I’ve been to those run in Dublin and Limerick in the past, and they’ve been a worthwhile trip. It can be a great place to meet mix of like-minded people – from those who have been through the mill of setting up their own businesses, to those who are thinking about taking the first jump.

The idea behind BizCamp is that it’s a user-generated conference – that means that there are no expensive invited speakers, it’s a free conference, and it’s up to those attending to share what they know with the audience (not sales pitches). You can sign up for a talk on the Speaker Registration page (it’s as easy as entering your name, email, and a title & short description of your talk).

If you’re not sure about giving a talk, you can still register to attend over on the Bizcamp Galway site. This  is also one of those times when letting people you know that it’s coming would be great – there’s a lot of empty registration forms to fill, but they won’t be empty for long.

See you there.

Cross posted from the Ambient Age Blog.

Congrats to the 091Labs guys on putting this together, it looks like a great space with some massive potential. Their new home is in Foster Street in Galway. Nice work!

Heh. More at cleanternet.org (via TJ McIntyre)

I came to it via a tweet by @marklittlenews last night. It seems to have been out for a while, but I hadn’t come across it before. The full version (~60 mins) of the film is available to watch on the Us Now website

Galway, New Years Day, 2010

Came across this great video – someone in Failte Ireland or Look West should be giving him money for it and using it to promote Galway.

There’s a few other in a set over here.

The guy dancing up in the window was the best bit!

Twestival Local is :

…a global series of events organized by volunteers around the world under short timescales, which bring people offline for a great cause.  Twestival is run 100% by volunteers and independently from any not-for-profit; although the organizing teams do work closely to outline an achievable and measurable fundraising target.

Events are being run all over the world, and I know that a huge amount of work has been done  to get Galway’s up-and-running; from sorting out a venue, to looking for sponsors & pushing ticket sales. This time around, you don’t even need to be from Galway to participate – you can contribute by buying one of the “Sorry I can’t make it tickets”, and even win prizes (like this nice iPod Touch that I want, sponsored by Gold Sponsor LookWest.ie).

I was at the last Twestival in Galway back in February, and it was great to meet so many nice people at it; including a few that weren’t using Twitter and didn’t know anything about it.  So, you’re pretty much guaranteed a good night if you drop in for a beer or two.

So, if you want to find out more, check out the Twestival Galway site (or on Twitter). There are still some tickets left, so you can buy them now, or if you can’t make it, take a look at the small donation you can make instead.

I just had a week away from it all. It gave me some time to catch up on a bit of reading – the highlight of it was an impulse buy in the airport: “A Book About Innocent“.  If you’re interested in starting a business, or seeing how a successful brand is built, I’d highly recommend it.

The book is the story of how innocent drinks started up, built their brand and expanded their markets & range (now selling about 500,000 bottles a day). If that sounds a bit dull, the book is really well written in a conversational tone (keeping in line with the innocent brand image), and is both funny and entertaining.

I’ve always admired innocent’s brand image – there is always some humour behind their packaging, and the company is socially responsible – they donate a percentage of profits to charity, and use sustainable methods throughout their supply chain. Seeing how they came to that point in the book was really interesting. They have a great attention to detail (ever look at the bottom of one of their bottles or read the labels?), an interesting approach to market research and a great appreciation of how to listen to their customers. Some of it also gave me some good ideas for my own work – for example – they discuss how they got around having no marketing budget to promote themselves starting out.

There’s a video below that gives an overview of the company (and covers some of the stuff that’s in the book):

Well worth a read (their drinks are pretty nice too!).