Last week I attended  it@corks breakfast meeting in Rochestown Park hotel. Ronan Geraghty introduced the Microsoft Bizspark programme which provides Microsoft software and services to start-ups. The slides from the event are available on it@corks blog.

John Galvin from BackUpEarth.Com are currently participating in this programme and John made a presentation showing how their business has benefited from Bizspark. The BackUpEarth slides are also available from the it@cork blog.

Since then, I’ve signed up to the Bizspark programme for Murrion Software. I confirmed with it@cork that the business meets the criteria for the programme and got back an enrollment link to get started.

To be eligible for BizSpark, all of the following must be true. Your Startup:

• Is in the business of software development
• Is privately held
• Has been in business for less than 3 years
• Has less than US $1 million in annual revenue

I filled out a couple of forms and got a welcome email back from Microsoft Bizspark. 2-6 hours later I was granted access to the MSDN using my existing Windows Live ID.

I started out developing apps using ASP a good few years ago and now I have the opportunity to develop versions of software using ASP.NET. I’ve since downloaded Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to begin developing some apps and get back in to ASP.

I’ve been developing using PHP for the last 5 or 6 years so I’ll be fun to get ASP going on the server using Apache instead of IIS.

One thing I noticed though on MSDN  is that the downloads don’t work when using the Firefox browser. It downloads the default.aspx page instead of running it. Switching over to Internet Explorer works  fine which installed an independent downloader to download any apps.

Another benefit of the programme is being able to list your product or service on Bizspark DB.  I’ll add Murrion Software up there soon enough, I’ll be curious to see if there is any resulting traffic to the site.

Who knows, maybe I’ll drop all the open source stuff and go back to Microsoft.

Last week I put together a tool called Keyword Domains to notify a user by email if a .ie domain name becomes available in relation to their chosen keywords.

This app uses Blacknights list of expired .ie domain names. I think this list is a great resource and I wanted to stick with it to make a list which consists of thousands of .ie domain names more useful to a person looking to gather together some domain names.

This week I’ve created a little mash-up of the .ie expired domain names list and Google Trends. With Google Trends you can see what is currently a hot topic being searched for the most on Google.

With Trend.ie Domains (Trendy Domains!!) you can see the current top 100 trends on Google and see if there are any expired .ie domains names along similar lines. Clicking on ‘Buy Now’ takes you directly to Blacknight to get it.

Google Trends and related .ie domain names

I attended the Microsoft Bizspark event organised by it@cork yesterday morning, hosted in the Rochestown Park Hotel. It was definitely worth going. Tea, coffee and even breakfast rolls were provided to wake everyone up before the speakers got started.

On each of the tables there was an it@cork flier showing the upcoming talks and a membership offer of Corporate membership to it@cork until January 2010 for only €60 including VAT.

To avail of the offer, sign up before May 31st and when filling out the online form choose to pay by post, it@cork will contact you to arrange payment.

Later in the morning I signed up and now Murrion Software is a proud member of it@cork (check out the badge on the right) and looking forward to the coming events.

• Visit to EMC, May 18th
• Online Marketing Workshop, May 28th
• Software Testing Event, June 18th
• Midsummer event in Murphy’s Brewery, June 18th
• When Agile goes bad, June 23rd

I’ve put together a useful tool to allow users to search for and get notified by email of  .ie domain names that have expired.

This could be useful if you are watching out for a particular .ie domain name to become available or if you are interested in buying domain names that are somewhat related to your business, products or services.

Domain Keywords

The list of .ie domain names comes from Blacknights website which currently has over 4,500 deleted domain names.

To use the app simply enter a few keywords or phrases relevant to your business. If there are any domain names that might be of use to you they are displayed  with a link back to Blacknight to buy them.

If you add in your email address then you will receive an email as any .ie domain names become available that are relevant to your keywords.

Try it out, let me know what you think. Its the first of about half a dozen useful little apps I’ll be making available over the coming weeks.

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A friend at Apple told me about this the other night, you can change the language on your Facebook  profile to Pirate!

To change to Pirate, click on the current language down on the bottom left.

“What’s on your mind?” is now “What be troublin’ ye?” and “Log Out” is “Abandon Ship”. There are plenty more, try it out!