2009 Awards
Business Category and Overall Award Winner
Entrepreneurs: Paul Groarke and Garrett Hussey
Compay Name: RendezVu (www.rendezvu.co.uk)
Referral: NovaUCD
There is currently no convenient way for most students learning languages to practice their language skills. Travelling to foreign destinations is expensive, impractical and infrequent. This problem is particularly prevalent in the Far East, where there are over 500 million people learning English. RendezVu (www.rendezvu.co.uk) provides learning through Virtual World technology and uses a ‘gaming’ approach to attract and maintain students’ interest. By “immersing” students in real-life settings where they must use their knowledge, RendezVu gives students a deeper and more dynamic understanding of languages, through using them in context. RendezVu was founded in January 2008 by ex-Baltimore Technologies employees, Paul Groarke and Garrett Hussey. It was the overall winner of NovaUCD’s 2008 entrepreneurship programme.
Arts Category Winner
Entrepreneurs: Jennifer Jennings and Philip McM
Compay Name: THISISPOPBABY (www.thisispopbaby.com)
Referral: Business to Arts
THISISPOPBABY is a theatre production company; an arts festival; a touring agent and an events management company. Describing themselves, they say, “We are the only theatre company in Ireland that looks at bringing new audiences to theatre by redefining the very notion of what theatre can be. The British Theatre Guide last year commented that THISISPOPBABY brought “a fresh perspective on theatre, blurring the distinctions not just between art and performance, but also between actor and audience, creating a unique and creative experience.” Co-founder Jennifer Jennings was previously Programme Director with the Dublin Fringe Festival and fellow co-founder, Phillip McMahon is currently ‘Writer in Association’ 2009 at the Abbey Theatre.
Social Category Winner
Entrepreneurs: Krystian Fikert
Compay Name: PPD - The Psychology Centre (www.theppd.eu)
Referral: Social Entrepreneurs Ireland
In 2006, Krystian Fikert, a Polish psychologist living and working in Ireland, set up the Psychological Centre in Dublin (PPD), initially to address the psychological needs of Polish immigrants in the country. In Poland, even small towns have easy access to psychological teams without the need for a professional referral or long waiting times. Krystian established PPD to provide a community-based, client-led model of psychological services. The PPD aims to improve personal and community well-being, improve integration and create open access to mental health services. In 2008, the service was expanded to address the needs of other immigrant communities as well as the native Irish population. PPD has two offices in Dublin – Gardiner Street and Ranelagh, one in Naas and one in Limerick.
2008 Awards
Social Category and Overall Award Winner
Entrepreneur: Cormac Lynch
Company Name: Camara (www.camara.ie)
Referral: Social Entrepreneurs Ireland
Camara specialises in recycling technology from Irish companies and delivering sustainable ICT to the educational sector in sub-Saharan Africa. The company sends out pre-owned computers to its own technical centres in Africa where they are refurbished by local people before being distributed to schools and colleges in the area. Camara also organise the delivery of basic and advanced ICT training programmes to the teachers in the schools receiving computers.
Over 150,000 computers are not being meaningfully recycled in Ireland each year. By 2012 Camara expects to be able to supply 1,000 African schools per year with a fully functional computer lab, offer multi-year training programmes for 15,000 teachers per year and pre-load schools computers with national curriculum and other educational software on areas such as HIV/AIDS and Gender Awareness.
Arts Category Winner
Entrepreneur: Johnny Donnelly
Referral: Business to Arts
Based in Galway, Arcana Productions specialise in event management and production and was founded by former Saw Doctor Johnny Donnelly who has worked as Musical Director for Macnas and Macteo, and Percussion Director for the Special Olympics and the Ryder Cup. The company is made up of a team of highly creative and innovative performers who aim ‘to dream up big ideas and make them happen’. Arcana have been asked to event manage and produce the entertainment for the Volvo Yacht Race event for two weeks when it comes to Ireland in May 2009. Tourism Ireland has also asked Arcana to partner with them in creating an innovative way to represent Ireland through entertainment and events in a number of locations including Alicante, Cape Town, Boston, India, Rio de Janeiro, Sweden and Russia.
