Touristr Blog : Tag innovation, everything about innovation

Innovation Partnership with DERI

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:59:00 -0700

A few weeks ago, our partership with DERI was officially announced and received good coverage including the sunday Business Post and twice the Irish Times. The best review, "how the intelligent web can plan the perfect holliday" was written by Marie Boran at Silicon Republic. Marie interviewed us and grasp the concept of TripPlanr very well.

"an intelligent application that will suck in data from travel sites, blogs, social networks etc and come up with a customised trip best suited to the individual."

The story

Last Summer, Conor and I went up to Deri to make a presentation on a proposed trip planning application. We met with John Breslin and Conor Hayes and decided to apply for an Innovation Partnership grant where Deri would build a Recommendation Engine for our trip planner. We were approved. Deri recruited developpers and now a team of 5 is working out the best model that will make TripPlanr smart.

Eircom Web Innovation Fund

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:47:00 -0700

Last week the winners of the Eircom web innovation fund were announced and sure we’re happy to be one of them.

Mark Taylor, head of content and services strategy at Eircom, is very excited by the annoucement - “This is a new departure for Eircom and one we are very proud to develop. Ireland has a huge pool of entrepreneurial talent […] we are very much looking forward to working with these four companies in the coming months and we are hugely excited about their potential.”

Just before the press release, we and the other winners were taken on Stephen’s Green and Eircom’s headquarters for photo shoots. I was pleasantly surprised that two air hostesses and a tourist were waiting for the occasion. The photos were taking between two showers of rain, each of the companies had specific photo shoots. A big compass for Locle, kids in costumes for Playza , and bales of hay for HeyStaks.

See press release on Damien’s blog and some coverage here, here and here.