Continuing Read/WriteWeb's series on international web apps, I bring you a sample of all that the emerald isle has to offer. 20 years ago Ireland was a sleepy backwater with high unemployment and mass emigration. Jobs were rare and the only new startups were farms. But all of that changed when the 'celtic tiger' came along. No one can agree what kick started it - low corporate tax rates or our involvement in the EU. I reckon it was Ray Houghton's goal against England in the 1988 European championships. Either way, things have changed forever.
Today Google, Microsoft, Intel, Dell and IBM all have various european head quarters in Ireland. With a population of over 5 million north and south, we are considered in some circles to be the largest exporter of software in the world. We have no shortage of bigco investment and job creation in Ireland, but what's happening in the indigenous startup scene?
Pigsback.com has been running since 2000 and is endeared to the hearts of a large number of internet users in Ireland (and the UK as of last year). In their own words, it's an 'online club of consumers and brands'. You sign up for an account and then receive targeted offers, competitions and surveys from the Pigsback network of advertisers. As you interact with these events you build up 'piggy points', which you can exchange for goods and services.
Pigsback works, simply because the 'piggy points' you collect are really worth something. In little time you can build up enough for a free CD or a discounted holiday, for example. Their advertiser network includes Ford, EBay, Nestle, and Betfair to name but a few.
StatCounter provides web tracking services for millions of websites around the world. Similar to Google Analytics, but around a lot longer, you can sign up for free and start tracking immediately. They also have paid accounts which include more reports and options.
StatCounter is one of the few websites around with a pagerank of 10. They have more back links to their site than anyone else on the web, apart from Google.com!
HostelWorld is one of the most successful Irish startup stories. It was started back in 1999 with the goal of streamlining the booking of hostels anywhere in the world. They take bookings from travelers and backpackers for over 50,000 hostels worldwide. They now have over 70 staff, and by some reports take in excess of $1 million worth of booking on any given day. This contributes to their self proclaimed valuation of anywhere up to $1 billion for their parent company.
AllFreeCalls is more of a mobile/telco play, but worthy of inclusion all the same. On their website they provide you with details of how to make international calls from the US, Ireland and the UK for the price of a local call. They are able to do this by exploiting various loopholes in legislation governing the way money is divided between bigger telcos.
I don't think they are up and running in the US at the moment, due to a confrontation with AT&T - which is claiming that Allfreecalls cost them almost $2 million in subsidies for one month alone!
Nooked have been in the RSS marketing business now for a while, but they recently announced a forthcoming product codenamed 'feedshop' - which is all about "Really Simple Shopping (RSS)". They are also about to launch a new widget marketing service, which will allow e-tailers to advertise their products through nooked's network of blogs, widget partners and social networks. It's all part of their strategy for a feedcommerce platform.
Nooked was listed just this week as a RedHerring 100 Europe winner and a company to watch in 2007. Expect to hear a lot more from them very soon.
[disclosure: R/WW editor Richard MacManus is an advisor to nooked]
Pixenate is a handy free online photo editor. No accounts necessary, just upload your photo and start editing. It's ad supported, AJAX based and runs smoothly. But the free version of pixenate you see on their website is just a demonstration of a customizable and rebrandable white label version of the application, that you can buy for use on your own website. They even have a widgetized version that you can add to your site or blog and let your users edit photos there and then.
They claim over 100,000 visitors/month to the site and will also be providing a YahooUI-based theme in a forthcoming release.
PutPlace.com is still in private beta at the moment, but it looks like it could be a winner. They have raised a six figure sum from angel investors, to build an online application to help manage your digital media. We all have many different files scattered across our mobiles, pcs, laptops and various other gadgets. Putplace gives all of your files a 'digital fingerprint' and helps you to manage and locate them. You can also publish your files to flickr, youtube and a host of other media sharing services.
You can also share your files between sites, so for instance with one click you can pull all your photos off flickr and publish them to your photobucket account. And of course all of these files can be backed up on PutPlace secure server, in case you lose them. Their public beta is coming in April, so keep an eye out.
Loudervoice.com.... I will let their CEO explain this one to you: "LouderVoice harnesses the distributed expertise in blogs to provide quality rated reviews for us all instead of spam, product placements and search results noise. Our site enables bloggers to publish structured reviews to their blogs and in turn aggregates structured multi-lingual review content from those blogs. Users can search for reviews, rate them, relate them and collect them in ways that are useful to themselves and others."
They are currently in private beta and hope to launch in April. I have seen this app and it's pretty cool. If they get traction, it could be big.
