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Conall Laverty is the founder and CEO of WIA, a start-up company that works with property owners and developers to deploy Internet of Things hardware to reduce cost and improve their buildings’ performance. WIA provides a simple way for people and things to communicate with just a few lines of code. With over 10,000 clients across 100 countries, it has attracted €1 million in venture capital funding with backers including Suir Valley Ventures, Enterprise Ireland and NDRC. As a result, Conall has become a key figure in the global Internet of Things ecosystem. Conall is one to watch. He h

Ireland is a leading player in the global medical technology industry. IDA Ireland reports that 14 of the world’s top 15 Medtech companies have bases here. Dublin, the country’s capital city and economic powerhouse, is home to giants in the sector like Medtronic, ResMed, Abbott, Bayer, Stryker, Johnson & Johnson and many others. With more than 40,000 people now working in the industry, Ireland is one of the largest employers of Medtech professionals in Europe. In fact, it is home to the most Medtech personnel per capita on the continent. Why Medtech companies choose Dublin All sorts of companies have a presence in Dublin. However, there are so

The Liberties is one of Dublin's most characterful and historic districts. It owes its name to the fact that it was originally outside the jurisdiction of the city. So it was free to follow its own rules. In many ways, it's still doing that today.

Stress baking. It’s a thing, you know. It’s what Caryna Camerino used to do after another difficult day at her old job in human resources. It was also the starting point of her successful Dublin startup: Camerino Bakery. HR to hotbuns: Caryna Camerino’s startup story Caryna Camerino, a first generation Canadian who has lived in Dublin for the past 17 years, wasn’t always a baker. However, food was always a big deal at home – partly because her father, who was from Rome, is a stickler for authentic Italian cooking. Such a stickler, in fact, that she loved going to friends’ houses where she could enjoy a regular TV dinner, like n

Roisin Lyons, who is a professor in entrepreneurship at DCU, has no time for the mindset that says, in effect, ‘Innovation? Oh that’s just for innovators’. “Everyone needs to be innovative”, she believes, “everyone needs to be enterprising, particularly with growing issues of sustainability in Ireland. People have to be more inventive about solutions”.

The second annual Dublin Startup Week, which took place from October 21st – 25th 2019, was a celebration of the city’s innovation and startup ecosystem. With five days of networking events, keynotes, panels and workshops – all free of charge – the event was aimed at future, current, and repeat startup founders. Find out more at dublinstartupweek.com Next up in this mini-series, we meet Natalie Novick, another of the event’s track captains. Natalie Novick is a University of California San Diego PhD student who now resides in Edinburgh. Sh

The second annual Dublin Startup Week, which took place from October 21st – 25th 2019, was a celebration of the city’s innovation and startup ecosystem. With five days of networking events, keynotes, panels and workshops – all free of charge – the event was aimed at future, current, and repeat startup founders. Find out more at dublinstartupweek.com First up in this mini-series, we meet Colin Keogh, one of the event’s leading lights. David R Pollard, Gene Murphy and Colin Keogh are founders and organisers of Startup Week Dublin. Keogh is also

Zendesk is a SAAS company that specialises in helping other companies with their customer care operations. It was founded in Copenhagen in 2007 and has grown massively since then. With four core products and over 170,000 customers worldwide, it has come a long way. Zendesk’s startup success story “The initial concept was making life easier for customer support engineers,” says Colum Twomey, Vice President of Product Development at Zendesk and head of its Irish office. “We developed a customer support platform, a software as a service product, and that’s where we came from. Since then, we’ve developed more products and addressed a broader marke

Skytango is an online platform for the buying and selling of drone video footage. Irish woman Susan Flynn is Skytango’s chief operating officer. Her husband Steve, from Minnesota, is its chief executive, a job he’s been preparing for since he was seven years old: “Back in the day, you’d spend three months building a balsa wood and styrofoam airplane and it would take-off and you might have a thirty-second flight and it would explode into pieces, and you’d go back and work for three months to rebuild it. Now you can pull a drone out of a box and launch it, and it’s re

“So your bar is there. You have to have that and give me an appraisal,” says Clare. “You can be honest,” she adds. That’s a terrible idea, Clare, I think to myself. I‘m a hopeless chocolate snob. ‘Dairy-free milk chocolate’? How is that even possible? As Clare herself admits, when you say the word vegan, people assume it’s going to be horrible. She reckons that they’re thinking: ‘Oh my God, it probably tastes like sawdust!’ But guess what? This Chocolatey Clare Salted Peanut bar tastes great. It’s not too sweet and icky like lots of non-milk milk chocolate. Not too pale and wishy-washy. This milk chocolate has a he

Sustainable, ethical clothing designed in Dublin Grown Clothing is a Dublin startup that prints beautiful, simple designs on ethically-sourced, environmentally-friendly shirts and t-shirts. Its origins lie in conversations between three friends as they journeyed back and forth between Dublin and the West of Ireland, on swimming, surfing and scuba-diving trips. What inspired this sustainable startup? The ocean-loving friends were Neil McCabe, Stephen O’Reilly and Damien Bligh. They often noticed rubbish in the water and on the beaches they explored. This made them think about the ecological impact of plastics and modern fabrics – and how we pr

Bringing responsible innovation to Dublin Innovation is what has brought the human race as far as it has come. Because of innovation, we have tackled disease; we have navigated the globe by land, sea and air; we have sent men to the moon. And, soon, we will have driverless cars. What is responsible innovation? Innovation, in many ways, defines us. However, it also has its drawbacks. There is an innate impulse to push things as far as they can go. At times we wonder why innovation has taken us in a peculiar direction. What is the need for this device? Why has this phenomenon taken over? This is when innovation becomes irresponsible. That innate drive to push