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Last Updated:
Aug 14, 2009 - 5:42:07 PM |
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| Mark Taylor, Head of Digital Content Services at Eircom and 2009 winners of the annual Eircom €100,000 Web Innovation Fund; Pieter Oonk of SocietyMail, Austin McGinley of GetItKeepIt.com, Pat Walsh of Diaryplan.com and Bartek Czerwinski of BeeHerd
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Eircom this week announced details of the four winning Irish companies of the 2009 annual Eircom €100,000 Web Innovation Fund. Launched in February 2009, Eircom’s Web Innovation Fund aims to promote, mentor and sponsor innovative web applications in the Irish Internet industry. One of the winner's GetItKeepIt.com offers subscribers a secure online portal for the receipt, management and retention of life’s essential documentation.
The four winning companies will benefit from a prize of Eircom funding valued at €100,000 to help them develop their winning concept through to production. Funding will be released on a staged basis throughout the six-month development process, according to needs assessed on a per-case basis.
GetItKeepIt.com was selected for its innovative approach to the management of the simple but all too often poor job of taking care of vital household documents. Subscribers to the site can gather, analyse, file, tag and create alerts for any documents that require attention and need to be retained such as utility bills, insurance documents, pension records, tax receipts, credit card bills, eReceipts, eTickets etc.
The benefit to subscribers of the service is that they can access these documents quickly from anywhere and always find what they are looking for. No more missed deadlines, surcharges, penalty fees or loss of documentation means users save time, money, reduce worry and annoyance as they finally take control of critical correspondence.
GetItKeepIt Marketing Director, Austin McGinley said “This is a tremendous vote of confidence in our business model and our solution to the headache that comes with managing life’s paperwork. The idea actually came from seeing a big mahogany chest stuffed with important household documentation. Any important piece of correspondence that needed to be retrieved from 20 years worth of documents inside could be retrieved with a few hours of dedicated searching. We wanted to create a solution that would avoid the clutter and management headache presented by paper being increased with digital correspondence”.
Commenting on GetItKeepIt’s success Mark Taylor, Head of Content and Services Strategy, Eircom Online, said “I would like to congratulate GetItKeepIt in achieving this significant milestone. We are very much looking forward to working closely with the company to provide them, not only with essential funding, but with guidance and support”.
The €25,000 prize awarded to GetItKeepIt will be used to develop the winning concept through to production and an invitee only beta launch in Ireland later this year.
This year Eircom has partnered with the Telecommunication Software & Systems Group (TSSG) at the Waterford Institute of Technology. As part of its support for the Eircom Web Innovation Fund, the TSSG will provide free consultancy and training to the Web Innovation winners to help them further develop their technical innovation. The winners will also receive entrepreneurial training and incubation space at the arclabs business centre to assist the winner in getting the product live and operational in the market.
The other winning companies are:
Diaryplan.com - - a new Irish start-up web company whose mission is to be the world’s largest provider of online calendar services. Focusing primarily on sporting events, Diaryplan.com provides content rich, ready to go downloadable calendars which are attractive to multiple market segments including sports fans and web 2.0 social networkers.
SocietyMail.com - - a plug-in for webmail systems that turns the Email Inbox into a social network and search engine for social content stored in the email archive.
BeeHerd - - a "revolutionary platform" allowing sports online content publishers and website owners to create interactive, customised social widgets. The widgets allow fans to stay up-to-date with the latest news, photos, videos, fixtures and results as well as provide the facility to discuss and comment live using the Twitter platform.
