A lot has happened in the last 12 months. It being the first day back at work of the New Year, I wanted to write a post about some of the highlights of our first full (calendar) year in business.

Startups

The year started off well enough. We’d just finished a two month project for Mobivox, a Canadian VoIP startup. We’d been building their billing system and integrating it with their VoIP system since our first day of trading in October. The project went well, and Mobivox was later sold to Sabse Technologies, a company founded by Sabeer Bhatia one of Hotmail’s Co-Founders.

In early January we decided to shake up our business model a bit. We’d previously taken the route of web developers / PHP guns for hire. Ireland is a pretty small market, and we found that sufficiently differentiating ourselves from all the other web developers in the country to be no easy task. Given the broadness of the term itself, we decided to focus on our strengths on those that need them the most: startups. We also decided that in order to do this, we’d need some extra brains. (more…)

There’s been a lot of talk, blogging, tweeting in the last week about TechCrunch50, so I’ll try not to tread old ground. Personally, I’d like to thank everyone in the Irish web community who wished us luck before, during and after the event. It was a great to feel we had the backing of so many people in the industry - I believe that this sense of community characterises our industry and separates us from others, long may it continue.

For echolibre, this event was a huge milestone — the software behind the two Irish companies to attend TechCrunch50, CloudSplit and VidSchool, was built by us. echolibre opened it’s doors to the world on October 1st 2008, so for us, helping two companies get to TC50 is really a big deal. As we approach our first birthday, we’ve been privileged to have worked with some very bright and talented entrepreneurs and their startups. (more…)

Last night, a simple holding page for a brand new product was quietly put live, and announced through a tweet from Joe Drumgoole. CloudSplit is a service that offers users of cloud computing a realtime view of what’s happening and how that hits their wallets.

Some of the features in current development include reporting and analysing of activity and spend, setting of alerts to suit a budget, and the service works with Amazon Web Services, with future support for Microsoft Azure.

CloudSplit was founded earlier this summer by echolibre and Joe Drumgoole, and since then we’ve been working hard on our alpha version, which we’ll be bringing to TechCrunch50 in a few short weeks.

This stage of development has been real fun as it’s allowed us to work in PHP, C, Python and we have been putting CouchDB, nginx and Gearman through their paces

If you’d like to know when the service is fully launched, let us know on CloudSplit.com .