Business Category Winner
Entrepreneur: Andrew Murphy
Referral: Dublin Business Innovation Centre
Sláinte Technologies provides value added products to the health sector to allow hospitals leverage their investment in expensive legacy systems. By providing full integration expertise, Sláinte’s products can be added as ‘plug and play’ technologies. Sláinte Technologies is developing a suite of products to deliver administrative and clinical workflow improvements, these include: Claimsure which is a complete claims management system that manages the entire lifecycle of a medical insurance claim, Chartsure which is an integrated application to digitise and index patient charts with one click resulting in no indexing errors or requirement for expensive scanning companies, and a Patient Billing system which is being constructed to facilitate the complex contract caveats in the private insurer/provider arrangement.
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2007 Awards
Business Category and Overall Award Winner
Entrepreneurs: Patsy Carney and Tom Brennan 
Referral: South East Business Innovation Centre
EirGen Pharma is a pharmaceutical research and development company and one of the first pharmaceutical companies in Europe to have obtained regulatory approval to safely develop and manufacture multiple anti-cancer products in their purpose-built facility in Waterford.
Social Category Winner
Entrepreneur: Tara Cunningham
Referral: Social Entrepreneurs Ireland
Release is a communication intervention programme which includes Speech & Language Therapy, Occupational Exercises and Oral Motor Therapy. It is designed to teach the parents of children with intellectual disabilities the skills they need to enhance their child’s communication skills.
Entrepreneur: Finola Jones
Referral: Business To Arts
A new project in contemporary art, Mother’s Tankstation gallery is situated on the edge of the old city of Dublin, close to Heuston Station, IMMA and the National Museum at Collins’ Barracks, in a sensitively renovated factory building. ‘Mother’s’ nurtures, along with the artist, the delicate and often awkward offspring of ‘new art’ and helps to provide a forum and a support structure for the introduction of unfamiliar or complex art practices to an Irish audience, as well as following a policy of bringing new Irish artists to the international art world through art fairs.
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2006 Awards
Arts Category and Overall Winners
Entrepreneurs: Conor McCarthy and Mark Duckenfield
Company Name: Emergent Events - The Street Performance World Championships (www.spwc.ie)
Referral: Business To Arts
The first Street Performance World Championships (SPWC) involved bringing the best street entertainers in the world to the people of Dublin. Performers from Australia, Canada, the USA, France, Sweden, Portugal, the UK and Ireland covering music, acrobatics, theatre and comedy took part and the Festival generated their best ‘hats’ (money donations) ever of any festival worldwide! It was also very successful with the general public as on its first day, it attracted 16,000 spectators and on the second, 10,000.
Social Category
Entrepreneur: Frank Buckley
Company Name: Sport Against Racism Ireland (www.sari.ie)
Referral: Social Entrepreneurs Ireland
Sport Against Racism Ireland (SARI) supports and promotes cultural integration and social inclusion through sport. SARI is a not for profit organisation with charitable status that was set up as a direct response to the growth of racist attacks from a small but vocal section of the people of Ireland.
Business Category Winner
Entrepreneur: Richard Boyle
Using the combined power of the internet and mobile phone technology, www.stopsmoking.ie uses a range of highly innovative stop smoking tools for everybody from the casual smoker to the long-term heavy smoker.
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2005 Awards
Winning Entrepreneur: Francais McKeagney
Company Name: InnerWorkings (www.innerworkings.com)
Referral: National College of Ireland
InnerWorkings delivers unique practice-based learning solutions that present real-world coding and application design techniques. Their goal is to transform the way software developers learn and are supported in the workplace, in addition to enabling the accurate measurement of developer capabilities throughout an organisation.
Shortlisted: BiancaMed Ltd and PSI
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2004 Awards
Winning Entrepreneur: Simon FactorCompany Name: Moving Media (www.movingmedia.tv)
Referral: Dublin Business Innovation Centre
Moving Media is a specialist provider of Media digitisation, encoding and digital content management services to the owners of sound and image collections.
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2003 Awards
Winning Entrepreneur: Fred Hanna
Company Name: SwifTXT (www.swiftxt.com)
Referral: Dublin Business Innovation Centre
SwifTXT provides tracking and logistics management systems.