Hi-tech mentor firm for Ireland

THE founders of Startup bootcamp used yesterday’s Dublin Web Summit to announce the addition of Ireland to its growing list of locations. The venture by the technology entrepreneurship mentoring programme, which started in Copenhagen, acts as a high level incubation centre for technology start-ups.

Dublin, London, Madrid and Berlin will be the next hubs. Eoghan Jennings — the former chief financial officer of German online networking site, Xing — will head the Dublin version, with applications set to start in the summer. Yesterday’s event, attended by 500 delegates, featured a number of high profile speakers including Ben Parr from US online news site Mashable; Paddy Power’s Breon Corcoran; Ray Nolan of Hostelworld and Dan Cobley of Google.

Entrepreneur Jerry Kennelly who was promoting his venture, Tweak.com, which aims to link SMEs to high quality brand designers in a cost-effective way — said Ireland is currently at its brightest moment, in terms of potential success from technology start-ups.

But, Mr Kennelly warned, “good ideas are only worth so much; someone has to pay for them at the end of the day”. He said start-ups should make sure that their competitive advantage can be commercially sustainable in the long-term and that they can scale up their venture quickly.

Mr Kennelly added that the Endeavour entrepreneurship support programme which he co-founded is looking for candidates for its 2011 programme and noted that the 12 companies that took part last year have already amassed a combined valuation of about €10m.