I got an e-mail from John Dineen, CEO of Learnpipe.com - Ireland's (and the worlds) leading training course search engine, about the Endeavour Programme. From his own blog, I am copying this so you can read all about it

Back in September, I was listening to Matt Cooper's Last Word drive time radio show when I heard an interview with Jerry Kennelly (founder of Stockbyte) on the launch of a new entrepreneurship programme in Tralee, Co. Kerry called Endeavour.

The interview caught my attention - it seemed as if the Endeavour Team were trying to build something special - almost like an Irish Y Combinator / TechStars.  The programme offers seed capital (CORD) combined with intensive mentorship - all designed to hatch new companies / take others to the next stage - very, very quickly.

Thanks to top chap Ted Vickey, Golf Fitness Writer and commentator, I was introduced to Pauric Logue, the man behind Wiseloads.com, Ireland's new online courier website. Pauric is setting up some interesting new solutions for companies that need cost effective parcel delivery etc.

Given the amount of travelling I'm doing to Dublin and the time I'm spending there, I hope to announce a new office address there shortly. I like Dublin and I used to live there but I'm settled in Limerick with our family here and in Kerry, so I'll have to continue splitting my time until then.

I've been offered a nice desk near St James' Gate and I'll update everything next week when I get a chance!

This slide show demonstrates a model for bootstrapping a Technology/HPSU company in Ireland - as long as you meet the necessary Enterprise Ireland requirements. A Blog-On from  which says:

Outvesting was largely inspired by the IQ Prize and the conversation around two blog posts, by Pat Phelanand Joe Drumgoole. While lots of figures were bandied about throughout the discussions the sum of €5,000 kept coming up as a baseline figure that a bootstrapping startup could do something useful with. It’s also the amount of funding received by Level 1 awardees at Social Entrepreneurs Ireland. 

http://www.outvesting.org/about/ 

I've spent the weekend in Kerry and we spent a night in Killarney. I love Killarney and would love to live there. I'm not sure how lively the SEO scene is there but I'd love to be able to work there and spend more time there.

While we were thinking about hotels, I noticed two interesting issues with one hotel site. When I got back to Limerick, I went to twitter to ask people if they ever check their own site, company name, brand name etc on Google. I didn't mean a Google Alert, which is obviously a good thing and was pleased to see that most people were actively using it.

What I meant was - in the first page of 10 results, how much of the returned results was about you and how much of it was good?

Google is a search engine. Most companies want top listings in Google. That's what SEO is about and that's the business I'm working in. So if you've spent months and months working on an SEO campagin, whats the point of having possibly negative or confusing results display below you?

Here's an example from the Brehon Hotel in Killarney:

There are two domains here. Its hard to guess which is the hotel and which isn't. Both sites will allow you to legitimately make a booking. One of them will cost the hotel more (the one they don't own) and the other may net you a better deal as you can talk directly to the hotel. You're possibly thinking that either way the hotel will make a sale, so whats the problem? Then why did the hotel bother setup a site then? Most hoteliers prefer to make the sale directly - its cheaper for them and they get to start a relationship in some cases.

Some research/opinion I've read from an Irish SEO who analysed click-throughs from another search engine (not Google) showed that on average 54% of clicks went on result number one - so why start your SEO programme by losing up to 46% of visitors by just not dominating your own search results?

The second thing I noticed is that even though they have a website - the Brehon don't list their telephone details, except on the contact us page, and not on every other page. I was using my iPhone and in North Kerry, the reception can be dire. As a result we ended up booking somewhere else.

Given that many people, especially those new to the web, now enter the domain name or part of a domain name into Google rather than try to remember and type in the address into the address bar, can you really afford to have confusion for your own site/brand/url in the returned results? Or do you just assume that people will work hard to find you?

Last week I made it to the TechLudd Relaunch/Microsoft WebsiteSpark progamme launch. Organised by Anton Mannering (TechLudd). WebsiteSpark (part of the Bizspark programme). WebsiteSpark is for small companies developing web apps at the coalface in ASP and, surprisingly also PHP. It's great that Microsoft recognises and embrace developers who develop on PHP too - and are offering support to them to help building web applications and systems on the stronger and richer enterprise environment offered by Visual Studio Professional editions.

Microsoft is demonstrating its commitment to small Irish IT companies. The costs of enterprise development software and web server applications can very high. The new WebSiteSpark programme offers support as well as 3 years free licences of Visual Studio Professional Expression 3.0, and Microsoft Web Server 2008 as well as the stunningly powerful SQL server 2008 Web Edition. These licenses can be very expensive on their own. Their is a US$100 fee when the company exits the programme (optionally or after 3 years) - which frankly really is peanuts for the 3 years development usage afforded under the programme. But you can read more about it yourself.

The launch was a brilliant event and I got to meet some great people from Microsoft, as well as the iia and Anton himself. Plenty of Guinness (it was held at the Guinness Storehouse) and lovely finger food abound.

I also got to meet Ruairi Browne, of Galway website development company, Kro IT, who also provide custom software. Ruairi has signed up to the programme and I look forward to meeting him Galway soon.

I stayed at the Jurys Inn, which was very handy being in town but quite dear for parking and breakfast and booked it via Dublin Hotels.

It's interesting to see Imagine's new billboard ads for "WiMax", in which consumers are invited to Google "Wimax" to learn more, rather than giving a URL, as is the way in probably 99.99% of cases. This makes sense from the point of view that most newbies (to the web) don't even know what an address bar or address URL is - and use Google search to find sites they already know of.

WiMax is a huge term and Imagine don't rank it for organically. Instead, Wikipedia, Intel and Wimax.com are listed on the home page, so ranking for it is quite hard. So Imagine are using an AdWords campaign to make sure they come up. I find this understandable but its given me something to think about.

It's an interesting phenomenon. Some of clients even have to use AdWords with their own brandname to prevent competitors from outbidding them with their domain name. Google AdWords has this this facility, which I find a bit odd, whereby I can advertise one URL but visitors are sent to an entirely different name.

For example, I could have an ad that lists the URL as "imagine.ie/wimax" but users are actually forwarded to, say, "eircom.net". This is obviously hugely devious and underhanded but for whatever reason, Google not only allows it, it also allows you to remove your competitors listing by using their domain publicly and your domain as the real destination - as long as you're willing to pay more for it.

You would think Imagine would try to rank for it, even from "Pages from Ireland" but clearly paying for each visit they plan to get via their national advertising campaign seems more logical, for some reason....