Kilkenny Business Award Winners

Back in 2006 I shared a table with some of the McDonalds, Pack Publishing and Kilkenny Active gang, myself and John (Aidan was away on holiday) tucking into a sizeable steak as we’d been nominated for and were attending the Kilkenny Business Awards (nominated in the best service provider category). Nominees had a 20 euro (I think) discount on ticket prices, bringing the cost to 100 a head for the night).

The awards were held in Kilkenny on Saturday night in the Lyrath Estate Hotel and Keith has the lowdown on the results. You’ll be able to catch Keith in conversation with some of the winners on The Bottom Line, KCLR96FM’s business show which airs later tonight.

Overall, there were six categories with 39 finalists, I’ve highlighted the winners below in bold.

Kilkenny Retailer of the Year Award (Sponsored by FBD Insurance)

• Lamber de Bie Flowers*
• Pat McDonnell Paint Sales
• Flowers by Lucy
• Superior Tiles
• Kilkenny Book Centre
• Field’s Jewellers

Kilkenny Service Provider of the Year Award (Sponsored by Electro City)

• Kilkenny Borough Council Garden Crew
• Premier Recruitment Group,
• Blue Wall Technologies
• Springhill Court Hotel Leisure Club
• C&C Security
• Creative Catering
• Taxback.com*
• Gibbins Removals & Storage
• James Phelan Demonstration Farm

Best Small Business Award 2008 (Sponsored by Kilkenny Chamber)

• Vendemia Organic Wines
• Surf Box/Ormonde Technologies*
• Smart Placements
• Rothe House Trust Ltd
• Blueberry Larder
• Kilkenny Print & Graphic
• Hullaballoons
• Kompass Records
• The Reptile Village

Kilkenny Tourism Provider of the Year Award (Sponsored by Kilkenny Local Authority)

• Team Dynamics
• Tullahought Community Group
• A Rural Experience
• Woodstock Gardens & Arboretum
• Springhill Court Hotel
• Kilkenny Rivercourt Hotel*

Education & Training Provider of the Year Award (Sponsored by FÁS)

• Empower Training
• Sharon Roynane Kelly
• Kumon Kilkenny
• Busy Bees Early Learning Centres*

Manufacturing/Product of the Year (Sponsored by SEBIC)

• QEF Ltd
• Kelsey Horseboxes*
• Chesneau Leather
• Fineline Furniture
• Enviroclad Systems
• Moth to a Flame Ltd.

Taxback.com were also presented with the “overall winner” award on the night while Kilkenny’s Kieran Crotty was given a lifetime achievement award. For more background on the awards themselves, check out this article in the current edition (dated April 10th) of the Kilkenny Advertiser.

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Relaunching The Business Blog

2007 brings new changes and new developments and we’ve got plenty of those planned for the business, one of those includes the relaunching of the blog, now called ‘The eventIreland Blog‘ (you’ll find the feed link in the Grazr window on this blog’s sidebar) which will cover business offers from ourselves along with domain and internet news, marketing tips and helpful information from Aidan coupled with some extra design and other posts - related to the business - from myself and John.

We’ve removed our main site for a few days, that itself launching with a complete redesign based on our horizonCMS solution. Those of you with a keen eye might notice that we’ve also made a very subtle change to our logo. While all these are quite small changes and additions to us, they’re the first a long line for 2007 as we pass 18 months in business.

Billionaires? We’ll Have Four Please…

Interesting chart is this, Forbes.com’s Dollar Density, mapping out where all the billionaires in the world are hiding out. Seemingly, most of them are in the US.

Surprise, surprise.

MyHome.ie Sold For €50m

Turn to the business section of the Irish Times today or take a listen to the radio and you’ll be hearing that MyHome.ie, originally set up by some of the majory players in the Irish Property market and usually the first port of call for auctioneers and home buyers online, has been sold to the owners of that same business section, The Irish Times.

The Competition Authority has yet to weigh in on the deal but if MyHome.ie has just been flogged for €50m, I would wonder about Daft.ie, originally valued back around the time of the Six Nations (February?) between €10m and €15m.

From the MyHome.ie newsletter this morning…

The deal strengthens MyHome.ie as the leading web advertiser for property in Ireland through our association with the Irish Times, one of Ireland’s leading media organisations covering both print and online.

In practical terms, it’s business as usual for MyHome.ie. We will continue to provide our estate agent clients with the facility to advertise their properties on behalf of vendors and house hunters with the facility to search for property and home related services.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank both our clients and site users for their continued support over the past five and half years. We will continue our commitment to providing you with a quality property search and home services facility.

