• Tom Murphy
• Fri, 04/27/2012 - 09:00
• Comments

Farewell

All things must pass and by extension all good things, such as New Tech Post, must come to an end as well. Due to other commitments and lack of sufficient funding, neither John Breslin or myself are able to support the NTP project in its current configuration any longer.

It has been two fascinating years looking at cutting edge developments in the world of technology and it has been a privilege to meet and interview CEOs and innovators both abroad and here, in Ireland.

I don’t wish to fill the page with numeric stats but suffice to say that our knowledge-base of the Irish tech scene over-runneth with many good and splendid things.

We would like to thank all our interview subjects for giving up some of their precious time to talk to us. Especially, those who had to tolerate having questions shouted at them on dodgy Skype connections. (All this computer stuff will never catch on.)

We would like to thank all our contributors who helped to shape and form New Tech Post in to what it became and wish them well in all their future endeavours.

Most of all, we would like to thank our loyal readers. We were constantly surprised at who turned out to be a reader. We may be on the the leading edge of Europe here in Galway but tucked away in our office, (and even with the best metrics available,) it was hard to know how much of an effect we were having. So when we did get out, it was always both encouraging and uplifting to meet the people we were doing it for — yourselves, the readers.

New Tech Post, like many great things, started over a cup of coffee. John owned socialmedia.net and was looking to put it to good use and I had an upcoming trip on which I would have some chunks of down time so I agreed to write a few articles. Five months later we had an office and six months after that we had on any given day between one and four people working in that office.

For our social media data mining exercise we even had an additional office set up for a month to compile and enter data.

All very empire-like.

With 20-20 hindsight all projects have elements that could have been done better. I feel that we completely failed to give the extremely important, world-beating, cutting edge technological progress in Irish agriculture and Irish life sciences the coverage it is due. If we had our time again...

As for the future — There are no plans to take down the site any time soon. We are keenly aware that many of the companies that we have interviewed use our articles and links to our articles as part of their own marketing programmes.

It is too early to say that we have anything planned because, umm, we don’t have anything planned. We have learned a tremendous amount about the Irish tech scene and its place in the global market. We are acutely aware of certain challenges that nearly all the companies that we have talked to have to face on a daily basis.

We know that even the humblest startup is a global company first, and an Irish company second, and that it is extremely foolish to think otherwise.

But most of all we realise how talented and able Irish technologists and entrepreneurs are and how incredibly underrated they remain in their own homeland. Irish tech exports are growing quarter upon quarter and have been for some time. It is an astonishing success story that we have consistently waved the flag for at New Tech Post but it seems to be either weirdly ignored or taken for granted elsewhere in the national conversation.

In every democratic country national politics are essentially parochial. After all, only a certain, clearly defined subset of people can vote you into power. (Only the dimmest, most self-aggrandizing politicians ever forget that.) But for Ireland to recover from the economic shambles of the last few years the Government needs to get everything behind the areas of the economy that are clearly working.

Significant initiatives can be handled by simple changes in legislation and require little or no money or investment, although that would useful in certain cases. What is absolutely needed, is for everyone concerned with providing Ireland with a prosperous future to take a very different perspective and attitude to the one that currently prevails.

We need to adopt a different perspective that declares, quite simply, that we are front and centre in the global tech industry. To support that vision of ourselves we take the attitude that we are the best in the world and that we can beat anyone, anyplace, anytime at anything.

Go on, go on, you know it’s true in your hearts. Just admit it.