Back in the office today after a great Bizcamp over the weekend. Between Cork Open Coffee on Friday and Bizcamp on Saturday its been a great few days for networking and meeting great people. All my business cards are gone.

Cork Open Coffee on Friday was Sponsored by CityLocal Cork which allowed us to call in Mr. Cotton’s Coffee and Delicious’ foods for the moring which was brilliant.

Well done to the organisers of Bizcamp! The Guinness Store house venue was excellent. It was pretty big and I think everyone figured out pretty quickly that the lifts in the center weren’t the fastest to arrive so the stairs were pretty popular for the day.

At any given time during the day, there were 5 talks going on at a time in different rooms. It was physically impossible to attend them all which is a pity, a few of them which I’d like to have attended were on at the same time.

For me the best talk of the day was Alan O’Rourkes talk on Email to Sales: Conversion in Email Marketing.  Alan gave plenty of numbers showing how an email marketing campaign to around 1000 recipients could result in 1 single purchase of your product or service to a value of €1000 euro. This shocked a couple of people in the audience but rang true to a few other members of the audience which were familiar with this return on what is on average a €10 investment per campaign. Alan highly recommended reading “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely which is now on my wish list.

Steve Gotz spoke about how not to create a start up business. Steve bought a BMW Z3 and a new house before starting his company leading up to the dotcom bust and recommended doing things the other way around.
I missed Ger Hartnetts talk on Simple project management unfortunately in favor of Joe Drumgooles’ talk on Startups in Ireland. Joe highly recommended trying to take advantage of grants coming soon from the National Digital Research centre.

I missed Kate O’Beirnes talk on Time management for Start ups in favor of the panel discussion in the main hall. This panel discussion was excellent; Kevin Traynor, Colm Lyons, Asheesh Dewan and Jerry Kennelly spoke openly about the ups and downs of trading in difficult times from their own experiences and answered questions from a packed hall all the while sharing one single microphone.

At the end of the talks I attended a talk from the Bizcamp Team on how they organized the day. Overall the cost for Bizcamp was around €8,000 which covered the venue, audio / visual, food, wifi, teas / coffees and the teams highly visible T-shirts. The sponsors; Microsoft, Bank of Ireland, Mason Hayes+Curran (Thanks for the mints!) and 3 covered the costs of the day.

Around 500 people registered for Bizcamp, around 300 arrived on the day which isn’t bad at all for a weekend with an All-Ireland final on. I took plenty of notes on their organizing of Bizcamp for the upcoming organizing of the third Barcamp in Cork in November.

Check out Mark Cahills pictures from the day on Pix.ie

Other Bizcamp related blog posts

Bizcamp Dublin by Keith Shirley

Keeping an eye on the ball by Fran Hollywood