Where will the next successful Irish tech companies come from?

It’s a question that the government, its state agencies and top universities are spending a lot of time and money considering.

One agency that thinks it has a direct answer to this question is the National Digital Research Centre.

Based in Dublin’s Digital Hub, it has given ten young tech companies its facilities - and €10,000 in cash - to develop their technology further.

Called the Launchpad initiative, the result is a mixture of projects, from tracking music piracy to street navigation for blind people.

‘‘We expect about 50 per cent of these projects to succeed after this three-month, stipend-supported period,” said Noel Ruane, director of the Launchpad scheme. ‘‘We expect this will mostly be through new funding.”

Here are the ten companies aiming to become the next big thing in technology enterprise.

Timetrack

Founder: Paul Shiels

Status: active

Timetrack is a software program that can tell a band or record label whenever a copyrighted song is played on over 10,000 radio and television stations worldwide.

The application for such a service, in an age of mass music piracy, is obvious.

So far, Timetrack has had no shortage of suitors. It has already received the promise of ‘‘several hundred thousand’’ euro in funding to develop the product, according to its founder, Paul Shiels.

‘‘This will give bands in-depth intelligence as to where their music is being played, all over the world,” said Shiels. ‘‘It’s the first time that this capability will be open to bands and music publishers. At present, there are media monitoring services, but they only operate in small territories.”

The technology works by ‘watermarking’ songs, which are then recognised when they are played back over the internet. ‘‘The software takes an MP3 recording of the broadcast, for use by the band or label. So they can then approach the radio or television station with evidence of its having been played,” said Shiels.

Timetrack is currently working with the Vatican, the Elvis Foundation and the Martin Luther King Foundation on copyrighted music and speeches that are commonly broadcast.

Point The Way

Founders: Tim Walsh, John Ryan

Status: in production

For centuries, blind people have used a cane or guide dog to help them navigate streets, paths and walkways. Over the past decade, new technology has thrown up new solutions that offer various alternatives. But nothing has so far proven to be an affordable, genuinely portable aide.

Tim Walsh and John Ryan think they have found the answer. Using a combination of a smartphone, some sat-nav software and a digital compass, the two Dubliners are constructing a system that will speak directions to blind people.

Crucially, it will also ‘buzz’ when the person is facing in the right direction, a lapse in many previous systems’ operation.

‘‘We’ve partnered with the National Council for the Blind in Ireland,” said Ryan. ‘‘We’re also pitching it to a mobile operator, which is showing strong interest.”

The system is being designed for smartphones with keyboards and which use the Android mobile operating system. These include models from HTC, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung. ‘‘The key thing is that you can do this hands-free,” said Walsh. ‘‘Because the compass is on-board, it lets you stick the phone into a shirt pocket.

That way, you can feel the buzz when you’re pointed in the right direction.”

Sokohealth.com

Founders: Aidan McKenna, Stuart Chaney

Status: in production The internet is littered with comparison websites. A few of them offer decent services and take a handsome commission for the choice you eventually make. The founders of Sokohealth are using this principle in the area of medical surgery.

Aimed principally at the US market, the service allows you to search for different types of surgery, pricing and comparing different hospitals or clinics. In many instances, the cost of elective surgery can radically differ from state to state in the US.

‘‘There’s absolutely nothing out there at the moment like this service,” said Stuart Chaney, co-founder of the company. ‘‘Surgery is a major cost in the US and it’s hard to get information on the choices you might have.”

Chaney said that the company would focus its activity on the west coast of the US, where co-founder Aidan McKenna has sales experience in the cosmetic surgery sector.

The company will base its revenue model on clinics, hospitals and specialists paying to be included in the comparison list. It will also take a 4 per cent commission on the surgery fee, which can be over $20,000.The service will be free to use for those seeking surgical services.

Chaney said that the service would offer its service free of charge to clinics and hospitals for the first three months of its operation.

Ketchup

Founder: Paul Campbell

Status: active

‘‘Meetings suck,” said Paul Campbell, founder of Ketchup. ‘‘I hate them. I hate keeping notes of them, checking planners for them and coordinating schedules.

So I wrote an application for myself that made it easy to make and take notes both during and after a meeting - and to schedule and plan meetings on a dead-easy platform.”

Ketchup will be used primarily as a website application, although Campbell said that he is keen for it to be developed into an app for the iPhone and other platforms. The service will be offered on three different access levels: free, personal (€10 per month) and business (€50 per month).

At present, the market for notes and organisational programmes is hottest in the mobile application world, with popular titles such as Evernote achieving hundreds of thousands of downloads.

Tapadoo

Founder: DermotDaly

Status: active

The big story in consumer electronics over the past two years has been mobile applications.

With an estimated 250,000 iPhones in use in Ireland - and up to 50 million globally - mobile apps have created millionaires out of many young software developers. Vying for a piece of this pie is Tapadoo, which has been developing apps since 2008.

