DUBLIN, IRELAND - All media is good media. The more times you name is mentioned the better. The more credibility you get, the more genuine you become. This morning I was on TV3 Ireland AM, a particularly lazy morning-in-bed favourite show of mine (until I took the TV out of my room!).

Why is this great?
The recording is visible thanks to the internet to my actual customers. While they’re not in Ireland to watch it (nor sitting at home at 8.15am if they were!). This is great credibility. Absolutely great.

Why is it not good?
It proves to me again, do not bother advertising a web based business on TV. The same happened with the Irish Times article, flat line for the day, no noticeable rise in visitors. Admittedly there is only a tiny tiny amount of people watching Ireland AM my business is pointed to, but you’d still think for a URL that is read out twice in 4 minutes on national TV to get more than 24 visits. This gives it an incredibly low Click Through Rate (CTR) as a form of media.

In comparison, I’d love to see the stats from BraStraps.ie who had a very relevant and more tangible product for the viewers. They may do very well from it, but I doubt they would get the same CTR per Euro if they ran a TV Advert against a Facebook/Google Advert for the right keywords.

To anyone in TV3 watching. Thanks for having me - it will have done the business a whole lot of good - I really enjoyed the morning. Thank you!

-Robin.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - I’m getting really bored of feeling sorry for ourselves. Positivity is needed - nobody else is going to get Ireland back on its own two feet. You’ve had time to grieve, it’s now time for acceptance and moving on. We’re moving through the 7 stages of economic grief, starting last Autumn we had shock (job loses), denial, anger (with government), bargaining (with government), and we’re now in the depression (with each other) phase.

The winners, are those who reach acceptance first. While many of you will continue to chat over the dinner table about the terrible news, your latest ‘recession buster’ business plan, or react to another damning report released by the government… I’ll be off building my business.

I’ve rewritten some quotes from today’s newspapers…

“The Governor of the Central Bank has said any economic recovery is unlikely to take hold in Ireland until 2011.”

Economic recovery will be in full swing by 2011.

“economy will shrink by 8.3% in 2009 and 3% in 2010″

Economy improving. Contraction will be almost 3 times slower next year.

“unemployment rate would average 13% this year”

87% of the population are still employed

-Robin.

(Image Credit: This fishing trawler crossed the road in-front of me today!)

I’m part of it. What can you do to be part of ‘Generation M‘?

Dear Old People Who Run the World, my generation would like to break up with you. Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences. –Umair Haque

The problem we have is, our young are being taught the old way. There is significantly less Generation M material in distribution. Everytime I return to ‘traditional’ sources I have to put up my filter walls to block a majority of what they’re saying. I now have to take every piece of advice and process it twice to filter out the Generation M from the ‘traditional’.

-Robin.

(Photo Credit: Taking my first flight lesson at Weston Airport on Sunday. Photo by author.)

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Decisions For Heroes, wins iQ Prize Fund of €10,000. Thank you to all supporters of the project, while we’ll be spending the money on getting more teams signed-up, the kudos of this award is for you too.

You can read our announcement here. I particularly want to point out the most important line from the press release:

McKeagney reaffirmed the quality of the entries and urged others to repeat the initiative of the iQ Prize, “If organisations like Enterprise Ireland matched the €10,000 we gave to each of our shortlist, it would be the best investment they could make.”

I feel this applies to wider than EI. Imagine every business supported their industry with innovation prizes like this. Ireland would be in a lot better place. It’s time to lead your tribe, create a movement.

***Thanks to everyone and make to check out the other finalists***

-Robin.

-Robin

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Our service Decisions For Heroes has been announced as one of the 6 finalists in The Europa Awards as Best Social Innovation from the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region. The Europas - The TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 recognise and celebrate the most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations of the year.

I spotted a number of Irish entries across the categories - congratulations to PutPlace, LouderVoice, MuzuTV, Locle, Dial2Do. Am I missing any?

There were some comments on the announcement page questioning the ’social contribution’ of all the finalists in the category. I replied with the following…

Robin here from Decisions For Heroes, hi and thanks for your comments.

Sure, we are a commercial service, but we see charging a very small fee as key to providing a high quality service.

It is important to note that we are not a ‘for profit’ we are a ‘for more-than-profit’. Take a look at our ‘tangible human outcomes’ here http://www.decisionsforheroes.com/about

Our core service delivers new and powerful tools through consumer technology to rescuers who volunteer on-call 24/7 to save lives. At the heart of it, we are providing analysis of their data to give them statistics on how their team perform allowing them to optimize their training. Soon we will begin to collate missing person data, and attempt to create predictions on their location weighted by localised result sets. We will connect rescuers from flank teams, allowing them for the first time to get a live view of the resources surrounding them. This is new - this is serious social innovation - as we say “we save lives”.

