The idea was for something that was easy to use and let people play using a service that they’re already familiar with. Playing is as simple as following the Twg.ie Twitter account where each day you’ll get an anagram to solve; be the fastest to solve it and you hit the top of the leader-board.  Told you it was easy.

Even though the game targets quite a niche audience, Alan’s idea of a word game like this on top of the Twitter platform seems obvious now. There’s a large enough user base on Twitter to make targeting a narrow niche possible, it’s a text-based interface making it suitable for a word-game, and Twitter’s real-time search makes it possible for players to interact on Twitter & see a near real-time leader-board of others playing the game on the twg.ie site.

You probably won’t be seeing my name on the Twg.ie leaderboard too soon – I discovered when developing it that solving anagrams quickly isn’t a talent I have (even in the 24 hours Twg.ie gives you). If you fancy testing yourself, check out the Twg.ie site.

Golden Egg wanted a way to replace their old family of sites which were originally designed as static brochures for each of their magazines.  As a producer of high-quality content, these static sites weren’t doing them justice, and weren’t giving readers a reason to return to the site. Instead, they wanted a site that was clean & easy to use, that put the magazines’ articles & readers to the fore, and was easy to update with new content daily.

In addition to the sections they’ve traditionally done in their magazines (like Beauty, Style, People & Parties, Food & Wine and What’s On), Golden Egg have started to embrace the web by getting more interactive with their readers by using features like a blog by their Deputy Editor, a monthly newsletter, and some other new features that will be making an appearance over the next few weeks!

There’s a separate design for the Fashion Innovation Awards section of the site – the finalists for each of the award categories were announced last week, and tickets for the Awards ceremony in March also just went on sale – more details are available on the site.

If you’re interested in keeping up with what’s going on, need some style in your life, or fancy a read of some of their features, check out the new Golden Egg site!

This is a one-year programme providing entrepreneurs with business skills, networks, facilities and supports necessary to navigate and execute the business start-up process….The MWEP provides participants with business acumen, office desk space, mentoring, networking, facilities, and supports necessary to help them in establishing and running their own businesses. Participants should have a business idea with growth and export potential.

There’s some more information on the programme brochure [pdf] (including profiles of two recent companies that came through it two years ago – eMedia and Active Mind).

Ambient Age has been one of the participants in the 2009 programme which is coming to an end in the next couple of months, and if you have an idea for a business, the MWEP is a good way of helping you to get it off the ground.

… buildings will be open for a time for special tours given by hundreds of professionals and enthusiasts, who generously volunteer their time. All events are free, and entry is on a first-come basis, with certain events requiring pre-booking. This is your festival and what you think matters.

You can preview the buildings on the site, and make bookings for any that may require it. If you’ve got a young family, there’s also a Children’s event being run in the Galway City Museum to keep them entertained!

It’s a simple & effective idea – users take a simple (eh, little) quiz every week. Get the 3 questions correct, and win a nice prize. Sign-up to the mailing list, and if you’re name comes out of the hat…win a prize.

For businesses, if you sponsor a quiz you’re getting access to the student market in a way that gets them engaged with your website.

There’s also a Littlequiz blog, packed full of money saving tips & tricks to help poor students through the college year. So, what are you waiting for? Go. Now. Win things.

TwitEye is an outstanding app that can help you find ideas for new applications, services, software and plugins based on tweets looking for something to fill a need.

The UI scrolls with tweets from users. It would be great to have a pause feature! You also can find a selection of ideas plucked from the stream in the Ideas Blog.

The pause feature is certainly something I’ll be looking into adding.

You can see the TwitEye listing, and their full directory of twitter applications, over on the Twitdom site.

From looking at how it’s been used so far, there are return visits and people arriving through search. To make it easier to get at the good ideas, I thought an RSS feed with some of the better ones would be helpful. You can grab the feed, or look at the published ideas, on the TwitEye Ideas page. Over there you can also look at different categories of ideas, and search the daily archive to see if there’s anything of interest. Or, if you’re intersted in taking a look at the full stream, check out the TwitEye homepage.

Something I’ve heard quite a bit is how difficult people often find it to come up with ideas for new products and services, and it can be a difficult process. One of the pieces of advice often given in response is to solve a problem that exists. Well, the thinking behind TwitEye was to  make identifying these problems a little bit easier. It’s not going to solve the problem for you, but it might spark an idea for you to run with and develop something new and useful (and I’d love to hear about it if you do!).

TwitEye is built based on the Twitter API; it uses the services that Twitter provides (very kindly) to search for problems people are having, or requests for software & services they asking others about. As I’m told almost daily, figuring out the market is always critical – and if you see something float by on TwitEye, at least you know you have a market of one!

I was watching the stream as I was developing it, and often there are existing solutions to the questions being asked. What you need to figure out is how you can solve the problem more efficiently, more cost effectively, or with more added value than anyone else.

Happy hunting (and, as it’s new, any feedback would be great). Now, go see it in action.

The Town of Fiction is a great read – there are lots of different writing styles – and you’re guaranteed to be entertained, and have a laugh. The award for Best Start to an Excerpt has to be split between Dara O Foglu, who’s excerpt starts with the attention grabbing “I watch porn all the time.  I didn’t tell Sheryl that though“; and Patricia Byrne’s “Murder can be daunting if, like me, you’ve no experience. The Internet is a great help nowadays…“, both of which I’m sure now have you curious, and will do no doubt bring in some odd things from the search engines.

To go with their new book, the group have a new website (I should probably add the disclaimer here, Ambient Age did the site) where you can read some excerpts taken from Town of Fiction. It also has a Reading Room to help get some of the Collective’s other writings out into the world.

I’ve known a couple of those involved for a long time, so, if you’re interested in a good read, you can buy the book online.

The Town of Fiction launch is in Massimo, Galway on April 24th – if you’re around, you should drop in. The Galway Independent also have a piece on them this week too.

…12-month part-time programme provides mentoring support over a series of business modules to help and encourage high potential entrepreneurs with an innovative business idea.

Following on from being accepted into the Innovation in Business Center at GMIT (Galway), this is another big step in developing the company.

If you are interested in finding a start-up programme in your area, Startup Ireland has a list of those run in the different Incubation Centres around the country.

Related articles (by Zemanta)

• New Start-up Programme Announced for West and Midlands (web2ireland.org)
• Irish Startup Programmes (web2ireland.org)