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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.

Busy couple of days ahead before I leave San Francisco. Today and Tomorrow is Dreamforce which I’m attending. Thanks Techcrunch 
There is also another event on today called “The Business of API’s” It’s a much smaller event than Dreamforce taking place in The City Club.

Tomorrow night is going to be election party night, everyone’s expecting Obama to make it.

Good reason to find your local Enterprise Ireland office and sign up. The fund is provided to assist companies in the following areas.

• capital investment
• technology acquisition
• recruitment of key managers
• consultancy to assist with the implementation of the Growth Fund proposal
• management development and
• staff training

For the planning stage there is also a Strategic Consultancy Grant which could provide up to 50% funding towards the cost of a consultant to assess their requirements under the Growth Fund and to assist with the preparation of an application.

This is an overall fund of which the Workplace Innovation Fund (WIF) is a key component of the Growth Fund.  This fund is a joint initiative between Enterprise Ireland the National Centre for Partnership and Performance (NCPP).

If you’d like more information about putting together a plan to approach EI about Technology projects that would benefit this fund feel free to get in touch with me.

For more information visit the Enterprise Ireland site information on the fund.

This week it became public that General Electric have decided to roll out Zoho Docs for it’s employees. There are circa 400,000 user desktops so its a pretty substantial  development in the world of online collaboration.

Apparently they got rid of Google Docs because of the intrusiveness of Google. Understandable really. Apparently this is a quote from an unnamed source in GE

A GE spokesperson who did not want to be identified said their decision was based around issues of personal and corporate privacy, functionality, support, features and Zoho won hands down. The spokesperson said the Google application was intrusive and the ads started to become a nuisance.

Interestingly Zoho have agreed to help GE setup their own instance of Zoho Docs on their internal servers. I really wonder what the implication is for future large rollouts. Will they all be hosted on the organisations servers or is this a once off?