PollDaddy.com, which I developed, has been around for 6 months now. You can create a free poll and place it as a widget on your website, blog, mySpace etc. Disclosure: it's also where I work, so please feel free to drop by if you need a poll for your site. Also note that Read/WriteWeb uses our service.
zinadoo.com lets you create a free mobile site with their online flash based editor. You can create pages, add text and pictures. This will be a very handy tool for people who just want to get some kind of presence online for mobile visitors to their site. Zinadoo creators Nubiq are also about to launch a mobile site search, discovery and personalisation engine called Mobiseer, where users can search, tag and bookmark their favourite mobile sites.
MySay.com is still in private beta but should be coming online any day now. It's a sort of social networking app, but through the phone. Once your friends are in, you can all keep in touch, hearing each other's updates and stories, jokes or whatever - on the phone, on the web, or through the mySay desktop widget. It's social communication using your phone, with no need to download any software - just use your voice! Should be interesting to see how they get on.
Ireland is a happening place. There have been a lot of big success stories, such as a few of the 'old timers' we have mentioned here. But there is also a healthy environment of innovation amongst younger startups. I would like to thank Fergus Burns from Nooked for helping me put this article together. Fergus is also the administrator of web2ireland.org, a blog where you can track the progress of many of the companies mentioned in this article.
This post is part of Read/WriteWeb's continuing coverage of international Web markets. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India, Austria, Sweden, Australia, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia and Latvia.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Top Irish Web Apps.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2090
Continuing Read/WriteWeb's series on international web apps, I bring you a sample of all that the emerald isle has to offer. 20 years ago Ireland was a sleepy backwater with high unemployment and mass emigration. Jobs were rare and the... Read More
David Lenehan from Polldaddy fame has authored a great article on the Irish Web2.0 scene - Top Irish Web Apps Judging by this list of companies - plenty of Web2.0 activity in Ireland ... Read More
Two weeks after St. Patrick's day Read/Write Web features a parade of Irish startups. David Lenehan of PollDaddy chooses an interesting structure for the article, categorising Pigsbacks, Statcounter and Hostelworld as old-timers. All you have to do is ... Read More
Our own David Lenehan contributed a piece on Read/Write Web today which highlights some of the leading Web App companies on the Emerald Isle. So, if you thought that Guinness was the only major contribution to modern man to come out of Ireland, read T... Read More
David Lenehan does a run down of some of the top and upcoming webapps in Ireland including Nooked, Pixenate, Putplace, LouderVoice, AllFreeCalls, PigsBack, HostelWorld and Statcounter. Read More
nooked was profiled yesterday on readwriteweb as part of their international series - which covers Top Irish Web Apps. “Nooked have been in the RSS marketing business now for a while, but they recently announced a forthcoming product codenamed &... Read More
Continuing Read/WriteWeb's series on international web apps, I bring you a sample of all that the emerald isle has to offer. 20 years ago Ireland was a sleepy backwater with high unemployment and mass emigration. Jobs were rare and the only new startup... Read More
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
You've obviously forgotten about Segala already :(
In the words of one potential investor we're speaking to (who's very well known in the industry) 'Shit, this is at least a £100m to £200m business' - in my words, 'at least'.
So, I'm not sure how it could be so easy to forget about us.
Posted by: Paul Walsh | March 30, 2007 2:02 AMThe 'Largest exporter' of software tag comes from Transfer pricing - it's more tax efficient for multinationals to declare sales (and profits) within Ireland.
That dose of reality aside, there is a lot of activity within the Web 2 space in Ireland.
Paul
Posted by: Paul Browne - Technology in Plain English | March 30, 2007 2:58 AMcheck out 1time our online time tracking software
http://1timetacking.com
We have over 1200 companies all over the world sign up to our service while in beta. we are now now public and will be looking let everyone else get in on the action.
Posted by: Derek Organ | March 30, 2007 5:27 AMSorry the link is broken
http://1timetracking.com
Posted by: Derek Organ | March 30, 2007 5:29 AMPaul, If your business is worth 100m to 200m, you don't need the coverage surely?
Posted by: Damien Mulley | March 30, 2007 6:13 AMAnd now for the first non-begrudging comment. Well done to all those mentioned. Hopefully the next time this area is covered there'll be a whole host more companies on the list.
Posted by: Damien Mulley | March 30, 2007 6:26 AMsorry i didn't mean to be begrudging. well done to the apps on the list. great to hear about irish successes.
Posted by: Derek Organ | March 30, 2007 6:35 AMDerek, must send you an email. Like your product.
Posted by: Damien Mulley | March 30, 2007 6:46 AMThanks for the mention David, we're really looking forward to getting LouderVoice out of private Beta in April and into the hands of bloggers.
We're in some great company in that post and I can't wait to get my hands on those other apps that are still in Beta.
Posted by: Conor O'Neill | March 30, 2007 6:46 AMHi David
Interesting list. Some of those I had not known about. Nice to see Ireland mentioned here finally :D.
We too are an Irish based web application company with a new product on the market: mProperty. Would love to see this mentioned in the post.
More info here: http://www.mproperty.ie
If you would like any more info please contact us.
Regards, Naoise - Marino Software
Posted by: Naoise Guerin | March 30, 2007 7:07 AMDamien - it's all potential so it's relative (and of course, subjective to say the least!). Put it this way, it's certainly not a £5m business!
We purposely stayed under the media radar for 4 years whilst building what we have today.
Posted by: Paul Walsh | March 30, 2007 9:05 AMDamien - if a well received/professional blog is to cover a 'country' it's pretty important to get it right... I didn't write my comment with hate either. I appreciated the article that Lenny wrote about us recently.
Posted by: Paul Walsh | March 30, 2007 9:09 AMApologies for my first comment on this post - it's crap! I wrote it on my way out the door :( Sorry to David and the deserving companies on the list. I feel bad.
Posted by: Paul Walsh | March 30, 2007 9:19 AMDon't forget that dotMobi itself is an Irish company: http://dotMobi.mobi :-)
And also, on a more social note, don't forget Dublin's inaugural Mobile Monday next week: http://momodub.mobi
Perhaps see many of you there?
Posted by: James Pearce | March 30, 2007 9:19 AMPaul. Don't feel bad. The comments in posts such as this are extremely important. Because, just like in an Academy Awards acceptance speech, important players are often left out of the list. Your comments are as important as the article itself; that's why blogs and other social media platforms that encourage and support reader interaction are so important and valuable.
Have a great weekend!
Tom
Posted by: Tom O'Leary | March 30, 2007 10:01 AMBesides, the Irish are notoriously begrudging ; ) - that's what keeps us humble, even in the midst of our historically great accomplishments. Even Bono can't get away with sitting in a pub with his nose up in the air. We wouldn't be Irish if we didn't begrudge a little now and then!
All the best from Bellingham
Tom
Posted by: Tom O'Leary | March 30, 2007 10:20 AMTom - I know what you mean BUT 99.9% of the time I'm not at all. I was caught on the hop on my way out the door - honestly :)
Posted by: Paul Walsh | March 30, 2007 10:24 AM[A repost without links...]
Don't forget that dotMobi itself is an Irish company :-)
And also, on a more social note, don't forget Dublin's inaugural Mobile Monday next week.
Perhaps see many of you there?
Posted by: James Pearce | March 30, 2007 11:46 AMPW
Posted by: Tom McKenna | March 30, 2007 4:44 PMI hope your "potential investor" does not trip across your comments here. You might find your next conversation to be somewhat shorter...
Didn't think some of these were from Ireland.
Posted by: TuF | March 31, 2007 3:20 AM
Posted by: mondo di modo | March 31, 2007 5:05 AMThank you very much. The only place on the internet, which has information on Ireland. Write more reviews of small countries.
I dont know if Irish software is good or not but there call centers sucks big time. All most all the big companies have a call center somewhere in Ireland to fight off the political backlash of sending call center jobs to India and the technicians in those Irish call centers are as smart as an automatic email responder script and as thick as champ.
Posted by: William S | March 31, 2007 11:47 AMThanks for the mention,appreciate, loads of other to mention though.
Posted by: Pat Phelan | March 31, 2007 12:55 PMTom McKenna - why? I shouldn't have commented because it made me look sad - for which I apologised. Why put the boot in? We're not all perfect!
Posted by: Paul Walsh | March 31, 2007 2:16 PMThanks all for the comments. Sorry Paul that we left you out, it wasn't intentional or anything. We just thought Segala isn't a web app, as your core business is services. Anyway, I linked to Segala in my latest weekly wrapup - as a way of making it up to you.
Also, Tom O'Leary is right, these posts are all about the comments. There's no way we can cover every web app in a country and so the comments are crucial in adding new web apps we may've missed. Every single Top Web Apps post has had fantastic comments - and this is no exception :-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | March 31, 2007 4:58 PMRichard - you didn't have to link to us but it was extremely good of you, thanks a million!
I agree that it's about the comments too - in fact, I'm going to write a post (soon I hope) about blogs that don't permit comments... er, I mean Web sites that call themselves blogs :)
Posted by: Paul Walsh | March 31, 2007 5:44 PMCall centres here are dodgy enough. That being said, at least you can understand what's being said over the phone.. Plus I've done that circuit before and there are generally intelligent, dedicated people who work in call centres. It's just a shit job so they move on!
Posted by: Michael | March 31, 2007 7:56 PMI thought the celtic tiger was extinct and the english were to blame. The companies listed are all really english since england owns Ireland right? How do you feel about the fact the country is changing to where there will be no farms or open fields and the entire country covered with new house subdivisions on anything that can be subdivided.
