Hi, just wanted to update our blog as it has been a while since my last posting! Deirdre and Grace have been busy writing posts about our company and what we have been doing, which has been crazy busy the last few months! All good though, keeps us on our toes!
On a recent trip to North America I was really impressed by the level of support and passion in Web2.0 but also in Mobile Internet usage, I think you guys use the Internet on your phones a lot more than us Europeans! Which is good for Zinadoo, of course, as USA is our largest and most active market today! When I think back 18 months to when we first launched Zinadoo Site Creation tools, we were engaging with the market and a lot of our time was spent educating users on the benefits of the mobile Internet - things like poor download speeds, weak search, multiple borwsers, high data charges and lack of content….the usual barriers out there! BUT we have seen a dramatic improvement in all of these areas, and now, in our market and customer engagement we are not spending as much time educating but have now moved onto a different level. How can a business benefit from having a mobile Internet presence, and what can we do to help them promote and market themselves using this medium!
We are doing some interesting work with the Dotmobi Mobile Advisory group as well around mobile advertising and mobile standards compliance, and planning on a big iLoveMobileWeb campaign as well which is very exciting. So many great events coming up over the summer and Nubiq are going to be driving promotion of these events over the Mobile Internet! Should be fun!
As mobile web solution specialists, Nubiq was selected as finalists in the recent ICT Excellence award in Ireland. The nomination recognises Nubiq for the Mobile Technology Project of the Year Award. Currently in its eighth year, the ICT Excellence Awards is now a firmly established landmark event in the Information and Communications Technology calendar; and is Ireland’s most prestigious and respected award competition in the ICT sector. The nomination is a credit to all in Nubiq for the continued technical and business development that positions Nubiq as Web2.0 and Mobile Web2.0 experts.
The award winner was announced on the 1st May in O’Reilly Hall, at University College Dublin, and went to Púca Ireland, so a heartfelt congrats to them! Our CEO Hélène Haughney attended the event.
The event was a great opportunity for Nubiq to network with industry innovators, and we got an enthusiastic response to the Zinadoo service and the creative developments at Nubiq.
Here in Nubiq we are all really pleased to be selected as a finalist for the Irish Technology Leadership Group’s (ITLG) Irish Times Innovation award! The nomination recognises Nubiq’s business and technical achievements and our international potential for growth.This nomination is a credit to all in Nubiq; both the technical and business team.
The award winner was announced last night in Stanford University, San Francisco and went to Changing Worlds, so congrats to them… they were wordy opponents! Helene, our CEO and Director; Willie Donnelly attended the event along with Minister Michéal Martin and the impressive ITLG board which include:
o John Hartnett, Senior VP at Palm Inc.
o Niall O’Connor, CIO of Apple Inc
o Rory McInerney, Vice President, Intel Corporation
o Barry O’Sullivan, Senior Vice President at Cisco Systems
o Tony Redmond, Chief Technology Officer at HP Services
o John Gilmore, COO, Sling Media Inc
o Conrad Burke, President & CEO, Innovalight Inc
The night gave Nubiq a great opportunity to mix with the folk out in San Fran, and we got a fantastic response to the Zinadoo service and what we are up to in Nubiq. Check out the Irish Times article from last Monday which profiled each company HERE and an article about the event itself HERE (you must be subscribed!).
So it’s on to CTIA in Las Vegas for Nubiq next week. Our CEO will be attending along with some of our board members. Email us at info@nubiq.com if you would like to arrange a meeting with them.
Waterford Institute of Technology hosted and organised an entrepreneurial day for their students last Wednesday dubbed “eFactor”. The concept for the day was to promote and encourage entrepreneurship among the students.
Nubiq got invited along to present and mingle with the students. They also used our services to enable students to complete their registration for the event over a customised eFactor mobile website; then send reminder and update texts to those who signed up.
I have to say it was an excellent event - very well run, a great buzz around the day and I overheard some great comments from the students! They had a great variety of activities on the day and there was a really interesting range of speakers; who gave some great, down to earth advice. I think the main message of the day was – ANYONE can be an entrepreneur! With the right dose of enthusiasm and passion for what you’re doing.
The event was covered by RTE 2 news in Ireland (with our own CEO Hélène Haughney featuring!), with lots of local and national press coverage also.
So, the event gets Nubiq’s “Aye Aye” in the vote to make this a yearly event… we might see an increase the number of entrepreneurs coming out of WIT!
Well we are back from Barcelona and our week at the Mobile World Congress. We had our own stand as part of the Enterprise Ireland Irish Pavilion. Have to say it was a great location and the stand itself looked fantastic. Grace and Donal came along with me this year and we must have given at least 300 demonstrations of the new service we will be launching in March. We are combining all of our services under the Zinadoo brand and will offer social bookmarking, discovery, directory services, site creation, SMS services, mobile widgets and m-SEO all from the one location! Can’t wait to release this version.
Some other things going on in Nubiq at the moment - we are presenting at the eFactor event in the Tower Hotel in Waterford on 5th March a great line up of speakers including Sam McCauley, Jerry Kennelly, Anne Heraty, Paul Curran and so on - a great lineup of entrepreneurs! All in aid of promoting entrepreneurship amongst the under graduates at WIT.
