Startups

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

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. In medieval times the Liberties was an area of the city in which brewing, distilling, tanning and other traditional industries were located. The world famous St James Gate brewery, home of Guinness, continues the tradition. Meanwhile distilling is enjoying a big revival in the area, with the arrival of the Pearse Lyons, Teeling, Roe & Co and Dublin Liberties dist

Stress baking. It’s a thing, you know. It’s what Caryna Camerino used to do after another difficult day in her old job in human resources. Caryna Camerino, a first generation Canadian who has lived in Dublin for the past 14 years, wasn’t always a baker. But food was a big deal at home – partly because her father, 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 normal folk do. Intending to visit Ireland for a couple of days after she left college, she’s never left. The job in HR was courtesy of an engineering company

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. She live

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

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 really fun. ItR

‘So your bar is there’, says Clare. ‘You have to have that and give me an appraisal’. ‘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 ‘oh my God it probably tastes like sawdust!’ is what they’re thinking. But guess what? This Chocolatey Clare’s Salted Peanut bar tastes great. Not too sweet and icky like lots of non-milk milk chocolate. Not too pale and wishy-washy. This milk chocolate has a hefty 5

GROWN is a tiny Dublin company that prints beautiful simple designs on ethically-sourced, environmentally friendly shirts and t-shirts from a shop on Francis Street in Dublin’s Liberties. 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. The ocean-loving friends were Neil McCabe, Stephen O’Reilly and Damien Bligh.  They’d noticed rubbish in the water and on beaches. It made them think about the ecological impact of plastics and modern fabrics, and how we produce and consume everything from food and drink to coffee and clothes. That got them rese

When Izzy was little she always said that her favourite thing about being in a wheelchair was that her shoes never got dirty. They looked brand new every day and the lights never ran out in her favourite light-up runners. However, her real shoes were her wheels. I remember we used to decorate her wheelchair for birthday parties and Halloween. We filled them with fresh flowers once when she was a flower girl for a wedding. At Christmas, we used to put tinfoil and lights around the wheels and lots of tiny Christmas decorations for the Xmas family show.

I used to work in very tech heavy jobs, consulting with big tech companies like Capgemini and Avnet. Back then I was one of the first people amongst my peers to get an iPhone and iPad for use with work. I enjoyed the luxury of being able to follow up on emails from the comfort of my home and get the updates about ongoing projects instantly; but after a while realised that overuse of tech was having a serious impact on my productivity and wellbeing. As the borders between ‘at work’ and being ‘off’ began to vanish I started having issues with sleep and my relationships as I spent too much time online. I needed a change so badly that I decided to move sectors just to

There are literally hundreds of young entrepreneurs launching their start-ups in Dublin, hoping to climb the precarious ladder in the tech, food and pharma sectors. Many of these companies will go on to achieve greatness; some will be quietly successful, others will become well-known names across the globe. Others, sadly, will perish under the immense pressure of starting and running a company from scratch. Dublin.ie caught up with Jack Kirwan (pictured above right), founder and co-owner of Sprout & Co. restaurants, which are, well, sprouting up all over the city, to find out what it takes to get from that init