Fernando Torres faces a fight to appear against Ireland at Euro 2012 after being dropped from Spain’s squad to face Venezuela last week. While Kevin Doyle has also suffered this season, there’s little danger of the Wexford man missing out, highlighting the gap in quality Giovanni Trapattoni must bridge in the summer.
Barcelona’s David Villa, Spain’s all-time top scorer, is out with a broken leg but Head Coach Vicente Del Bosque still left out a fit Torres for the first time in more than five years. Valencia’s Roberto Soldado was instead promoted to the national team-ranks scoring a hat-trick in the 5-0 rout. Athletico Bilbao’s Iker Muniam and Sevilla’s Alvaro Negredo were also called up while Real Madrid defender Albiol and Barcelona forward Pedro were omitted.
The order of the games in June has done little for Ireland’s prospects. Playing Spain first or, ideally, last would have been better as the defending champions might just be caught cold in their opening fixture or could well have qualified ahead of their third. The ever-defensive Italians are much more likely to need a win in game three, whilst Croatia will be looking for victory in what is most likely to be their only possibility of three points against Ireland.
Chris and Liam bring getHealth to America: Part 2
Following a relaxing weekend with a visit to friends in Miluakee, Illinois, we travelled to San Francisco on the Saturday evening. Arriving in the city, we were greeted by locals taking full advantage of the Halloween season and at our hotel we marked our arrival in the city with a pint of the familiar black gold.
After an all American breakfast the next morning and casually breaking the shower flooding the entire bathroom, we went on our merry way tearing up San Fran. After taking in the sites and getting lost in Macy’s several times, we made our way to Eric’s house and to our first experience of AirBnB.
Eric was a fencing champion and start-up advisor living on Mason street, who was incredibly blazay about his stunning view from the roof of his down-town apartment.
The next day was an early start for getHealth filled with presentation practicing. After this, we travelled down to Berkley to have lunch with Chris Bruce, local serial tech entrepreneur. Along with working on his own ventures, Chris also provided office space for start-ups in and around the Berkley area. Following a couple of coffees and some great advice from Chris we were on our way again and headed for Palo Alto.
The tree lined streets and packed out coffee shops, fulfilled all expectations from our watching of ‘the social network’. Here, it was great to meet up with a couple of Irish based out there. Enterprise Ireland’s David Smith and Stripe co-founder, Patrick Collison. Both gave us a good insight into the life out there and were able to make some great recommendations as to how we should approach developing our company out there.
On to the second night with AirBnB and a group of young entrepreneurs living close Stanford were our hosts for the evening. There were three companies in the house all working on a variety of different tech solutions and it was nice to sit and chat over a beer about our different experiences of the start-up world. It’s clear that WePay.com, Stypi (a Y-Combinator Startup) and Predictive Edge will be ones to watch in the future.
Tuesday was the big day for us. The meeting with Rock Health in the morning was what we had been looking forward to for the past week.
Rock health is a new start-up accelerator program based in Chinatown in San Francisco. The program is exclusively aimed at helping start-ups based in the health space and the next session commences in January 2012.
We met with creative director Lesley Ziegler whom we presented our concept to. After showing our demo and some Q&A we got some good feedback from Lesley on getHealth which we helped us in resubmitting our application.
After the relief that the interview went well, we took ourselves off down the Golden Gate Bridge. We got stunning weather and were lucky to be able to get some great snaps.
After soaking up San Francisco one more time we headed back down to Palo Alto to meet with Joshua Merril, CEO of Tap Canvas and currently based in 500 Startups. Josh showed us around and pointed out Jawed Karim, the co-Founder of YouTube, sitting by the window mentoring one of of his colleagues’ companies. Josh gave us some good advice on how we should approach setting up a company over in the Bay area. We also meet Dave McClure who was just recently back from Ireland as a judge at the Dublin Web Summit.
There was an amazing buzz about the place. Some teams brainstorming, others on sales calls and a lot of them building the next million dollar company. The atmosphere and vibe was infectious and we could see why the programme is held in such high regard.
After this we headed off to our third and final experience of Air BnB. This time we were staying with Iddo Tal and his family, an entrepreneur trying to make it like the rest of us. Their house was still decked out with Halloween paraphernalia from the night before and they were very welcoming to us both.
As soon as we left our stuff off with them we headed back into town for Silicon Valley NewTech meetup event. Liam had found out about this prior to heading out to the States and had secured us two seats at it. The event was attended by people from all sorts of backgrounds and essentially it was an opportunity for the tech start-up community to come together and to talk about their business ideas. Joshua who we met earlier was attending and the three of us sat and listened intently to some fascinating concepts people come up with for the online space.
Following the pitches, we got a chance to network over some pizza and beer and it was really nice to feel welcomed to this community having only come over from Ireland.
After this event our trip was drawing to a close and all that remained was to get a snap at 5am outside Facebook HQ:
Torres Facing Irish Pole-Axe
Fernando Torres faces a fight to appear against Ireland at Euro 2012 after being dropped from Spain’s squad to face Venezuela last week. While Kevin Doyle has also suffered this season, there’s little danger of the Wexford man missing out, highlighting the gap in quality Giovanni Trapattoni must bridge in the summer.
Torres Facing Irish Pole-Axe
Barry's Article for 'Ragmag'
Moving to Toronto
By Barry O’Shea.
Arriving in Toronto to a snowstorm set the tone for what would turn out to be a difficult yet exciting month of establishing a base in the metropolis on the shores of Lake Ontario. Like many Irish people I have made the move across the pond on a year out from University. From bank accounts to phone plans, gym memberships to apartment rental and the all important job search the process can leave you exhausted and frustrated with the seemingly endless ‘red tape’ and fast pace of life in this large city. Prior research and putting in the hard work initially means less time living out of a suitcase in your hostel and more time to get out and explore this exciting, vast and refreshingly upbeat city with its can-do attitude, as well as saving you a lots of cash on temporary accommodation. It’s all too easy to kick start your Canadian experience with a few ‘sociables’ in one of Toronto’s Irish Bars but if you can resist partying for a few weeks a clear head will do you wonders and leave you mentally prepared for this life changing experience.
