the new Asus EEE desktop version but I don’t think it would go very well in Luigis.

There are going to be Massive changes around here… nah, only kidding. See you Friday.

This weeks Tuesday Push is Louder Voice.

Louder voice is developed by Cork-based business Argolon Solutions, spearheaded by Conor O’ Neill.

Loudervoice allows anyone to post reviews about anything via several sources including blogs, Twitter, Jaiku, SMS and more. I have written a couple of reviews in the past and I plan to continue.

In their own words :

LouderVoice is all about reviews but with a BIG difference. Instead of expecting you to spend time and effort writing reviews for us, we’re interested in your reviews wherever you write them

In the highly detailed words of 11850 :

You may try this website on Loudervoice; http://www.loudervoice.com/about/ Thank you.

(Click here if you’re wondering why I brought up 11850)

There is a great Help section on their site to teach you how to begin reviewing : http://www.loudervoice.com/help/

The Loudervoice homepage reminds me of Yahoo and Lycos a few years back. Im all for healthy white space on a website design but LV manages to get a lot of stuff into a page very very well. Review of the day, review of the week and latest review widgets on the homepage are great.

There are a lot of tick marks on the homepage, it would be great to see more profile images from those reviewers, maybe only those people with profile images should be able to make the homepage.

In my opinion it is detailed, quality services like Loudervoice, driven by its user base which will drive more and more customer purchases. Many people I know look for reviews or ratings when searching for a hotel or B&B to stay in, this will spread to more and more products and services.

Word of mouth is the most influential business referral technique. In the absence of people recommending items to you, reviews and ratings such as those provided by Loudervoice are the next best thing. In a similar manner, I find myself using Google Blog Search more and more when searching for items on the web rather than using the usual website search to get a more up to date and personal opinion on what ever I might be searching for.

Loudervoice is clearly aware of this trend as they have recently launched Loudervoice for Business – Connecting commerce and customers. Conor writes about the launch of Loudervoice for business in their blog.

I would be excited to see if I would be able to use Loudervoice in relation to our own eWrite software to allow users to review our products to make sure we’re kept on our toes.

Deservedly, Loudervoice has been short listed for the Moviestar.ie Irish web awards. Good Luck Loudervoice!

Loudervoice…. 5 Stars!

The Tuesday push is part of a coordinated effort to spread the work of the Irish tech community.

On Monday the 13^th at 9am, Tom Keane, Co-founder of Nitrosell will talk to members of Open Coffee and Soho Solo in the National Software Center in Mahon in Cork.

Tom Keane is an engineering graduate of University College Cork and Trinity College Dublin and has over twenty five years experience at a senior level in the software business. Before co-founding NitroSell, Tom worked as a Software Engineer and ICT architect for leading software companies, including Motorola, Ericsson, Compaq, and Accenture. During 2007 and 2008 Tom was a member of the prestigious Microsoft S+S (Software plus Services) Partner Advisory Council, which met regularly in Seattle to discuss and advise on Microsoft’s strategic new cloud computing products, campaigns, competitive positioning and go-to-market strategies. Fellow council members included CEOs and Presidents of companies including BT Tradespaces, Best Buy, Siemens, EMC/Conchango, Mamut, WebTrends, and Telus. Tom is an experienced presenter and regularly gets invited to speak on emerging technology and entrepreneurial matters.

NitroSell “makes it easy for Retailers to increase their profits by extending their business with online multi-channel sales solutions”. NitroSell customer numbers are increasing every month and currently just under 400 retailers are running NitroSell eCommerce that web-enable 900 retail businesses across the US, Europe and beyond. The number of NitroSell registered end-user accounts broke the 2 million mark in Sept 2008 and over 600,000 individual products are for sale across the NitroSell WebStore base which attract over almost 2.5 million unique visits per month.

Tom will be talking about how he grew his business and raised the neccessary funding.

I’m looking forward to listening to Tom and thanks to my co-worker John Fitzgerald for plying Tom away from his existing work to come and talk to Open Coffee.

Thank you also to Conor O’Neill for pulling Open Coffee, Soho Solo and the National software center together for Tom to talk to us.

Ask not what Open Coffee can do for you..

Conor O Neill recently wrote a post on web2ireland.org regarding Seedcamp and putting in an application before the deadline.

In the comments, we talked about gathering a few people together from Cork with the aim of helping each other fill out the forms a little better than we might do on our own. I imagine I’d be quite embarrassed to read what I wrote in the forms last year, and I’d certainly benefit from any input or feedback that anyone can offer.

Open Coffee would be ideal for this, though with holidays and the deadline of Seedcamp, ad ah-hoc session is needed.

Anyone interested in meeting in Oriel House Hotel in Ballincollig to help polish their form filling talents?

Conor has put up a poll at web2ireland to gauge interest in this meet-up.