This is an UPDATE post by Ben Chapman, a 5th year student in Scoil Mhuire Clane, who has been with us for the past week on work experience. (Original post here)

Well, I’ve been working on my project for the week and here’s the update that you were promised! (And stick with the post, there’s a live demo!) I haven’t gotten as far as I had hoped but I have learnt a lot whilst here. See the previous post for more on that and what I had planned.

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A very short post on a Friday afternoon.

This is an open invite to anyone who works on the web, be it as a designer or developer, a startup entrepreneur or in social media.

Our door is always open for coffee, wifi and shop-talk

We’re based here on Dame St., just drop me an email - eamon@echolibre.com

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…)

On Friday evening we quietly announced on twitter a product that we’ve been working on for the last 10 months. FRAPI is an Open Source API framework that allows you to open up your existing web based application or legacy system to your own or third party developers.

FRAPI handles standard API things like authentication and data formatting, and speeds up the API development process — like the way ZF or Symfony for PHP, Django for Python, JQuery for JavaScript (or, I suppose even Ruby on Rails ;-p ), does for other technologies.

David Coallier put together a quick 5 minute screencast to show you how you can use FRAPI to start building your API. (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 .

[UPDATE] - a sincere thanks to all those who re-tweeted and responded to our call for developers. We’ve gotten a great response in the last two weeks and we’re working them. We’ll be in touch with everyone who contacted us in the coming days.

So, it’s been a while since our last post. We’ve been busy working with some very smart and talented Irish entrepreneurs on start up ideas, and the last few months have been a blast. We’ve got lots in store over the next six months and we’ve started to scale up our team.

Behind the scenes our team has grown to six, soon to be seven. Continuing on with this growth, we’re looking for two new team members: a PHP developer, and a Business developer. (more…)

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A few weeks ago I was talking to Mark Baker from MySQL AB about getting a MySQL meetup happening in Dublin. Meetups currently happen in London, San Fran, etc., and are an opportunity for local MySQL users to meet socially. Mark was very helpful, up to the point that he’s offered to fly himself and Ivan Zoratti for the inaugural meetup. They’ll give us a brief talk on MySQL 5.4, MySQL Cluster v7 and what the future holds for MySQL.

This event is a chance for you to engage in your community by meeting other Dublin web / MySQL developers, learn from shared experiences and to make some nerdy contacts.

The good people in the South William Bar have given us the use of their top floor for this informal event, which kicks off at 18:30 on Wednesday 24th June. Places are limited to 25 people. You can reserve your spot on eventbrite for free.

To help with the “community” part of it, we’re going to put some money behind the bar for some nice beers.

UPDATE (3rd June 2009) : This happy bunch of MySQL developers have registered to come along. We’ll be releasing a few more tickets a few days before the meetup.

Barry Alistair, Richard Bowden, Declan Boylan, Rory Browne, Paul Campbell, David Coallier, Ray Cregan, Barry Cronin, Darragh Curran, Stephen Curran, Laura Czajkowski, Bill de hÓra, Andrew Duffy, Ross Duggan, J.D. Fitz.Gerald, Eoghan Gaffney, David Gillen, Daniel Hunt, Piotr Jankowski, Eamon Leonard, Conor McDermottroe, John Moylan, Tomasz Muras, Shane O’Grady, Paul Phillips, Eduard Raos, Karen Thompson, Neil Turner

According to wikipedia, the Dragon’s Den is:

a venture-capitalist television programme that originated in Japan where the format is owned by Sony. The format, which now airs internationally, consists of entrepreneurs pitching their ideas in order to secure investment finance from business experts — the “Dragons”.

As some may already know, in 2009 the television show began in Ireland on RTÉ ONE. This post covers the technical considerations encountered when a web site / application appears on national television. (more…)

Just a quick post to remind the Irish and Dublin web community that OSS Bar Camp is running this coming Saturday 28th March, in DIT Kevin Street. (more…)