Newspresso at Dublin Startup Weekend

Better late than never. I'm finally posting some photos and videos (later) of the Dublin Startup Weekend (2nd to 4th March) that I attended at the Google European Headquarters in Barrow Street, Dublin 2. I found it to be a thoroughly enjoyable experience despite my having made a complete balls up of my own pitch. I had it worked out at exactly a minute if I read it out. I really should have known better than to try and read it. I had to hold a microphone right up to my mouth and being so aware of my own voice and trying to hold, and read from a piece of paper was bound to lead to disaster. I faltered and suddenly felt very self conscious. In the end I ran out of time, (60 seconds).

I was one of 38 people out of over 100 attendees that pitched an idea. A slight plus in my favour was that one person voted for my idea whereas several other ideas got no vote at all.

Anyhow I ended up joining a small group of three other people on an idea pitched by Diarmuid Bourke, a Developer, which was called 'Newspresso' a platform for enabling journalists and small publishers, such as local or regional papers, to publish a journal and to use the space as a market for services such as photographs and content contributers to support their journal. I offered to conduct any market research and to develop and map out an appropriate business model. I found one direct US based competitor, namely; www.pressmarket.com.

The unique selling point was that content subscribers and photographers would be eligle for a portion of the advertising revenues which would be the main source of revenue. another source of revenue would be a premium membership for additional functionality that would benefit small to medium journals. We didn't come anywhere in the vote rankings for the weekend in part because we had such a small team and in part because we hadn't mapped out our route to market clearly enough. We also didn't complete many of the criteria recommended for a favourable judgement, such as a street survey, (although not really appropriate for this market) and a video. Nevertheless we seemed to be heading for the neccessary 100 Twitter folowers and had tremendous support and encouragement from the mentors including www.siliconIreland.com who gave us a mention on their website.

There were ideas ranging from sport event Apps, Health Care Apps, Gaming developments and much more. Here are just a few:

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All in all it was a very worthwhile weekend. I shall now pitch better in future and I also learnt a thing or two about preparing for presentations as well as the power of Twitter which I will be using much more now to promote this blog and other projects.