Gremlin’s Fireside Chat

Maeve my three year old daughter must be beginning to understand that all people are not the same (colour, language etc). I have a habit – good or bad – of trying to say hello and goodbye in the language of the person I am talking to. Maeve must have pickup up on this and the reason I know this is we were shopping in the Marks-and-Spencers in the IFSC in Dublin and after we filled the basket we approached the tills to pay for the goods. The young woman behind the till (who looked of indian origin) beckoned us over with a smile and a simple English “hello”; As we approached the till Maeve said “Namaste” (which means greetings and goodbye depending on the context) and both I and the lady did a double-take of surprise – the lady quickly recovered with a slight bow and “Namaste” in reply.

I was surprised to say the least. I use “Namaste” often when I interact with Indians since I picked up the phrase when my wife and I were on Holiday in Nepal and India a number of years ago. Maeve has heard me use it a number of times when talking to Indians – say in an Indian takeaway; What Maeve did all on her own is work out the link between the word and the apparent ethnic look of the person she is talking too. Clever girl.

Bit of an exciting week for me. Last Friday a long contract finally came to an end and since I had six weeks notice of it I had signed up for the “Open Data 18 hour Challenge” on 4th and 5th July which from the blurb on their website was about local government data sets which have recently started to be released in Ireland. I was expecting something like the tech conferences I have attended in the past – some presentations, discussions maybe the odd coding and brain storming sessions; But boy was I wrong. If I had known what it was to be about before hand I would probably never have signed up for the challenge, but I am SO GLAD that I did. In short the challenge was to generate business idea’s that used open data and maybe in the future take them forward to a product and a new High-Tech business.

The challenge was run over two days when on the first day was almost a pure brainstorming session where you as part of a table of techies, academics, entrepreneurs you came up with as many idea’s as you could on using the open data sets (Fingal County Council datasets and Dublin dataset ) Each table had to create two or three posters from the best ideas they could come up with – and there were loads. Once the posters were created and everyone had a look at them there was a short presentation on each one of them after which everyone voted on which ones were the best idea’s. Once all the votes were cast the idea’s with the least votes were eliminated and then we were asked to pin our names to the projects we wanted to do the next day – I chose one called “BizFit”. We were then told at the end of the next each of the ten teams had to do a five minute “Dragon’s den” style presentation to a panel of judges who would make the the final choices.

The BizFit idea is conceptually a simple one in that the idea is to use demographic data to either allow a small-to-medium company to find the best location for their business or for someone like an estate agent find the best kind of company for a particular empty business unit. With a great team of six people we had to develop the idea, discover the competitors and work out revenue streams etc for the final slide based presentation.

Anyway to cut a long story short our BizFit team beat off stiff competition to win the £4000 euro prize. Needless to say our team were stunned at our success.

Not too sure what we are going to do next. There is talk about entering the launchpad process to see if we can take the idea further. I hope we do since its an interesting business idea.

If you want more information on the challenge and the results from the Fingal Open Data Site, New Tech Post, Silicon Republic and Digital Times

I learn’t a lot on the process of business idea generation and what is needed to initiate the process of turning an idea into something more concrete. The “buzz” in the air on both days was palpable and I got to meet a lot of great people whom I hope to maintain contact with.

My three year old wonderful daughter just made me laugh – She wanted something of mine which is not suitable for children so I said “Maeve – not until you are older”. “OK dad” she said. Five minutes later she came back “Dad, I’m older now”. You cannot fault the logic.