Startup Bootcamp, a European startup accelerator network and Techstars affiliate, just added Dublin to its existing locations of Copenhagen and Madrid. London and Berlin will follow in 2012.

Ireland’s tech scene continues to expand in spite of the woeful state of the rest of the economy with a plethora of accelerator programs, seed funds and events like Founders and the IBM smartcamp global finals happening there in the last year or two.

Startup Bootcamp’s Dublin program will be run by Eoghan Jennings, formerly CFO of Xing, one of Europe’s most prominent startups. A single pan-European application process will result in the selected teams being assigned to the most suitable city. I attended the first investor day at Startup Bootcamp’s Copenhagen location last November and one striking characteristic of the startup teams there, was how few of them were Danish. One team came from as far away as South America. Dublin’s first batch of startups is also expected to include 8-10 teams from outside the country.

Jennings told me that each city is expected to develop into a centre of excellence in a particular domain area. Ireland has produced quite a few successful enterprise software companies so its initial theme will be “smart cities”; the challenges presented by big data and connected devices in urban environments. The idea is also to tap into the customers and problems of multinational companies already present in Dublin like Facebook, Google and IBM. IBM and RDIL, Citi’s first dedicated R&D centre in the world, will be official partners.

Traditionally, Ireland has had a good pool of tech talent, with many developers learning their trade at those same multinationals. A true startup culture has been slower to develop but is picking up speed. Dogpatch Labs is due to open its first international incubator in Dublin this year. Another Techstars affiliate, the Propeller accelerator, is backed by Declan Ryan of low cost airline Ryanair. The government trade body Enterprise Ireland is offering up to a 50,000 EUR investment to startups who want to relocate to Ireland. Four new seed funds launched in the last couple of years.

The country’s ambitious targets for renewable energy, with 40 percent of power due to be supplied by wind and wave power by 2020, have also generated a cluster of clean tech startups.

Tags: Accelerator, founders, incubator, ireland, startup

Companies: Facebook, Google, IBM, techstars

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Search engines don’t seem to have evolved much since the dawn of Google. If Google was the sports car of search engines when it launched, it’s now a rather rusty vintage sport car.

Enter HeyStaks, a new startup launching today which wants to make search more efficient by making it social. Search is still a time-consuming and often frustrating business, especially if you are searching for information on a more esoteric or specialized subject. According to search engine marketing firm iProspect, a typical knowledge worker spends 16 hours a month searching for information and 50 percent of all those searches fail. HeyStaks’ founders claim that 1 in 4 searches are repeats of your own past queries and 2 out of 3 of searches have already been executed by someone else in your social network.

HeyStaks revolves around the notion of a Stak, which synthesizes the best shared search results of a group of users on a particular subject. Each user has a default Stak of their own searches and can start or join other Staks. A Stak might cover startup advice or travel in San Francisco. As a user, you choose your preferred Staks and who to collaborate with to get better search results. You might have one friend who has great insight into the design scene but knows nothing about high-tech startups.

HeyStaks provides a browser plugin (currently Firefox only) and a mobile application. Once you have installed the plugin, relevant HeyStaks community search results start appearing in your Google, Yahoo and Bing search results.

The results to the left are from a search for “hard rock reviews”. The searcher is a mountain biker who is looking for reviews of Hard Rock mountain biking gear. Google thinks that the user is looking for the Hard Rock hotel or hard rock music, so its default results are not relevant. Since this user is a member of a mountain biking Stak, HeyStaks anticipates that the user is more likely to be looking for mountain biking results. So it makes suggestions accordingly.

HeyStaks is based on technology developed by a group of researchers in search, data mining and personalization. The company’s CTO is Barry Smyth, a prominent expert in personalization whose previous startup, ChangingWorlds, was sold to Amdocs for $60 million. Smyth told me that around the time Google launched there was a rival, and now now long-forgotten, search engine called DirectHit which used page popularity (the number of times a page has been selected by searchers) to rank pages. Like Google, it had the potential to deliver demonstrably better search results than existing search engines but it turned out to be easier to “game” and so Google won out.

Intrigued by this idea, Smyth’s research group embarked on various research projects to improve upon a simple, popularity-based approach to result-ranking. The group, including researchers Maurice Coyle and Peter Briggs, developed and patented a number of core technologies in this area.

The HeyStaks social ranking and relevance engine takes 10 different types of user behavior into consideration. These include behaviors like how often a user selects a page and whether they tag it, share it or post it on their social networks. Results to date suggest that HeyStaks recommendations can be up to 50 percent more relevant that the vanilla search engine results.

HeyStaks CEO, Jonathon Dillon, was previously a VP at Yahoo. He says Yahoo tried to do something similar with social search after the acquisition of Delicious 5 years ago but failed because social graphs were still too immature.

