So they’re all trying to gain our trust again it seems these politicians and they’re sorry indeed about the expenses stuff and all that bad stuff they were caught doing. We should forgive them and let them fix up the country they say. We owe it to ourselves.

Now it’s unfair to tag them all with the same brush but the adject tedium of the Facebook posts and Twitter stream with the electioneering is overwhelming to the point where they are now best referred to as anti-social networks. But like the proverbial wobbly tooth I haven’t got the willpower to unfriend them all, on some horribly corrupt level I must be enjoying it.

Saying that it’s not all bad. In the interests of disclosure yes we built her website and yes my fiance works for her but it’s still refreshing to see Anna Lo pledging her help to SME ands, wait for it, Start Ups on her election literature. Check it out for yourself…

So we had to wait nearly a month before shouting from the rooftops but we thought we’d let the Belfast Telegraph and the very kind @lyramckee have the exclusive. Here’s the article about our investment in Silicon Valley and a few wee photos for fun…

Ulster firm Air Pos attracts Silicon Valley investment

Wednesday, 14 April 2010

A Belfast-based entrepreneur is flying high after his company received its first investment from a prominent Silicon Valley investor.

Marty Neill, Managing Director of point-of-sale software company Air Pos, was in San Francisco to attend the Irish Leadership Technology Group (ITLG) Silicon Valley awards when David Kirk, the former Vice President of AOL, Inc and ex-Senior Vice President of Cisco Systems, made the surprise gesture.

“It was St Patrick’s Day and we were having a drink in an Irish bar in San Fran, The Chieftain, when he called me outside to hand me the checque”, he laughed.

Hailed as the “evolution of PoS software”, AirPOS allows retailers to connect their in-store sales with online sales. According to its website, www.airpos .co.uk, “AirPOS allows companies of all sizes to sell from a single stock across unlimited points of sale. It solves the age old problem of till and web integration and will help lead to greater customer satisfaction, reduction in human error, better detection of fraud and theft, easy access to multi channel sales and much more AirPOS also allows sales to be performed anywhere that an internet connection is available, which is essentially everywhere in today’s mobile connected world.”

Kieran Graham, David Kirk and Marty Neill at the Apple Store, San Francisco

“AirPOS is a different approach to PoS. PoS hasn’t progressed in about 15 years. We created the problem we’re trying to solve when through our other web company, No More Art, we created a system for a client which didn’t hook up their in-store stock and sales with their online stock and sales. This created huge problems for them, but in those problems we spotted an opportunity. Air POS is PoS evolved to the new web.”

The company is currently creating a stir in the US after attending the SXSW interactive conference in Austin, Texas, where it attracted interest from corporate giants such as PayPal.

“Staff from their Manchester office are coming to Belfast to meet with us as they’re really interested in seeing the software”, says Marty, “That was a huge lead for us. The US as a market is perfect for us; it’s basically a cashless society. I don’t think I saw one person pay with cash the whole time I was there, everyone pays by card, and that’s perfect for AirPOS.”

David Kirk and Kieran Graham at Stanford University

And Marty is calling on other Irish companies to make the trip to the US and consider it as a potential market.

“Invest NI offer trade missions to the likes of SXSW every year. The best thing about the US is that everyone is interested in what you’re doing; the American mentality is real. Out of 400 stands at the SXSW tradeshow event, we spoke to 399, including companies like Google and PayPal.”

But success in the US isn’t the only thing the Shankill Road man has to smile about.

“My fiancée and I have decided to go to San Francisco and get married in September”, he said. “We’re going to stand outside the Chieftain on the same spot David gave AirPOS its’ first investment and have a champagne toast to celebrate.”

The Chieftain Irish Bar, San Francisco

Fake? Not really. Remembered through a haze of Bushmills more like. Back home friends of ours have a name for the second day of drinking, the ill-advised watching the game down at the pub after a heavy stag night, wedding or birthday. They call if Day 2, and it should send shivers down the hardiest of spines. And it appears that Day 2 has an international faction.

If you haven’t been you should go immediately. There’s a reason why all of the songs about San Francisco are about how leaving it breaks your heart. It’s entirely true. Granted it’s got an extraordinary homelessness problem that beggars belief, also there’s parts of the neighbourhood that you’d be advised not to venture into but despite these things it has an atmosphere that is unlike anything we’d ever experienced. There’s a buzz in the air, a belief in something, what? A way of life? An attitude? It’s hard to put your finger on it but it’s there in the electric between people. It’s there when you walk down a half empty street.

Our first St Patrick’s Day (16th of March) was spent much like the actual St Patrick’s Day, in an Irish pub, drinking Irish drinks and generally living up to every single Irish cliche imaginable (minus the fighting) and it was a blast. We even got up and played some songs in the end, which confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt that we’d found our way through the road of excess and took a wrong turn at the palace of wisdom too.