Barcamp, Silicon Ireland and CrunchLudd roundup

I’ve attended Barcamp Belfast, Silicon Ireland and CrunchLudd over the last couple of weeks. All were good fun and interesting and it’s great to see so much creativeness coming out of Ireland as a whole.

Barcamp Belfast

This event was good craic and was great to meet and talk to loads of local people with shared interests. Well done to Andy for a well organised event.

I did a talk at the event entitled ‘Keeping users happy’ that included some usability and customer relation tips. You can view the slides below (might follow up with a blog post dedicated to this so it makes more sense).

[slideshare id=496616&doc=barcampbelfast08-1215036280212553-9&w=425]

There was an interesting talk on scaling Rails by David Rice and a freelance talk by Brian O’Neil. All the talks were great but I these were the ones that most applied to me.

Silicon Ireland

Paddy Donnelly and I were down talking about The Big Word Project in Dublin. Great day and great people at the event. It was really interesting listening to Sean McGrath, he has some really interesting ideas regarding the current state of the web. We even got to do a TV spot for RTE news. Here’s an interview we recorded on the day.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvqU1UxdwfU]

CrunchLudd

After Silicon Ireland it was onto a (free)bar in Dublin to see some local startups. Some fantastic sites, some have been launched and some are launching shortly. Here’s my 2 picks of the bunch.

Toddle.ie

Beautifully designed app that creates mail/newsletter templates with ease

Muzu.tv

Kind of a mash-up between (old-skool)MTV and YouTube. They have some big labels signed up already.

I had great fun attending all these events and thanks to all the organisers. Hope to see you at the next one.