The success of HeyStaks depends on how willing users are to share their search results. The founders say, that in the private beta group of 500 users, 70 percent of users shared 70 percent of Staks with 3-4 people. A typical beta user got community recommendations for about 1 in 4 searches.

Anything that improves search results is relevant to advertisers. HeyStaks’ business model will, at least partly, be based on advertising, but since the advertising model is not yet launched, the company is unwilling to discuss it in detail. Another obvious application is knowledge sharing on company intranets.

HeyStaks was founded in 2008, has 9 employees and is based in Dublin and San Francisco. The company has seed funding of $1.4 million.

Tags: search, social

Companies: Bing, Google, HeyStaks, Yahoo

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Ireland Banks Are All For Sale: Central Banker (Reuters)
Ireland’s banks are effectively up for sale, central bank Governor Patrick Honohan said on Tuesday as Dublin sought aid from the European Union and International Monetary Fund to prop up its lenders. “They are for sale as far as I am concerned,” Honohan said. “I’ve been an advocate for a number of years for small countries to have foreign owners for their banks.”

North Korea Fires At South (WSJ)
A South Korean military unit on the island, called Yeonpyeong, returned fire, while military officials scrambled fighter jets. In addition to the deaths, at least 16 more were injured, military officials said. Three civilians were injured, and the island’s 1,200 residents were sent scrambling for bomb shelters. “The whole neighborhood is on fire,” island resident Na Young-ok said from a bomb shelter about an hour after the shelling began. “I think countless houses are on fire, but no fire truck is coming. We have a fire station but the shots are intermittently coming.

Greenhill Hired By US Treasury To Help Dispose Of AIG Stake (BW)
The department agreed on Nov. 18 to hire Greenhill for the next 18 months, according to a contract posted on the Treasury’s website yesterday. New York-based Greenhill will collect $500,000 a month for the first year and $175,000 a month thereafter.

Carlos Slim Buys Stake in Money Manager BlackRock (Bloomberg)
Arturo Elias, Slim’s spokesman, said yesterday in a telephone interview that he thinks Slim’s holding is less than the 2 percent figure reported Nov. 21 by the Financial Times, which cited unidentified people familiar with the investment. Elias said he didn’t know the exact amount of the stake or whether Slim holds it directly or through a fund.

DE Shaw Exec To Launch Own Hedge Fund (HFMWeek)
Daniel Posner, managing director at DE Shaw & Co. who heads the firm’s distressed securities group, is departing the firm and expected to start his own hedge fund manager.According to two people briefed on the plans, the new offering will invest in troubled companies. Posner’s plans come shortly after the quantitative hedge fund titan cut approximately 10% of its workforce after it faced a number of investor redemptions.

Bracing For Black Friday (Reuters)
“What I really like is that a lot of stores are opening before Black Friday,” said Gabriella Jones, a 49-year-old from Lake Forest, California, who was in Times Square traveling with her daughter on Wednesday. “It’s almost like Black Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.”

Culinary Masterpiece Was A Turkey (CD)
“When I stuff a turkey, I eschew traditional bread cubes in favor of White Castle hamburgers.”

Barclays Transfers From Lehman May Have Broken Law, SEC Says (Bloomberg)
The U.K. bank got $769 million in securities held in the Lehman brokerage’s reserve bank account, and $507 million in assets listed as a debit item in the brokerage’s customer reserve, when it bought defunct Lehman’s brokerage, Lehman Brothers Inc., the SEC said in a filing yesterday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. The transfers would violate securities law if they increased the deficiency in the accounts, “and LBI would not have sufficient funds to satisfy all claims of the remaining customers,” the SEC said.

Charlie Sheen: Capri Anderson Tried to Extort $1 Million (People)
Charlie Sheen fired back at Capri Anderson in lawsuit that alleges she tried to extort $1 million from him after their “consensual encounter” in a New York hotel room. “This case involves a shakedown and extortion of the internationally known actor and celebrity Charlie Sheen … by an opportunist pornographic film star and publicity-hungry scam artist,” says the lawsuit filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Foreclosure Detectives Hunt For Lies (WSJ)
In two squat, suburban office-park buildings here, Richard Barrent is digging through loan files that could help decide who pays for the mortgage-paperwork debacle. The former Wells Fargo & Co. quality-assurance manager’s two-year-old company is part of a cottage industry of loan detectives obsessed with detecting fraud, misrepresentations and violations of underwriting guidelines. Such discoveries can be used as ammunition to force banks and other lenders to buy back loans from bond insurers, holders of mortgage-backed securities and other customers of forensic loan-review firms.

IMF: Greece Needs More Reforms (WSJ)
“The program is off to an impressive start, but the program is also at a crossroads,” said Poul Tomsen, head of the IMF team in the delegation. “The ability to make the program sustainable depends on deep structural reforms.”

