Innovate 100 - The good, the bad and the hungry

Innovate 100 event was held in Dublin on Monday at the Radisson Blue hotel.

Plush enough surroundings really and free food which was handy for the lesser-well off. Plenty of networking style walking around and passing business cards, no brown envelopes received. As we'd not a single outstanding idea for the event we did feel a bit early stage for it but was good to see people were supportive and freely giving advice.

The morning kicked off with the CEO of Revahealth. Now this to me is a database of doctors profiles but from what the lecture contained it seemed to be fairly heavy staffed. The ROI seemed pretty slow to materialise though so he didn't paint too pretty a picture on going through the business. Google adwords got a bit of a slaying.

Next up was the CEO of Getitkeepit.com, a bill aggregation site. Not a bad looking enterprise and currently just going live so it's fairly fresh. They talked about offshore development for startups and getting technology into service integrators (Accenture et al). Seemed like a good idea if not slightly "mint" orientated. Reckon they might find it hard to pull in revenue from a site like that considering they're hoping to charge service providers to host their bills on the site. No doubt a slew of services will be setup to replicate Patzers cash cow.

Next 2 lectures were some generic Microsoft stuff on partnering and going international. Boring stuff that was no pushing their software.

Ray Nolan, owner of Hostelworld.com  gave the "i'm loaded, don't talk shit to me" speech. He steamrolled through the presentation like primary school student through home time prayers. Making sure to throw in the odd "we stamped out them" and "expedia are bullshit" comments. Funny to watch and he did make some good points at the panel that followed.

He reckoned Ireland's too small to target anything other than a sweet shop at. Probably right but I'm sure there are lots of people with companies doing well (maybe not as well as the 500m hostelworld was sold for).

There was a dragons den style affair to top the evening off where 11 startups presented to the crowd. Honestly the startups were by in large shite (although better than what we have which is currently nada). Typical affairs with a mobile website builder, time managment software, network software, cloud computing analyser. Nothing really unique. The winner was the Sonru video interviewing software which seems to be taking steroids as it's picked up tons of awards around Ireland recently.

Decent event, met some good Po-lice and well worth a visit if just for the free food..