We have also launched another white paper called “The Growing use of Mobile Websites for Business Communication and Promotion”. It’s available for download from our website as welll.
2007 has been a very active and successful year for Nubiq. We’ve worked really hard on refining our company value proposition, making connections with the right partners and developing our overall business and marketing strategy. All the while; constantly updating our existing product and service portfolio.This approach, to constantly evolve and refine Nubiq’s strategy, will continue into 2008 and beyond. So here is a look back at our success in 2007 … and here’s to another, even more successful, 2008.
Nubiq Highlights, 2007
DecemberNubiq Joins the Paddy’s Valley Crew
Nubiq heads to Silicon Valley with the rest of the Paddy crew. The trip included meet and greets with Facebook, Yahoo, Social text and more! Nubiq had a very successful trip, receiving first place in the trips Venture Capital pitching competition.
Nubiq Partners with T-Mobile the Netherlands
Nubiq’s mobile site creation service, Zinadoo is made available on the T-Mobile mobile portal in the Netherlands and will soon be available on their Web portal.
November
Nubiq Partners with O2 Ireland
Nubiq announces a link up with O2 Ireland, and now Nubiq’s free mobile website creation tool can be found on the O2 Active mobile portal.
October
“Mobile advertising in a dotMobi World” MAG Whitepaper
With key contributions from Nubiq, the dotMobi Mobile Advisory Group, Mobile Advertising positioning paper and whitepaper, is published. It covers a wide spectrum of hot topics in the Mobile Advertising space. Download the paper at: http://advisorygroup.mobi/mobileadvertising/whitepaper.pdf
August
Nubiq Launches Mobile Directory & Discovery Services
Nubiq launches a Beta release of their second product, a mobile directory and discovery service, offering guaranteed mobile content to users worldwide.
July
T-Mobile Zinadoo Trials
Nubiq partner with T-Mobile, the Netherlands to run a trial of the Zinadoo service in conjunction with their Web’n'Walk service. The focus of this trial is to work with T-Mobile and trial participants to improve and grow the Zinadoo service.
April
Nubiq Launches completely new version of Zinadoo.com
February
Nubiq becomes dotMobi domain Reseller
Through a partnership with Hostway UK, Nubiq becomes a reseller of dotMobi domain names.
As part of our trip last week to Silicon Valley, the Paddy’s Valley crew paid a visit to Yahoo! Brickhouse, hosted by Salim Ismail who so kindly invited us over to meet some very cool and interesting people. Brickhouse is Yahoo’s incubation facility for innovation and new product ideas. We heard from Chad Dickerson who talked about his aspirations for Hack Day and also met with Havi Hoffman, who is managing editor of Next Yahoo! blog. So even though this is a massive corporation they made time to hear us pitching our ideas to them and give us some tips on how to deal with Yahoo!’s of this world! Overall a great event and very cool to hear what new innovations are coming out of Yahoo! in the coming weeks. Oh and forgot to mention, while we were there Jerry Yang popped over to say hello and pose for a photo with the PV crew!
A quick update on Paddy’s Valley trip: Nubiq received first place in the Paddy’s Valley pitching competition, to a panel of five local Silicon Valley venture capital firms!The event, organised by Enterprise Ireland, put the five participating Web2.0 companies (Nubiq, Tourist Republic, Putplace, Spoiltchild and Pix.ie)through their paces and judged their ability to endure the “Dragons Den” like test. Also attending the event was Mr. Michael Collins, Irish Ambassador to the United States
So well done to everyone involved. Here is CEO Hélène Haughney delivering Nubiq’s pitch at the event! Check out http://paddysvalley.org/ to view the rest of the pitches.
Nubiq CEO, Helene Haughney, is among the group of Irish business and technology community, nicknamed “Paddy’s Valley”, which has travelled to Silicon Valley this week. The focus of the trip is to build links with Silicon Valley business and technologist’s network and spread the word that Ireland has some really great technology companies!
Other companies attending the trip include Tourist Republic, Putplace, Spoiltchild, Pix.ie and more. The group have an action packed week, so there is certain to be lots of tales on their return!
The trip has got some great press coverage including:
Last week Nubiq were one of the 7 companies pitching to the Wireless Advisory Board that came over from USA and Canada to meet a number of Irish companies and offer advice and wisdom.
The sessions were arranged by Enterprise Ireland and are set up to help Irish companies get into the US market abd to learn from a group of people who have been there already.
We used it as an opportunity to ask for feedback, from some really experienced guys ( no ladies there this year!!), on our value proposition and marketing plan. We had the ears of people like Trevor Healy, Michael Duffy, Jason Devitt, Jon Bukosky , Kieran Hannon and many more great names from the world of consultancy and serial entrepreneurs.
We had a couple of sessions beforehand with David Taber who worked with us to refine our presentation and message and brush up on presentation skills - an excellent workshop.
A great experience and not just for early stage companies, as you can see from the list above, a mixture of companies all at different stages in their development.
So a big thanks to all invovled in organising the event and to the members of the Board. It was a great experience and one I hope we will be invited to do again.
