A new event announced this week is set to attract dozens of top developers and technology companies to the North-West to showcase their latest, innovative projects.

The free, one-day conference entitled SHOWCASE, is designed as a platform for some of the hottest talent in the fields of cloud, mobile and web applications to demonstrate or launch new projects that they’ve been working on. All in front of an audience of 150 peers, industry professionals and potential customers.

The web is a big place.  It’s full of porn, and social networking sites, people flogging all manner of dubious health products and even more dubious information on how to be happy.  Much of it is pretty useless.

When someone says “in the roaring 1920′s” we can immediately relate to the era of speakeasies, dancing the Charleston and silent movies. My question is though: what was the decade before that called? I ask because we will soon be at the end of the same decade in this century and it needs a label.

Colonel John Boyd, USAF, left us with two interesting legacies. He was the most successful combat pilot in history and yet never shot anyone down. And he developed the OODA Loop theory for air-to-air combat which fundamentally describes how modern businesses must survive.

So Google have unveiled their App Inventor, which allows users to create Android-based mobile apps using a simple drag and drop interface. “To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge.

The finalists of the annual NISP CONNECT £25K Awards have been announced, revealing the top 10 innovative concepts to come out of Northern Ireland’s research base. They now enter the ‘Big Pitch’ phase, giving candidates the final attempt to put forward their case.

Sponsored by Bank of Ireland, Invest NI, Queen’s University Belfast, University of Ulster and the Agri Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI), NISP CONNECT’s £25K Awards aim to identify local talent and offer a platform to launch the ‘Next Big Thing’ in intellectual property.

There is no more significant cost to be driven out of our business expenses. It is time to rethink the purpose of technology in business. It is time to change our thinking and make technology a competitive advantage.

For tourists and locals alike, finding your away around Ireland is not always the easiest thing to do.

So this is the 301st post on Iddictive – big thanks to all of you who’ve commented, sent in ideas and helped spread the good word on Twitter, Facebook and your own blogs. And now that we’ve notched up a reasonable number of posts, it’s about time that we got around to setting up a [...

For tourists and locals alike, finding your away around Ireland is not always the easiest thing to do. Maps are frequently out of date and GPS devices rarely include details of interesting sights and attractions. Irish entrepreneur John Ward has tackled the problem head on with a new GPS service, that not only helps you [...

Uppy Media‘s Facebook app allows users to tag the clothes they’re wearing in photos and share them with friends. Users can also use the app to ask others what they’re wearing. The company makes money through affiliate links, so if you just have to have that dress your best mate wore on Friday night, you’re [...

Research being carried out at the Magee campus of the University of Ulster to improve the sound quality on wireless networks could have significant commercial potential.  

Jonathan Doherty, from Knightsbridge, who was awarded his PhD in Computing at the University of Ulster summer graduation ceremonies in Derry’s Millennium Forum this week, is part of the research team, lead by Dr Kevin Curran and Professor Paul McKevitt, who are investigating "Improving Audio Listening Experience on Radio Networks".  

Laptops, netbooks and mobile phones are all vulnerable to the unreliable nature of bursty connections on wireless networks, especially at the outer limits of the signal.

Typography is certainly benefiting from a growing presence as an art form. Pair that up with something of a renaissance in high-quality print and you’ve got a recipe for a business. The Keep Calm Gallery does exactly this – selling screen printed posters based largely on typography and evoking something of a ‘British heritage’ aesthetic.

A few weeks ago, I wrote here about some gaps in the North-West's digital landscape that were waiting to be filled by the right entrepreneur.

The idea of location-aware city guides, running off mobile devices, has been about for a bit. Usually the concept makes use of the GPS capability of smart phones, to feed the user rich media info about where they are. Augmented reality overlays frequently get a mention too.

Guest contributor Helen Lindop takes the reigns today to discuss how starting a business with a young baby in tow is not only possible but can actually fuel innovative approaches. Two years ago I was surprised to find I didn’t want to go back to my full-time job after my baby was [...

Our lovely friends over at home business website Enterprise Nation, are giving £100 to 100 businesses and would-be businesses for their “good ideas”. Ideas 101 in association with PayPal launched yesterday and asks, “if we gave you £100, how would you spend it?” The 100 best ideas will win £100 each and the best of [...

It may sound a little odd, but most retailers that sell both online and off, maintain separate stock control systems and often have to resort to updating their online stock levels manually. Belfast-based startup AirPOS aims to fix that. AirPOS is stock control and ePOS software that connects bricks and mortar and online sales channels, [...

Social currency (the value locked away in your social network) is an oft mentioned principle in online marketing. You build social currency by providing useful stuff to a growing network of fans and they reward the value of that stuff by sharing it with others, building their own social currency in the process. A new [...

The new iPhone release is undoubtedly stirring up a lot of interest at the moment but it’s worth pointing out that there are still millions of people using ‘normal’ phones – and they want apps too. Aimed squarely at that market, Safebox is Java-based privacy tool for mobile phones (although Android and Blackberry versions are in [...

Meet the 2010 £25K finalists! See below for a full list of company bios:

Hitech
MVR - QUB
MVR makes large vocabulary continuous speech recognition possible on embedded systems, which has the potential to revolutionize the way people interact with embedded devices. Unlike current solutions that have limited potential, the core technology of MVR results from a novel approach to speech recognition that makes it faster and more efficient.

iPod headphones that look like a stethoscope. Cool. Site: www.