Dogs Smarter Than Cats, Study Claims (NYP)
Scientists at Oxford University claim canines are smarter than felines, the London Daily Telegraph reported yesterday. And the reason, according to the researchers, is that dogs are more social animals and, therefore, have bigger brains. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, charted the evolutionary history of various mammals’ brains over 60 million years and found a link between the size of an animal’s brain in relation to its body and how socially active it was.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Global-Bank Deal Targets Reserves (WSJ)
Regulators have said new rules will help restore confidence in the global banking system. Banks have warned that such requirements could limit economic growth by crimping their ability to lend. Many bankers had believed their arguments were gaining traction, but the new limits regulators appear close to mandating are stiffer than some had expected in recent days.

Boehner Calls For Two Year Freeze On All Tax Rates (AP)
House Republican Leader John Boehner onWednesday proposed a two-year freeze on all tax rates and a cut in government spending to the levels of 2008, before a deep recession took hold of the economy. In a broadcast interview, the Ohio Republican said he was offering a “bipartisan” alternative to the package of business tax incentives and infrastructure spending that President Barack Obama was slated to announce later Wednesday in Cleveland.

Paulson & co Hit By US Economic Woes (FT)
The firm’s flagship $9bn Advantage Plus fund, which aims to profit from trading corporate events, lost 4.26 per cent in August, according to an investor, writing back tentative gains made in July. The fund was down 6.6 per cent in the second quarter. Paulson’s $3billion Recovery fund lost 9.13 per cent over the month, erasing its 6.5 per cent gain in July and compounding its 12.6 per cent second-quarter loss.

Goldman Sees $80 Trillion Emerging-Nation Stock Market by 2030 (Bloomberg)
The market value of emerging-market stocks may surge more than fivefold to $80 trillion in two decades, overtaking developed nations, as China becomes the world’s largest stock market, Goldman Sachs said. Faster economic expansion and growing capital markets may lift emerging nations’ share of world equity capitalization to 55 percent by 2030 from 31 percent today, Goldman strategists led by Timothy Moe wrote in a research report. Institutional investors in developed nations will probably buy a net $4 trillion of emerging-market equities, lifting holdings to 18 percent of their total portfolios from 6 percent now, Moe wrote.

SEC Looking At ‘Quote Stuffing’ (WSJ)
Mary Schapiro said the agency is looking at a practice others have called “quote stuffing” to assess whether it violates “existing rules against fraudulent or other improper behavior.” The practice involves trading in which unusually large numbers of orders to buy or sell stocks are placed in a fraction of a second, only to be canceled almost immediately. Ms. Schapiro said the agency is considering requiring traders to hold orders open for minimum periods.

Ryanair’s O’Leary Mulls One-Euro Toilets, Standing Passengers (Bloomberg)
“Why does every plane have two pilots?” asks Michael O’Leary, chief executive officer of Ryanair Holdings Plc, the largest low-cost airline in Europe. Wearing sneakers, jeans, and an off-the-rack short-sleeved shirt, O’Leary is pontificating in his office at the company’s headquarters on the outskirts of Dublin Airport. “Really, you only need one pilot,” he tells Bloomberg Businessweek in the Sept. 6 edition. “Let’s take out the second pilot. Let the bloody computer fly it.” What happens if the pilot has a heart attack? One member of the cabin crew on all Ryanair flights would be trained to land a plane. “If the pilot has an emergency, he rings the bell, he calls her in,” O’Leary says. “She could take over.”

Marilyn Manson Loses His Make-Up, Gains A Mullet (STP)
Interview reports that Manson is a “diehard” fan of HBO’s “Eastbound & Down,” the critically worshiped comedy starring Danny McBride as a washed-up former baseball star whose trademark mullet and angry face Manson is imitating in this photo. “Whenever I see Manson, he’s repeating entire chunks of dialogue and dressed like Kenny,” Adam Bhala Lough, who’s directing Manson in the upcoming film “Splatter Sisters,” told Interview. Lough went on to say that Manson dresses like “Eastbound” character Kenny Powers all the time, and provided this photo, credited to Manson himself, as “evidence.”

Hedge Funds Shrink In July As Billions Walk (Reuters)
The global hedge fund industry shrivelled a little more in July when investors pulled out nearly $3 billion (1.9 billion pounds) after the loosely regulated portfolios posted losses in May and June, researchers reported on Tuesday. Assets stood at $1.53 trillion, their lowest level since November 2009, according to data released jointly by TrimTabs and BarclayHedge, firms that track performance and flow data.

Hurd To Get $950,000, Eligible For $5 Million Bonus At Oracle (AP)
The biggest part of Hurd’s pay package will be the 10 million stock options Oracle plans to give him. The company said Hurd’s options will carry an exercise price equal to the market value of the shares on the date they are granted. While the filing did not offer a specific date, Oracle shares closed Tuesday at $24.26, which would value 10 million shares at $242.6 million. If he stays with the company, Hurd will be given options to buy another 5 million shares each year for the next five years.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker