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/

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

I signed on to the Microsoft Bizspark programme a number of weeks ago and I’ve been trying out some of the Microsoft applications that I’ve never had access to before without forking out a lot of money.

I’m planning a lot of projects right now so I installed Microsoft Project 2007 to try it out. I have to say, I like it a lot so far. I got a couple of lessons on using MS Project from my brother in law who uses it as part of his own work for a large Engineering company in the UK.  I imagine I’m barely using 2% of its abilities but it’s working out very well for me already in planning the time and costs for a project.

As well as Ms Project I’ve begun using MS Word 2007 too in place of Open Office which I’ve been using for years. Open Office gives problems when using bullet points and when copy & pasting from OO to other applications so I installed MS Word. I can open the odd .docx file that people send me now too.

For emails I use Thunderbird,I’ve used this for years and I’m very happy with it. Recently though I’ve been a little frustrated with its ability to connect to other apps. Several addons are needed to sync Thunderbird with anything.

I use a Thunderbird extension called Lightening to provide an interface to my calendars.

I use Provider for Google Calendar“  to sync Lightning to a Google Calendar, this has been failing recently.

On my Nokia e61i phone I use CalSyncS60 to connect the phone calendar with Google Calendar. CalSyncS60 used to be free but now its proprietary and called Googasync.

MS Outlook provides a calendar facility built in without any addons. It syncs with my phone using the Nokia PC Suite via cable or Bluetooth.  It has an added bonus of syncing the contacts and notes on my phone too. I’m a big note taker.  I’m thinking of getting the cradle for the Nokia e61i since I’ll be syncing more often.

Outlook can also be linked to the projects in MS Project. Emails in my inbox can be drag and dropped into tasks which can then be imported into a project.

There is a Journal section too in Outlook 2007 that can record the time spent on documents which is great at accounting for time but I’m not too familiar with this yet. Maybe it could track time spent on Twitter

I moved my emails from Thunderbird to Outlook over the weekend and I’m planning on using Outlook/Word/Project for a few weeks to see how I get on. I may eventually go back to Thunderbird, I know Thunderbird 3 is on the way promising more facilities.

Moving from Thunderbird 2 to Outlook 2007

I followed a guide to  move from Thunderbird to Outlook. Thunderbird emails are stored in MBOX format. This cannot be imported into Outlook 2007 directly so a couple of steps are needed.

I used ImapSize to convert the MBOX files from Thunder bird to .eml files.

Then Drap and drop those eml files into Outlook Express, recreating any custom folders.

Use Outlook Express to Export to Outlook to Outlook 2007.

For the address book, export the address book from Thunderbird as an ldap file. Import into address book in Outlook Express, Export to Outlook 2007.

I’ve upped my backup routine too. I picked up a Seagate 1 TB external USB drive which is on offer in Eason’s at the moment for only €89 and started backing up my documents, projects, downloads incrementally to the drive each day instead of each month to a 320 GB drive as before.

For backing up the folders I’m using Second Copy. Thank you @lecraic for the recommendation on Twitter.

It’s a great app and easy to set up. It automatically backs up several folders on my hard drive and compressed a couple of them and provides email notifications when complete or if errors occur. I highly recommend it.

So overall, starting this Monday morning, Im a little more organised and connected thanks mainly to the Microsoft software available through the Microsoft Bizspark programme. If you’re an SME, check it out.

Related articles by Zemanta

• MS revives Outlook for Mac (theregister.co.uk)
• Microsoft Employees Want Your Ideas for Improving Office (readwriteweb.com)

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.