In case you hadn’t heard a Cork-based company Cubic Telecom headed by Pat Phelan is making some waves on the technology scene. A few weeks ago they confirmed raising 5M Euro for the new venture and for the last few days have been presenting at the very high profile TechCrunch40 event in San Francisco.

Pat and his team are providing a new service called MaxRoam (launching October 1st) that allows people to use their mobiles all over the world for a fraction of the prices currently charged by GSM providers.

If you hadn’t heard already Cubic Telecom have already made huge steps to reduce the rip-off prices for international landline calls - allfreecalls.ie, allfreecalls.co.uk and yak4ever.com.

Pat and Cubic Telecom chairman Don Jeffery also happen to have a history of supporting the tech community in Ireland particularly in Cork. OpenCoffeeClub Cork for the most part have been meeting in Luigi Malones (owned by Don Jeffery) with Pat being a frequent attendee. Not only that but Pat also gave a spare ticket for TechCrunch 40 to Conor O’Neill of Loudervoice.comanother local company with potential.

Conor O’Neill might have just have sparked something off in his post “How to get and Irish David Heinemeier Hansson” which was followed up by equally pragmatic post by Alan O’Rourke in “Encouraging entrepreneurship in Ireland”. In their posts they offer suggestions to foster entrepreneurship for students which is something I feel strongly about.

Conor describes a “just a job” mentality displayed by a majority of students/grads who wanted nothing more than a bank or multi-national job. Unfortunately very little options are open to those students/grads that would love to work in a start-up and develop their careers quite apart from working in large multi-nationals.

In March after attending a ShareIT event organised by Damien Mulley I sent him an email outlining my own thoughts about what could be done to help tech start-ups in Ireland and what some of the current issues were. In two sentences:

Issues: Not enough tech entrepreneurs completing cycles and re-investing within Ireland.
Fixes: “We” ourselves become the angel investors and develop a way of encouraging students in setups similar to Y-Combinator.

Unfortunately, after re-reading the email, nothing I said hasn’t already been mentioned (nearly a year and a half ago). The vital component is the ‘Brain Trust’ as Damien Mulley referred to it. As we’ve seen, despite sitting on millions, Enterprise Ireland can’t give the money away. They’re looking for the big knowledge companies to appear out of a tiny tech-startup eco-system. Damien Mulley had the first post which kicked off this conversation (in Ireland) by highlighting the fact that the traditional VC’s are facing stiffer competition from savy tech entrepreneurs often with not a lot of money, the most famous being Y-Combinator (now Seedcamp in the UK is following a similar model).

James Corbett picked up on Damien Mulleys post and wrote about “Fantasy business teams” which included references to points made by Paul O’Mahony about bloggers and programmers who could “form some sort of loosely bound structure/organisation to facilitate this kind of collaborative enterprise. With enough members we may even be able to boot strap our own ventures through membership fees”.

Personally, I think Conor O’Neills ‘Hothouse’ idea is excellent and he and Alan O’Rourke have obviously given it a bit of thought because I couldn’t add a whole lot more to what they’ve suggested. My contribution would be to echo Paul O’Mahonys point that there is possibly an entrepreneurial opportunity in helping to develop <€100K start-ups in our own community. The 'Hothouse' idea would be a great place to start - we'd be helping to develop the right environment for a start-up culture as well as giving Irish investors additional confidence in these start-ups particularly if they've essentially been peer reviewed and investment from tech entrepreneurs had already been given.

Though Joe Drumgoole might have the last word? “Populations of multi-millions trumps populations of 4 million everytime.”

it@cork have been doing an excellent job in Cork so it was no surprise that they managed to get Jerry Kennelly, of Stockbyte fame, to speak at their ‘Midsummer networking event’ last night.

For those of you who don’t know the story Kennelly, a former photojournalist, setup a photographic image company in Kerry in 1996. He grew it to become the third largest stock photography supplier in the world eventually selling the company for $135M to Getty Images.

At the time of the sale, he had 100% ownership of the company having bought out the VC share (approx 30%) beforehand (that’s a story I’d like to have heard). So Kennelly can afford to be brutally honest, and he is. Not long after the sale I heard Kennelly describe the banks in Ireland as ‘bastards’ on live radio. Often said in private, rarely said so publicly.

His family started a newspaper business (still running) in Kerry when he was a child which is how he got into the photo-journalism business. He realised that technology was radically changing the media world. After understanding the money that had been made from VHS he correctly bet that digital photography on CDs was the way to go.

Possibly like a lot of others I had heard about the company but just assumed that Stockbyte were a clearinghouse for stock images which they bought from freelance photographers. Turns out that the majority of Stockbytes then portfolio was created internally. They had teams of photographers and art directors who planned for months photo-shoots in locations all over the world. A huge amount of planning went to each photo-shoot since they were so costly but the more interesting aspect of that was how customer driven they were. As a company much smaller than existing competitors they were shameless in trying to engage their customers and getting feedback from them. He and his team were very, very focused on giving their customers what they wanted and making their lives easier.

I’m not sure if he said it directly but from his talk you understood that he built a fantastic team around him in what sounded like a great working environment. When the deal was done to sell the company one of the first things he did was write all his staff some serious thank-you checks!

Some points from his talk:

• Work in high-margin businesses - it allows you to make mistakes.
• Scale fast and keep it lean.
• Appear bigger than you actually are.
• Put a huge effort into understanding your customer (and getting all your staff to do the same).
• Instincts matter

Not only is it great to see somebody having done so well locally it’s great to see them willing to talk so openly about their own experiences.

Thanks to Donal Manning and Catherine Wall at it@cork for organising the event and Murphys-Heineken Brewery for hosting!