The sale of MyHome.ie, according to the article (which can be found here via RTE Business) will pocket €40m up front with an additional €10m over time and once business targets are met.

MyHome.ie itself will carry on as a standalone site. Interesting stuff!

Kilkenny Business Awards 2006

Quiet weekend on the blogging front but just back in the door from the Kilkenny Business awards. Not used to blogging about the business here but needless to say a good night was had. No major awards but nice representation, a great meal, good conversation and all the rest. Needless to say, being nominated for Service Provider Of The Year after just over six months in business isn’t bad considering we were bunched with companies trading over 20 years around the country.

It does have to be said that there are some absolutely excellent businesses operating in Kilkenny in all areas (retail, service, HR, manufacturing etc.) and for small startup businesses its evenings like these that offer a genuine appreciation of the work involved and the role everyone plays in providing business services to the region.
Congratulations to everyone on the night and everyone I’d been speaking to, hope to see you, and ourselves, again next year!

eBusiness Seminar in Kilkenny

The IIA and Kilkenny County Enterprise Board will host a ½ day seminar on maximizing the return on your website in the wonderful Lyrath Estate Hotel, Kilkenny. Having a website is only the first step in making a return on your online investment. Websites have to be content drive, user friendly and attract interested visitors to make it a business reality. This seminar will show you how to develop content that is designed to appeal to users and search engines. This ½ day seminar is aimed at website owners, marketing managers and web designers who have a web presence but have never had the time, resources or knowledge to make the internet work for their businesses. This half day seminar is €25 to IIA and Kilkenny County Enterprise Board members and only 45Euro for non-members.

On a work related note, our very own Aidan Coonan will be speaking at the event and likely myself and John will be there in some capacity. Aidan will be speaking on the use of search engines, blogging, rss capabilities and a few more topics wrapped into the third session of the afternoon.

Full details on the event along with booking through the IIA can be found here.

Daft.ie worth €15 million?

If you happened to read the Irish Independant on Saturday (don’t ask me how I was reading the Irish Independant on Saturday, but I was!) and turned to page 3, there was a very nice writeup on Daft.ie.

Set up by Brian and Eamonn Fallon as a spin of a project of Brian’s going through the education system as we all do, Daft has become massive over the past few years and advertises around 140k properties a year for rent with a further 20k for sale over 45 countries.

I remember using it myself when heading off to college first and was impressed by its relative ease of use. What I was amazed to read is that given the work on the site, its traffic and potential revenue that there was a price tag put on the site, estimated at between 10 and 15 million Euro.

Thats a whole lotta euro!

Of course, the brothers say that its not for sale, but nice to see an independant Irish website doing so well!

How an IT startup raises money

So Meebo is out and about now as an AJAX powered IM client and the official meebo blog has some great honest posts about how the set upon raising money for the startup, a point of interest to some people around here!

1. milk money, part one
2. milk money, part two
3. milk money, part three

Blogs : 2 for a euro…

If you’ve got about 70k to spare you might be interested to know that the Blog Herald (which I read) is up for sale. The blog itself makes about 2,000 US$ a month which isn’t bad. The price is being touted as a little steep, but then how do you set a price on a blog?

It raises a good question though. The blog is normally built around the content. It’s the person that drives the content, provides their views and opinions. So if you take that person out of the equation you had better be ready to fill their shoes, I reckon anyway. Marketing Loop has the Alexa graphs of the traffic and you can’t doubt the potential when the figures speak for themselves.

If you were to sell your blog in the morning, realisticly, what do you think you’d get for it? I can imagine Moore Street some Saturday… “Get your Techcrunch, get your Techcrunch, 2 for a eeeeeeeuro….”

Nikon out of the film game

I’m a Nikon user, have been for years, both film and digital. In the last 18 months however its been strictly digital, man how I love my D70. Nikon has just broken the news that it is to concentrate its efforts on the digital market.

“Nikon will discontinue production of all lenses for large format cameras and enlarging lenses. This also applies to most of our film camera bodies, interchangeable manual focus lenses and related accessories,” it said in a statement on its British website.

It will keep on a few of the higher end professional film cameras such as the F6. Nikon are currently the second largest producer of dSLR cameras (behind Canon) but my devotion remains with them. 95% of their sales last year was in the digital market (where cameras are concerned anyway) and I can understand why. Built to last, drive them into the ground, superb picture quality and processing. Sign of the times when one of the biggest camera manufacturers turns its back on film. Beginning of the ultimate end of film cameras?

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