The last few weeks have been hectic and I haven’t had time to post much here.

For those who don’t know I left DERI at the end of August with the aim of starting up my own company.

Since then I’ve been accepted into the Transform Programme [1], along with 43 other startups. Transform consists of training, mentoring, networking opportunities, office space and grant support. The Transform Programme officially started last week when we had a 2 day session down in Cavan.

Eligibility for Transform depends on your business locating in a northern or border county. So I’m in the process of relocating to Sligo and over the last couple of weeks I’ve been going up and down to Sligo looking for somewhere to live. That’s been a huge drain on my time. Once I’ve found somewhere to live and made the move hopefully things will calm down again and I’ll have more time to write. I’ll blog about what my company is working on at a later date.

I’ll be giving a talk and chairing a panel at Barcamp Galway [2] this Saturday. The talk is “A gentle introduction to machine learning and data mining for recommender systems”. This will be a high level overview of machine learning and how it can be used. The panel is about “Issues faced by startups in Ireland”. The idea is to get some people who have been working on their own startups to discuss what problems they had and what advice they would have for someone just starting out. I’m still looking for volunteers for this panel so if your interested, let me know.

Hope to see you at Barcamp [3] on Saturday.