BarCamp kicked off with a thought provoking introduction by solicitor Simon McGarr of Digital Rights Ireland (DRI) current action challenging the law (Irish and European) on data retention. As we understood it, information surrounding who you’ve called and for how long, your emails, what you’ve looked at on the web and your actual location for the past three years will be kept on file. All the Government has left to do is open up your mail and keep a record of what the postman gives you! Not only that but Ireland has no laws forcing companies or the Government to disclose if any information they keep on you has been compromised or abused in any way.

Unfortunately the general public are blissfully unaware of the erosion of their own privacy and it’s potential for abuse. Out of sight and out of mind maybe. Click on the DRI links above to find out more.

The format of BarCamp means that talks/discussions are held simultaneously so next up we decided to go along to the Microformats talk given by Conor O’Neill. Conor gave a great talk based around material from Ryan King and Tantek Çelic. Microformats are a simple way of attaching meaning (or structure if you like) to information which is published on the Web. Interestingly Conor described situations where people are already using microformats, possibly without realising it.

When we broke for lunch we talked to two guys who are running some interesting businesses. John Henry Donovan is a trained industrial designer who now works as a freelance web designer/developer as well as working on media projects. The great thing for him is that he has the rare combination of artistic ability and technical skill so he’s kept very busy. Patrick O’Connor is a Corkman based in Dublin running a business providing IT solutions for SME’s in Dublin. The unusual thing about his business is that open source products are big part of the solutions they provide. This is definitely an area that will grow in time and it’s a service not generally provided by his competitors so he’s probably on to something there.

After lunch I went along to Bernard Goldbach’s talk entitled “On Dropping EUR 35,000 for a Failed Start-up” which he described as a business ‘accident report’. Bernie and his wife had a great business idea which on paper looked fantastic and has since been proved to be very viable as another company in Kilkenny is successfully following a similar path. The business was to provide multimedia related services to the likes of Pixar. This was back in 2000 and despite initially enthusiastic support from Shannon Development they hit a huge stumbling block. The company was based in Thurles and they just could not get access, despite the optic fibre being there, to broadband. This severely affected their ability to deal with clients and as everybody in Ireland knows it’s taken years for the broadband rollout to even get started. The nail in the coffin was a couple of clients who failed to pay up for some quite large contracts.

The lessons Bernie learned from it all? Killing off a company is actually quite difficult. Since they stopped trading they’ve spent over €9000 in maintaining the company as they have found it difficult to get its creditors to be involved in its liquidation. Most importantly, Bernie would get somebody involved who would be incentivised to get sales as well as being fairly ruthless about the financial cashflow of the company.

Steve, here. Brian Caulfield introduced the uninitiated to the world of venture capital, and, specifically, to the matter of applying for it. Interestingly, as Brian described it, when his company, Trinity Venture Capital, look at a start-up with a view to possibly investing in it, the start-up’s technology is third of three key aspects at which they look, behind ‘market’ and ‘people’, respectively. Brian rounded out his talk with the “Top Ten Lies Entrepreneurs Tell” and the “Top Ten Lies VCs Tell.” With luck, Brian’s slides will be made available on the BarCamp Ireland Presentations page. And with that, I’ll hand you back to Dave.

John Breslin gave an overview of his project, SIOC, which aims to help online communities connect information between them which otherwise might remain isolated. One of the difficulties with the Semantic Web is that is sometimes difficult to get people to put the structure into the information the create. The clever thing about SIOC is that it leverages the structured information that is already there and provides tools to develop additional functionality for those online communities.

Mark Twomey probably gave the most controversial of the talks as he advocated a more pragmatic approach to the issues surrounding data retention which was discussed earlier by Simon McGarr. His presentation was certainly memorable as somehow he managed to fit in a reference to “Nazi’s riding dinosaurs” (in a joke related to ‘what’s the worst that can happen’ scenario).

When we thanked Tom Raftery and Damien Mulley for a great job organising the event they credited Conor O’Neill and Walter Higgins with most of the effort, so thanks lads!

There was a great spread for lunch, including wine, and pizzas at the end, so a nod to the sponsors: Howard Holdings, Qumas, Roam4Free.ie, Heineken, Bubble Brothers, Trinity Venture Capital, Hosting365, Sigmar Recruitment, Madgex, Blacknight Solutions, C&C Group