Northern Ireland is going to tap the global crossing broadband line and bring it in to Derry. The Deptartment of Enterprise will provide some funding in return for links to Donegal and Monaghan. This will give a very high quality broadband connection to these areas. The current completion date is scheduled for March 2010.

Here is the official line on it:

Project Kelvin

Project Kelvin is a €30m cross-border venture in partnership with the Northern Ireland Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment and co-financed by Interreg funding from the European Union. Broadband Communications between Ireland and North America will be routed directly into a transatlantic communications network without having to use intermediate external networks e.g. through London. Amongst the benefits will be faster response times at lower cost for high capacity broadband users.

The project will involve the construction of a fibre optic submarine telecommunications cable which will be brought ashore in Co. Derry. Further links will ensure Letterkenny and Monaghan as well as Castleblayney, Drogheda and Dundalk have direct international connectivity.

Following a competitive tendering process, the contract for delivery of the project has been awarded to Hibernia Atlantic Ltd.

Some more info here science.ie site

Enterprise Ireland have announced a programme called Propel for the BMW region. Sounds similar to initiatives to what has been happening with the Greenhouse in Limerick and also quite similar to CORD (Commercial Research and Development) which is another EI programme.

Details can be found here: www.propelprogramme.ie

The prospectus is below. Hopefully there will be a good take up in Leitrim as there are many talented people I’ve met since moving home.

Image via Wikipedia

David McWilliams spoke in Carrick On Shannon last Friday (Feb 13th). His message was pretty consistent with his blog and articles in the Irish Indo and Sunday Business Post over the last few weeks and months.

What was especially interesting was his mention of his experience in Argentina and how small business sprung up after the catastrophe with the banking system. In fact the similarities between the initiatives there (http://www.experienciapyme.com.ar/) and the BizCamp Limerick and Dublin movement are striking. Visit the websites for further details on the events and ethos behind them. Limerick takes place on March 21st and Dublin on March 7th.

If your Spanish is not quite up to scratch for the experienciapyme site try out this Google Translated version

Finally, here is some video of the event last friday taken by RTE.

This is well worth watching if you want to find out about the David Allen Getting Things Done system before purchasing the book.

Personally I can’t recommend the system highly enough.

Proud Leitrim man that I am as well as having my business based in the county I thought I’d share this with you.

The Promotion

Leitrim County Council has recently launched a website to promote Leitrim as a destination to live and work in. The site includes details of an accelerated 50% Tax Relief available immediately on Capital Allowances to companies setting up in the region. More details on the Commercial Rural Renewal relief are here.

There are many other supports for new business setting up in the area as I can testify to. The quality of life is also second to none. Well done to Jackie Maguire and the rest of Leitrim County Council for taking the initiative. Some of the people featured are in the videos are:

Philip Martin - Chief Executive Officer, Cora systems
Ronan Haslette - Chief Executive Officer, Meranda
Joe McHugh - Regional Director IDA North West
Ian O’Doherty - Chief Executive Office MBNA
Angela Hope - Handbag Designer, AngelaHope.com
Padraic White - Chairperson, Collins McNicholas

Tech Companies in Leitrim

From a Tech perspective we have the founders and CEO’s of some of the most innovative companies in Ireland and Europe at the moment based in the area.

Fergus Burns - Nooked - One of the most well known Tech companies to emerge from Ireland in recent years. Fergus is also well known in Ireland and the rest of the world for his knowledge and help to start up Tech companies.

Johnny Beirne and Gareth McDaid - DownloadMusic.ie - Download music has disrupted the music industry by providing a totally new sales channel to musicians signed to independent labels allowing them to sell their tracks via mobile phone SMS. Recently launched in Europe and the US as TextATrack.com this company is going to be very big in 2009.

David Linehan - polldaddy - With customers such as Fox Media and RTE, they were recently sold to a US company Wordpress for quite a tidy sum. David and his team are continuing to work on polldaddy and other  new ventures.

Networking

For those of you familiar with networking events such as OpenCoffee, BarCamp you’ll be interested to hear that the worlds first CruiseCamp will be taking place in Carrick On Shannon on July 25th 2009. People from the Start-up and Blogging community from all over Ireland will be attending. Leitrim is truly at the cutting edge!

Media

Take a look at some of the promotional videos:

Enterprise and Investment in Leitrim

Leitrim an Opportunity

Quality of life in Leitrim

I’d encourage anyone with Leitrim connections to write about and share the videos and content from www.leitrim.ie on their Blog/Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/IGOPeople/etc. Whilst there is a national radio campaign being ran it doesn’t have the same reach internationally that Blogs and Twitter can have. You can also follow me on Twitter and ask more about specifics or for names of good people to talk to in the Enterprise Board.

I’ve always been into mindmaps since discovering them whilst studying for the Leaving. At the time I was reading Tony Buzans original book on the subject. I used them intermittently in University which stopped completely after graduating.

Lately I’ve been doing alot of work on business planning. In particular I’ve been following the Alex Osterwalder model for innovative business plans, thanks to Diane Roberts from xCellPartners (more on this model to come for those of you who may be unfamiliar).

After checking out at a number of Mind Mapping applicationd most of them running locally on the desktop I had more or less settled on Mindjet Mindmanager. I then came across another program called Mindmeister.com.

Straightaway things were promising, the look and feel of the site as well as the sign up process were similar to many current Web 2.0 applications. After signing up for the free version and logging in I was able to get cracking straightaway.

The main dashboard screen shows your latest mindmaps along with various configuration menus. From here you can start a new mindmap, edit existing ones as well as configure various options.

The user interface for creating mindmaps is extremely intuitive, for anyone who is familiar with the concepts of creating a mind map it’s a breeze.

One of the most impressive features is the ability to have multiple persons work on the same mindmap at the same time. I have tried this with my business partner where each of us on Skype had a brainstorming session and it worked extremely well.

MindMeister is also compatible with other Mind Mapping software so may be possible to migrate to it from another program.

Apart from the free version there are 3 price options for the Personal, Academic and Business. Like most good products you get all the features you need to get going and can decide to upgrade when your needs for certain features become important.

Finally my favourite feature is the ability to embed the code for your mindmap in your blog or website. You even have the choice to have the mindmap editable so visitors to your website/blog/wiki can add to it. Check this out below.

To edit this map click here and have a go.

I love good software and can’t recommend this product highly enough. whether you’ve never used mind maps or are looking for a new tool to using this fits the bill.

I was talking to a couple of people about this recently and it was also brought up at the Microsoft Event last week. This is a pretty good document put together by FORFAS which gives a pretty exhaustive list of all funding sources available in Ireland as of 2007. Hopefully somebody will find it useful.