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THIS YEAR’S WEB Summit played host to more than 2,000 startups hailing from Australia to Israel.
But what about the home-grown entrepreneurs who were vying for the attention of investors and potential customers?
Here are 5 early-stage companies which joined those pitching from the floor of the RDS in hope of becoming the next big tech success stories:
Giftpulse
The brainchild of 21-year-old Ryan Dardis, Giftpulse is an app which mines users’ social media accounts to pick presents for their friends.
“If you don’t really know what to buy someone, it’s going to look at their Facebook profile – their likes, movies, interests – or whatever other biographical data that they want to provide and give gift suggestions based on those,” he told TheJournal.ie.
“So when you’re buying someone a gift you really know what to buy them – the perfect gift.”
The idea was spawned out of the UStart entrepreneur accelerator program in Dublin City University and Dardis said he eventually saw the app handling the whole process from gift selection to purchase, although he was initial looking at using the Amazon store as a “lightweight solution” to get started.
We are a really, really young startup – just in our fifth month now – at the moment we are just moving into development. We are hoping to have some sort of MVP (minimum viable product) launched in the next three months and from there within a year we would like to have our full-featured app going.”
GroupBooked
Already up and operating, GroupBooked was devised by Cork brothers Andrew and Mark Kingston to take the pain out of group travel bookings.
Deirdre Ní Luasaigh / Twitter#websummit @GroupBooked best chocolate treats in Dublin! pic.twitter.com/lnRaAtSqQj
— Deirdre Ní Luasaigh (@CultureArk) November 5, 2014
“We’re making it easy for people who are organising a private group trip or group event,” Andrew Kingston said.
“We work with a lot of service providers … you book them all through us and then perhaps most importantly we have a payment system where everyone pays individually.
Particularly if you’re going with friends – we do things like hen parties and stag parties – it can often be a bit of a nightmare getting commitment from people. To actually collect the money can be even more difficult.”
GroupBooked, which is being backed under the Enterprise Ireland New Frontiers program, allows an organiser to send a link to all their guests and everyone can then follow through to pay separately.
Their website was launched in July and Kingston said he and his brother were still looking at the best way to scale the product, with one of their current plans to enlist a major hotel company rather than having to recruit individual venues to join.
Xpreso
Despite getting started only 18 months ago, the team behind Xpreso are already in the process of rolling their app out with one of Ireland’s major courier companies.
Launched to solve the “last-mile problem” in logistics, the system consists of a tablet app – used by drivers – and a companion customer app, which allows shoppers to feed real-time information to the couriers.
“Currently you order online and you have to wait all day for the person to arrive,” Eamon Keane, one of the company’s four co-founders, said.
“What we like to do is control the personnel so you can choose a neighbour, you can choose a local shop or a parcel locker and also give you a one-hour time window on the morning of delivery.
“Therefore you know when it’s coming and if you’re not in you can choose what you’re going to do instead.”
Xpreso emerged from the NDRC’s LaunchPad scheme and Keane said they were now trying to raise seed funding to expand, although they were also in talks with ”one of the big, global players” in logistics.
Standard Access
Based at Dingle, in Co Kerry, Standard Access is a keyless operating system that uses a burst of encoded digital noise to open locks.
The encrypted data allows keyholder to send their “key” via email to be accessed on a mobile phone anywhere in the world. The owner can then monitor exactly when a user enters and leaves their property using the code.
Standard Access / Vimeo
Standard Access’s Colin O’Brien said the system also allowed property owners to give access for a one-off event, like to let a builder in, or for a pre-specified period of time.
“You can email a colleague a key, but you may give him the key for say 2 days and after that he needs to come back you,” he said.
O’Brien said the company was in the process of talking to some big real estate firms in the US and it planned to put out a beta version of the product early in 2015 ahead of a full-scale launch next summer.
Mashup Media
Dublin-based Mashup Media operates out of the Digital Hub and does video production for brands and corporate clients.
But where its founders say it differs from many other digital-production outfits is that it also plans to use social media tools to “push” videos on clients’ behalf.
Co-founder John Tobin said he and business partner Sinead Dalton had been developing the product over the past 18 months and they were looking to work with other firms on the analytic side of the business.
“What we’re trying to do is to take it to the next level, whereby we’re using social media tools, analytical tools, to push the video, to help share the video and help the video through its whole life span,” he said.
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I like that standard access idea
Xpreso should drop the o. So its not confused with coffee
I only got half of this story. Wifi not working again
Great ideas – wish them the best
GroupBooked is a dream for Best Men everywhere! Trying to get money out of 20 lads on a Stag for accom. + activities is a nightmare
Great ideas all – though Standard Access, Group Booked, and XPresso stand out for me.
The energy and can-do’ism at the Web Summit was infectious. I spoke to so many nationalities album was a little concerned that there were so few Irish startups there, or at least easy to find. It’s great to see this sample of what Irish entrepreneurs are doing.
Lot’s of these folks tour the Silicon Valley events like Disrupt, and told me that this event is the biggest and best by far. So, yes, let’s fix the wifi next year, and yes, Cosgrave can be foot-in-mouth sometimes, but let’s also realise we have a genuinely world-class thing going here.
“Album” how did autocorrect turn “but” into “album”?
The logistics idea is the only that one that does’nt smack of the standard social media chancerism
yes indeed, a lot of these startups, granted they’re trying to follow the gold in IT, focus too much on apps this and that, overusing the geo-location feature as the driver. startups don’t have to be IT based. That Gift idea is crap. So much using social media, suggesting gift ideas? We’re all trying to avoid those suggestions but use our own brains.
Xpreso. Yes.
All these companies sound very promising but we are all missing the point of the poor internet connection outside our cities. It us like having a car without petrol.
entrepreneurship is essential and I wish these teams all the best but it’s disheartening to see so much effort and investment is increasingly narrow problems and often trite solutions that only serve the needs of a wealthy global elite, adaptations of existing solutions or models for creating revenue from content.
it seems the only big thinking among companies at the websummit was how to avoid paying tax.
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