Its latest app is called Firepit, which is aimed at touring music bands and singers, many of whom are losing money.

Developed in advance of a band’s tour, the app gives much of the usual information about tour dates, venues and the like. It also gives exclusive content such as band interviews, videos, photos and other unavailable band information.

‘‘We’ve kicked it off with Ultravox’s new tour,” said Tapadoo’s Adam McCarthy. ‘‘Midge Ure [Ultravox lead singer] has been raving about it on Twitter for the past few weeks.” The company charges €3 for the app, which has already been downloaded several hundred times.

Tapadoo splits this revenue with Apple (30 per cent) and the band (percentage not disclosed).

JLizard

Founders: Trevor Parsons, Viliam Holub

Status: in production

This is a software product that scans and checks the ‘log files’ of errant software programs. For large companies with many software and data transactions taking place, glitches and bugs can be very hard to isolate. This is where analysis of log files can help.

‘‘It’s a little like CCTV for software,” said Trevor Parsons, co-founder of the company. ‘‘Big companies have loads of log files. If there’s something wrong, it can take a while to get to them.”

Having completed a post-doctorate thesis, Parsons wrote a software program for IBM to identify specific log files in its many databases. Based on that program’s adoption and success within IBM, Parsons and co-founder Viliam Holub set about creating a similar program, but accessible from a website.

‘‘There’s a massive market for this,” said Parsons, ‘‘and there are no current cloud solutions. We know that some firms are still a little cautious about cloud applications, so we’re targeting companies that already use cloud services from the likes of Amazon or Rackspace.”

J Lizard’s main competitor is Splunk, a US-based service that is doubling in size every year. The company will offer a basic free service, but charge $150 per month to companies.

NeuroSynergy Games

Founders: David Delany

Status: in production Neuro-scientist David Delany has long been interested in conditions that affect the frontal lobes of the human brain, having studied schizophrenia, ADHD and other mental health issues.

Delany has come up with an advanced brain-training software program that tests this part of the brain.

‘‘There are several different levels to the brain-training application,” said Delany. ‘‘It’s like a game. But it gets progressively harder and harder. We hope that it will help in the treatment of brain-related issues.”

Delany did not say what the price of the finished product would be.

‘‘The goal is to develop it as an app for Windows, the iPhone’s App Store and for other platforms, including Nokia’s Ovi,” he said.

Cloudsplit

Founders: Joe Drumgoole, Colin Lyons

Status: active The world is turning to cloud computing, according to the experts.

To the uninitiated, cloud computing services are those that are used online, such as web-based e-mail, internet data storage and payment processing. Because of better broadband and increased standardisation, it is often cheaper and quicker to use cloud services than their physical alternatives.

‘‘The problem is that companies are signing up to lots of cloud services and then finding it really tricky to keep track of how much it’s all costing,” said co-founder Colin Lyons. ‘‘What Cloudsplit does is to make it really easy to track a company’s cloud service costs, including Amazon and all the big players.”

Lyons said that the software was configurable to allow ‘‘cut-off limits’’ when a certain amount had been spent on a particular service. It also monitors all cloud costs as they occur. The company is currently looking for further funding.

Mygoodpoints.org

Founder: Killian Stokes

Status: in production Mygoodpoints.org is a website where you can translate unused loyalty points from retailers into cash for charities. The kind of retailers covered include supermarkets, mobile phone operators and coffee shop chains.

The website aims to negotiate with companies to put a cash value on loyalty points. The website then assumes the position of the points redeemer, exchanging the points for charity-bound cash.

Company founder Killian Stokes has long-time connections in Africa, where he anticipates most of the money will be spent. But is this the climate for charitable donations?

‘‘You’d be surprised,” he said.

‘‘There is still a strong appetite to donate to charity. Many people prefer to know that they are helping to pay for an eye operation in Ethiopia, instead of getting their tenth coffee for free.”

Stokes said that a key consideration for people was to know exactly what they were contributing to.

‘‘The average payment term for Plan International, where you get a picture of the child you’re helping, is ten years,” he said.

What about loyalty schemes and the people who use them? ‘‘Most men under 50 don’t use loyalty schemes,” said Stokes.

‘‘But very many women do. We’re targeting women, students and older people.”

Glidebooks

Founder: Andronikos Nedos

Status: in production

While the iPhone has encouraged more people to use their phones’ web-browsers, it has also greatly increased the amount of productivity software in use, as company executives strive to keep up with developments in sales, meetings or stock control. Andronikos Nedos has created a software application that works on a computer and a smartphone.

It ‘captures’ workflow ‘processes’ on a mobile phone, which can be instantly viewed by other users back in the office Nedos said that the application would work on the iPhone and Nokia’s Ovi system. He said that the system would be live by June and would cost €30 per user per month.