After Bizspark for Startups, Microsoft launch WebsiteSpark programme for Web Developers and designers .

Barcamp Cork the 3rd is confirmed for November 14th.

A great service for storing passwords, free online password manager www.passpack.com (Via @alexleonard)

In the wake of a blog post from Pat Phelan, James Corbett kicked off ‘OutVesting‘ whereby people on Twitter pledge to donate 50 Euro along with 99 others to give 5,000 Euro to a startup. In what I believe was under a week, 100 people have already pledged to donate 50 Euro. More on http://www.outvesting.org/

Little Quiz launched this week offering a chance to win a spanking new Sony Ericsson walkman phone compliments of their first quiz sponsor, downloadmusic.ie

To be in with a chance to win the phone you just answer 3 simple questions, that’s all!

The monkeys behind Littlequiz must have lost their marbles because they’re just giving stuff away. If you sign up to the newsletter you could win €100 in cash and there’s even a page dedicated to how to win prizes.

I’m looking forward to seeing more prizes on offer on the site from week to week. It’s a great looking site and I hope plenty of sponsors come onboard to help out and promote their own products at the same time.

Try out this weeks quiz  on LittleQuiz

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

The Jack & Jill Foundation, through its partner Promethean, have launched a campaign where they are asking schools to swap 300 old mobile phones for a new interactive 78 inch Promethean ActivBoard.

My fiancée is a primary school teacher in Cork and she has begun to collect old mobile phones to get an interactive whiteboard for her classroom.

So far we have 19 mobile phones thanks to family and friends. I’m hoping that through the various businesses I know around the country that we can collect together 300 or more phones. Can you help?

19 phones so far..

If you have an old mobile phone lying around, I’ll collect it from you if you’re around Cork city.

It is estimated that there are over 10 million old phones in Irish households so 300 shouldn’t be too hard I hope.

I wonder would they settle for 1 large phone maybe?

Giant Polystyrene iPhone

Image Credit: Polystyrene iPhone from MadeinHollywood

Google has opened an Internet Statistics site bringing together 3rd party statistics into one place.

The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions.

From the same site, a Timelines visualisation for time travel in popular film and TV. Read the comments too, some nerdy people out there.

Im trying out Outlook 2007 at the moment as my email client after using Thunderbird for years and years. This morning I read about Postbox, built using the Mozilla engine. Postbox are on Twitter too. Read a Postbox review on ReadWriteWeb.

Have you old PC parts knocking around your home or office? Give them to Bluekop.