Vote for D4H!

The Awards Ceremony will take place in London at the Delfina with an audience of 300 on July 9th.

Winners are determined based on popularity vote and a judging panel, so I would really appreciate your click! Click Here To Vote, it just takes a few seconds!

-Robin.

We’re giving €10,000 to help grow a good idea into a great business. No strings attached. Seriously…

Bring on July 8th, when we have to make an elevator pitch Dragons Den style, to the judging panel! The judges include representatives from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, a number of Irish Start-ups, and London investor Nic Brisbourne.

What is fantastic - is the quantity of entries. Here are the other finalists - great to see some known (and unknown) names.

• Decisions For Heroes (Robin Blandford) –A web application that saves lives by helping rescue teams record and analyze their rescue operations and training
• GetitKeepit.com (Alan Coleman) – A web application to help consumers declutter their lives by offering an online portal for the management and retention of important documentation
• MyHotel.ie (David and Matt Sherlock) – A website and booking engine that reinvents the traditional booking model, offering hotels a powerful new marketing channel with no booking fees
• Neurosynergy Games (David Delany, Lorraine Boran and Michael Boran) – Innovative online brain training application designed to enhance both intellectual (’IQ’) and emotional (’EQ’) performance for healthy people and people with specific mental disorders
• Octopied (David Behan, Ronan Morris and Michael Flanagan) – A web application for freelancers, helping them manage invoicing, project management, sales and support through one simple and cost-effective tool
• Our Writers’ Bloc (Owen Gallagher and Karl Quinn) – An online marketplace that connects self-published authors directly with their readers, and facilitates the distribution of material over multiple formats including mobile phones and e-Reader devices
• Pendle House (Michael Furey) – An online currency exchange marketplace that allows companies and individuals around the world to trade currencies directly with each other, cutting out all transaction costs
• Plink (Mark Cummins) – An image-driven search engine that allows users take a photo of an object with a mobile phone, and automatically retrieve information about it online

Wow! It goes without saying, that if a €10,000 fund can attract 249 potential business ideas - should the government not be supporting more of these events?

-Robin.

FineTuna allows you to upload an image or take a browser screenshot, add comments or markers to your image and send it on to your designer or developer by email.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - I love Fine Tuna as a concept. As expected from Alan, the design is gorgeous and the app works seamlessly. Rather than be a business in itself, I believe FineTuna is an opportunity for SpoiltChild to get known, and spread word about their Email Marketing App Toddle.

For such a simple task as annotating an image, it needs to be fast. The competition for me is Skitch, which Alan is closing in on with the Firefox Plugins, but I need to be able to snap screenshots anywhere. I’m picturing a small desktop app that works on a keystroke giving you a crop box, once you click, drag, and release over your area you automatically get it uploaded and FineTuna open on your screen ready to annotate.

Good luck with this one…

-Robin.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - When you launch something new, everyone wants to get their oar in. They want to tell you what they would have done. They want to explain to you how you could have done it better. They want to offer you their advice on how you could improve a feature.

It’s hard. It’s hard because you get criticism. Naturally you want to defend yourself, your talents, your product.

“No, no, you see we’re launching that next month…”

“No, we prioritised this instead because…”

Well I have learnt something new.

When somebody wants to give you advice, it is not a debate.

Remember that. Remember that, because it is extremely powerful advice.

The person giving you advice is trying to help you, they just want to get their ideas off their chest and communicate them to you. Do not answer back.

Take notes. Listen.

Go home, analyse what they said. Try and see their point of view. Decide if you can take anything from what they said.

Remember, it is not a debate - Listen. Nod. Smile.

-Robin.

(Playing ultimate frisbee in Killarney this weekend. By Author.)

DUBLIN, IRELAND - I’ve been meaning to publish these stats so others can learn from it. We launched decisionsforheroes.com two weeks ago today, and thought it would be valuable to show the traffic to the site. We were blogged about on the Tuesday Push (thank you all!) on the 19th, which also led to a large amount of Retweets on Twitter.

We were written up on TechCrunch EU and syndicated to TechCrunch.com on the 20th. This caused even more retweeting, and commentary.

What is interesting, is that there were more visits spurred from the Tuesday Push than TechCrunch. But, Twitter sent the most traffic by far. I’d like to note that while TechCrunch didn’t pull through massive traffic, some REALLY good contacts got in touch, including some first sales thanks to the TechCrunch feature.

You can see the stats above for Day 1 and 2 of the launch, note that ‘Google’ includes all Google Reader click-throughs, and Twitter API clients are not counted - only people who clicked through from twitter.com.

Interesting stuff.

-Robin.