Damien Mulley

Read this with a Geordie accent for best effect.

It’s day two of Paddy’s Valley Padbrother and many of the contestants are still asleep in the PadBrother House, while others are up and awake nursing sore heads. Alexia is in the kitchen making food for everyone. One day in and she’s already assumed the motherly role. At the same time Eoghan is already outside the Apple store, face pressed to the glass while stroking the glass and declaring his love to the iPhone.

As this is happening Conor has declared that he’s his own Island Nation and monarch of it at the same time. His grand highness Conor P plans to pounce on the Irish Ambassador on Tuesday evening and talk about setting up and embassy in Ireland so he can bring back lots of cheap goods under diplomatic immunity.

While some are having fun, others are working on their networking. Bus ticket 2.0 manufacturer CoClarity’s Ger Hartnett is busy working on his powerpoint presentation while Niall Larkin from RelevantM is practising his deathly evil and cold smile while reciting “I could tell you what the product does but then I’ll have to kill you.”

As this is happening Shane McAllister from Mobanode is standing outside every door in the Padbrother house in turn and trying to send bluetooth messages about how great his product is to the mobile phones that are in each room.

5 miles away the Touristr crew are polishing their red mustang. (not a euphemism)

More updates on the other Padbrother contestants later.

Facebook, Ning, Meebo, Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, Socialtext, United Layer and MORE.

Paul Walsh has made a call to get something started in Ireland:

I’ve previously grumbled about the lack of support in Ireland for Web based companies. Heck, Enterprise Ireland doesn’t even have the word ‘Internet’ in the ‘Industry sector’ section of their application forms for grants etc. What does that tell you?

If you’re interested in helping me improve the ecosystem, please join me for dinner in January

There are so many things I want to say on this but I just don’t have the time right now. There’s a dinner in January to talk about this and act on this. Watch the Segala blog and do come along.

I’ve had my run-ins with Walshy in the past and people ask me why I’m friendly with him after I exchanged such strong words with him before. The reason is that the more I see him work, the more he impresses me. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly (sounds familiar) and like Fergus Burns he’s a networking machine. And again like Fergus, it’s not the Irish definition of networking which is comprised of gathering and then selfishly hoarding contacts (another blog post on this will follow), it’s all about “This is so and so, you should talk, you work in the same space and exchanging information will help you both”. Paul has made a name and a rep for himself in London and further afield because of the events he organises and he’s done a great job with BIMA and all their events.

If Paul can do the same in Ireland as he’s done in the UK then that’s a very important thing for the Web industry here. In the meantime I’d strongly recommend that Irish companies that are serious about doing business in the real world outside of incubation centres should be getting cheap Ryanair flights to London every now and then to attend many of the networking events that are on, on a regular basis. The quality of the contacts is worth the travel costs and time used up. See you in January in Dublin!