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.