Innovators

An automated system for organising sporting teams; selling Irish soil to Americans; online video recipes; and organic seaweed products

Lords of the ring-around

TEAMER.NET:NIALL McEVOY and his friend Ken Moulton are long-time friends who share a passion for sport. Two years ago Moulton was asked to manage a hockey team at Railway Union: "the fourths" he laughs, "a combination of rickety auld fellas and up-and-coming young players".

However, with a young family to manage as well, the weekly round of calls and texts to organise the team was becoming a chore for Moulton and he set his mind to finding an automated solution. What he came up with was teamer.net, a website that allows you to register the mobile numbers and e-mail addresses of your teammates and also the times and dates of matches and training. The system issues e-mail and text alerts before matches and training and collates responses on a team page to show who is available.

If regular players are unavailable the system will automatically contact substitutes. McEvoy jokes that they were always knocking around business ideas "but with this one I knew we had something, it was just so obvious and so simple . . . Almost all other systems require the system to be proactive but this system does all the work. It works for any team event, from inter-county GAA teams to tag rugby."

Teamer.net allows teammates to chat on their team blog and to post pictures. To ensure security, particularly for under-18 teams, all teams have their own login and password details. The system is free, with teamer.net taking up the cost of issuing the text messages. "This saves the captain a small fortune in monthly calls and texts associated with running a team." Revenues are generated by advertising on teamer.net and in the e-mails and text messages sent to players.

The company has 60,000 members - 42,000 of them in Ireland. McEvoy says they are taking the concept to other countries too, including the US and Australia. McEvoy says the target demographic is the under-35s and says people who play a lot of sport tend to be in the higher socio-economic groups. "Our users are highly valued by advertisers."

Teamer.net raised initial funding from family and friends and recently became a High Potential Start-up with Enterprise Ireland. The company is looking at another funding round to drive the next phase of development. "We are hoping to raise €750,000," says McEvoy. "There are an estimated 150 million playing team sports in the geographies where we are now operate. That is a great market to be chasing." See teamer.net.

Recipe for success

LOOKANDTASTE.COM:NOT MANY business ideas emerge while sailing on a yacht in the Caribbean but that was the starting point for lookandtaste.com.

Professional chef Niall Haribson was looking online for instructions for how to cook when he realised that amid all the recipes online there were very few videos demonstrating how to prepare dishes. Convinced there was a gap in the market he contacted his friend Seán Fee and together they founded the company in March 2007 with Haribson returning to Ireland to develop the business.

Since then the company has produced over 250 video recipes and its website is generating 400,000 page views per month.

The company was on the UK version of Dragons' Den last year where it was advised to change its name from ifoods.tv to lookandtaste.com.

The free website earns money from advertising and sponsorship. An iPhone application is due for release later this month so users can download recipes onto their mobile.

The dirty work of sending soil

AULD SOD EXPORT COMPANY:THE THOUGHT of digging up dirt from your back garden and selling it is the type of business idea that seems too simple to work.

But the Auld Sod Export Company sells Irish dirt to Irish-Americans and is turning muck into brass in the process.

The idea came from agricultural scientist Pat Burke who regularly travelled to the US where he was asked by friends to bring a bag of Irish soil to mark a special occasion, particularly to scatter on a burial casket.

Importing soil into the US is prohibited because of potential cross-contamination of flora and up until a couple of years ago heat-treatment to 200 degrees was the only system acceptable to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). This process renders soil sterile.

Towards the end of 2006 Burke started looking at ways in which the soil could be treated to meet US import standards while retaining cultivational properties. He patented a system acceptable to the USDA and the Auld Sod Export Company was born. Towards the end of last year corporate financier and accountant Tim MacDougald bought into the company. Enterprise Ireland also came on board while additional BES investors brought the amount raised to €750,000.

The company sells its bags of Irish dirt in a gift set with a Belleek bowl and a packet of shamrock seeds. "People think we are taking the p*** selling Irish dirt but we are not. We are selling a horticultural product," says MacDougald. The soil "components" are taken from land in Tipperary and north Cork and it is "manufactured" in Cahir, Co Tipperary.

The company has a distribution centre in Ohio. "If you want to do business in America you have got to take the business to them. They will not buy from an Irish company in Ireland. They will buy from an Irish company with a US presence," says MacDougald. See officialirishdirt.com.

An ocean of opportunity

VOYA:OCCASIONALLY A business idea just comes to you. At least that was the experience of Mark Walton, managing director of Voya, an organic seaweed cosmetics manufacturer.

The company grew out of the family business, Celtic Seaweed Baths, based in Strandhill, Co Sligo.

"One day a customer at the baths said: 'I can't do the seaweed back in London and I can't travel back and forth every weekend.' And we had a moment of blinding clarity: 'Why not make products people can use wherever they are?' When we looked at the market we found while there were organic products, they weren't great, and while there were seaweed products - they weren't organic, so we decided to make our own."

Although he had the idea in 2001, Walton and his wife Kira worked in the family business for a number of years while setting up Voya. Part of this involved overcoming technical hurdles. "We had to look at preservation systems that would work on seaweed and pass organic standards. We had to look at emulsifiers [binding agents] that weren't mineral oil based."

For a company name he again turned to his customers, one of whom described her weekly seaweed bath as "going on a voyage". Walton loved the description and shortened the word to "Voya".Voya is targeting €500,000 in sales this year. See voya.ie.

Amid all the recipes online there were very few videos demonstrating how to prepare dishes

The system automatically issues e-mail and text alerts to team members before matches and training