Business

In his latest book “To Sell is Human” Daniel Pink claims that, jointly in the United States, the educational and medical sectors (he refers to them as ed-med) have created more “new jobs in the last decade than all the other sectors combined.” Reflecting this trend in Ireland is Limerick based Touchstore.

It started off in 2000 by giving retail chemists reports on what their best selling items were as well as other valuable items of information. By 2006 the service was in over 200 pharmacies in Ireland. In 2010, through the purchase of another company which then became known as Touchstore Rx, they expanded into the dispensary management area.

Coinciding with the Irish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the European Data Forum (EDF) for industry leaders, academics, policy makers, and community organisers will hold its annual meeting in Dublin next month to discuss the challenges and opportunities of (big) data in Europe. The forum hopes to answers important questions such as: is the European economy ready for big data, are relevant stakeholders being reached by the EU-wide data community, and what is Europe providing in terms of innovative business intelligence (BI) solutions?

The laws of copyright have been abused and misused of late in a desperate attempt by European newspapers and music industry bodies to monetise the inclusion of articles and songs into online content.

In Ireland, a representative body for a cross-section of Irish newspapers attempted to extract royalty payments from individuals who included any link on their own sites to articles published on the web by its newspapers. It even targeted a charity that had included links to articles about it on its website.

BuilderEngine is a new content management system that aims to bring together the best of the CMS worlds of open source, enterprise and software as a service (SaaS). We spoke to Chief Executive Officer Keith Killilea, and the first part of our interview with Keith is below.

You consider BuilderEngine to be like the 'Apple' of CMSes. How is that?

Clear design. Intuitive controls. Just how you "ed" basically - how you edit the site.

Paul Kenny wants to build the first billion dollar internet company in the Middle East and North Africa. He's off to a flying start with his e-commerce empire Cobone, a kind of Groupon-Amazon-Expedia mashup operating in three countries with over 1.7 million subscribers to date. He spoke at NUI Galway's Cairnes School of Business and Economics on Friday about his story: building a multi-million dollar e-commerce empire at the age of 25.

Death and taxes are frequently cited as being the two great inevitabilities of life, but for a great many men frequent trips to the doghouse are equally hard to dodge. This enforced journey is often accompanied by a deep sense of confusion mixed in with a huge measure of mystification. (So I’ve heard.) By an odd coincidence, a great many of these unpleasant events seem to occur around birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas and sometimes, rather peculiarly, around the middle of February. (I think that's the right month.)

What all those occasions have in common is that they come around every year, so you would think, and certainly half the population seems to agree, that they would be easy to remember and plan for. But for the other half of the population, that doesn't appear to be the case.

Sean Blanchfield and Dylan Collins recently created a list of people driving the technology and startup scene in Ireland. In the interests of equality, here are our additions to the list.

Amy Neale

NDRC

LinkedIn | @amisnealis | TechVo

Irish Executives is a network of over 16,000 business people within Ireland and around the world. The network is dedicated to sharing the ideas, insights, expertise, solutions and know-how which exists among the Irish Diaspora at home and abroad. You can join the network at linkd.in/irishexecutives.

It is essential for any business operating in the modern world to have knowledge of the data protection laws and how it is affected by them - even if in some special circumstances they would find themselves to be exempt. If valuing how much confidence customers and clients place on how a company treats their data is not enough of a motivation to raise standards then the advent of severe penalties in the coming years should certainly make business owners and operators pay more attention.

According to Lisa Jackson, ICT Solicitor at Leman Solicitors in Dublin, (and a former colleague of ours from a previous incarnation of Technology Voice);