Posted by: shook looking | April 1, 2007 6:59 AMIsn't Ireland part of U.K ? Why not do a best web application list of U.K and include Irish web applications there - why just publish web applications of a province of U.K? This way Irish companies are getting unfair limelight as opposed to say hmmm scottish or english or moorish.
Posted by: Sohartu Sikogi | April 1, 2007 8:32 PMGreat to see Irish companies get some coverage on ReadWriteWeb, which is after all a leading media outlet in this space. Lets hope some of these companies are successful. What's really great here, is how many of these companies are not "hard core programming and infrastructure plays", but customer facing and retail plays.
Posted by: Paul Sweeney | April 2, 2007 3:33 AMSohartu, you are joking right? The Republic of Ireland is a not part of the UK. Perhaps some lessons in geography and history are in order. But I'll assume that you are joking. ha ha, very funny.
Ireland IS part of the European Union (EU).
Posted by: Tom O'Leary | April 2, 2007 8:39 AMPW, I was not putting the boot in. I was alluding to the fact that blogsphere is not an appropriate "enterprise valuation" forum. If you think otherwise, then that is your prerogative but you will have credibility issues with investors.
Posted by: Tom McKenna | April 4, 2007 3:24 AMExcellent article David. Its great to see a proactive approach to highlighting successful Web based businesses. Ray Houghton can be proud!!
The success of these companies will be determined by their ability to adopt successful product strategies. Many high technology companies have fallen into the trap of focusing heavily on their technologies. It is important for them to continually review and identify the needs of the market and leverage their existing knowledge base to expand into related markets.
Keep up the good work and hopefully we will see more flourishing internet companies in the west of Ireland
Enda
Posted by: Enda | April 12, 2007 10:32 PMsohbet
Posted by: sohbet | May 31, 2007 3:42 AMI agree - Great to see Irish companies get some coverage on ReadWriteWeb, which is after all a leading media outlet in this space. Lets hope some of these companies are successful. What's really great here, is how many of these companies are not "hard core programming and infrastructure plays", but customer facing and retail plays.
Posted by: Paul Finret | June 17, 2007 4:27 AMVery good post. Thanks that you include this in your page. I would like to ask if I could translate it and put it on my site in section about interesting topics. If that would be possible email me. Really great text. Greetings!
Posted by: Natola | June 17, 2007 4:30 AM> StatCounter is one of the few websites around with a pagerank of 10. They have more back links to their site than anyone else on the web, apart from Google.com!
We really hope StatCounter grows into the greatest company of the world, in our point of view, they provide much much better services than that of G's analytics. And they treat customers in a way that a great company does, which is also considered 10 times better than G's.
Posted by: United Digitals | June 23, 2007 4:12 PMoff
Posted by: indir | June 28, 2007 6:39 AMthanks
Posted by: komik video | June 28, 2007 6:39 AMthanks for
Posted by: download | June 28, 2007 6:44 AMthank you..good site yes
Posted by: youtube | June 28, 2007 6:45 AMgood stly
Posted by: indir | June 28, 2007 6:47 AMyou..good site yes
Posted by: chat | July 2, 2007 4:37 PMA good article, thanks for writing this. Keep up the good work!
Posted by: Ann | July 14, 2007 3:28 AMKeep up the good work!
Posted by: Giełda samochodowa | July 17, 2007 3:18 PMGreat to see Irish companies get some coverage on ReadWriteWeb
Posted by: Usb flashdrive | July 18, 2007 2:31 PMKeep up the good work!
Posted by: Odtwarzacze mp4 | July 23, 2007 1:03 PMThis is very cool. Ireland has a rich culture of poverty lol.
Posted by: Bored Portal - Free Flash Games | July 24, 2007 9:10 PMwow very good thx.
Posted by: Chat | July 25, 2007 4:59 PMKeep up the good work!
Posted by: Odtwarzacze mp3 | July 26, 2007 1:11 AMhi?
Posted by: chat | July 29, 2007 11:20 AMThank you for the useful informations.
Posted by: Bank zdjec | July 30, 2007 2:26 PMthanksss
Posted by: muhabbet | August 1, 2007 12:39 PMchatturk tahnkss. tahnks...
Posted by: chat | August 1, 2007 12:41 PMver very good . im fine tahnks
Posted by: evden eve nakliyat | August 1, 2007 12:42 PMthankssss
Posted by: msn programları | August 1, 2007 12:43 PMThanks for very interesting article. btw. I really enjoyed reading all of your posts. It’s interesting to read ideas, and observations from someone else’s point of view… makes you think more. So please keep up the great work. Greetings.
Posted by: Onlineshop Online Shop Online-Shop | August 18, 2007 3:55 PMcanli tv cine5 show tv atv kanal d izle
Posted by: canli Tv izle | August 20, 2007 2:39 AM