Ireland Stirs Homegrown Flavor Into Tech Scene

But Ireland last month became the first debt-ridden European country to exit an international rescue package, and now, through a combination of both longstanding and new grants and tax breaks, government officials are pushing to invigorate smaller, homegrown Irish companies. The hope is that a more robust tech sector can cement the country’s economic recovery.

It won’t be easy.

Ireland’s start-up scene is still relatively small compared with other European hubs like London and Stockholm. In the first nine months of 2013, the latest figures available, the country’s fledgling companies received around a combined $65 million of venture capital investment, a 28 percent drop compared with the same period a year earlier. The figure also is less than a tenth of what rivals in Britain secured in the first three quarters of 2013, according to the data provider DJX VentureSource.

And in the race to attract top engineering talent, the lifeblood of a start-up, it is hard to compete with the likes of Google and other global companies, which can offer tantalizing salaries and perks, as well as prestige.

Still, there are signs of hope. The domestic tech industry generates around 70 billion euros, or 40 percent, of Ireland’s annual exports and employs more than 100,000 people, according to government statistics.

This activity can be seen in the Grand Canal Docks, where young multilingual programmers and developers swap office gossip over expensive coffees in fashionable riverside bistros, while construction workers scramble to build high-rise office blocks to house international and local companies that have flocked to the area.

“This place has an interesting combination of young people and inventive scrappiness,” said Stefan Weitz, a senior director of search at Microsoft who has regularly visited the company’s operations in Ireland over the last 15 years.

For many of Ireland’s fledging companies, the key is to look for growth beyond their home market, which has a population smaller than that of Massachusetts. To succeed, many rely on government grants and tax breaks, like a 25 percent tax credit on research and development conducted in the country. The support is available to big and small tech companies alike.

The tactic, which also has been successfully used by Israel to help its domestic tech industry, allows companies to hire more engineers and developers as they can write off some of the cost against their corporate taxes.

To maximize the benefits, many Irish tech companies retain their development centers in the country, but move senior managers overseas, often to the United States, to be closer to their clients and investors.

For example, Movidius, an Irish semiconductor firm that has raised almost $50 million in venture funds, has a 12-person team in Dublin although its chief executive is in California. Datahug, an online business networking start-up, also has a sales office in New York, though it expects to keep its engineers and developers in Ireland.

“It’s cheaper here, but we need to be close to our customers,” said Ray Smith, 33, a co-founder of Datahug, who spends half of his time in the United States. “To succeed, you have to be in America.”

One aspect of Silicon Valley culture can certainly be found here: the struggle to hire and retain top talent.

Local entrepreneurs often complain that it remains difficult to hire well-qualified Irish engineers and developers, despite the country’s youth unemployment rate of almost 30 percent.

“There’s not enough local talent,” said Petter Made, a Swedish co-founder of the payments start-up SumUp, who oversees a 35-person team in Dublin that includes few Irish developers.

Bits Blog: Homegrown Efforts to Recruit Women in Silicon Valley

Peter DaSilva for The New York Time Margit Wennmachers, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, says the wording of job descriptions can discourage women from applying.

Silicon Valley is not exactly known for its diversity. So when Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm, wanted to make sure its job postings were reaching the most diverse audience possible, its partners did what most people in Silicon Valley do when they spot a problem. They turned to software.

They used programs that analyze the language in job descriptions to catch phrases that might turn off certain types of applicants. Looking for a candidate who is “off the charts”? Chances are, not that many women will apply.

“That’s just not how women talk,” said Margit Wennmachers, a partner at the firm. “They say, ‘Must be highly competent.’ ”

It is an example of many homegrown efforts across the Valley to change the face of the tech industry. There have always been big organizations hosting conferences and networking events for women. But newer efforts are springing up from inside companies.

There are programs to teach girls to code, like Girls Who Code, for which companies like Twitter and Google lend office space and teachers. CodeChix, started by engineers at companies like VMware, hosts coding workshops that promise to be “non-alpha.”

The Club is an application-only group trying to provide an alternative to golf courses and men’s membership clubs by coaching women leaders in Silicon Valley. It was founded by Annie Rogaski, a partner at Kilpatrick Townsend, a Valley law firm.

Rachel Sklar, who started a group called Change the Ratio, is introducing an organization called The List where members who pay have access to other women for advice, financing and conference speaking gigs.

“It’s to achieve the function of the classic old boys’ club, which funnels very easy advice and access and opportunity,” Ms. Sklar said.

At Andreessen Horowitz, the firm asks real people, not just software, to review all job descriptions, too — so in addition to the hiring manager, people who are women, African American and from other minority groups in Silicon Valley have input.

The firm also has a partner in charge of diversity who helps acquire a broad set of candidates for the firm’s talent agency, which its 200 portfolio companies tap for engineering and leadership roles. Despite those efforts, all of the firm’s investing partners are men.

“There’s a huge talent war going on, so we are doing a lot of things to try to surface all kinds of diverse talent and bubble that up to our portfolio companies,” Ms. Wennmachers said.

“What I’d like to see is Marla Zuckerberg and Mary Jobs and Joann Bezos.”

Apple Maps Errors Send Japanese to Homegrown App

TOKYO — When Hikarie, Tokyo’s new must-visit shopping destination, opened in April, it was already old news on Mapion’s map application. An elite team at the company, which is based here, had marked the glass tower a year earlier, keeping the service a step ahead in this fast-changing city.

Mapion is one of Japan’s homegrown companies that is benefiting from Apple’s maps debacle, which has left local owners of the new iPhone 5 flummoxed over erroneous place names, long-outdated landmarks and train stations that appear to hover in the middle of the sea.

Those errors have prompted legions of users to flock to other map services, including Mapion, which has seized the day by promoting a map app it says is among the most obsessively checked and updated in Japan.

Downloads of its Mapion iPhone app, introduced in June, have jumped threefold since Apple released an update to its mobile software last week that replaced Google’s maps with its own, said Yasunori Yamagishi, who runs Mapion’s development team.

“Apple Maps has definitely been a tail wind for us,” Mr. Yamagishi said. “It goes to show how much time and effort it takes to build a map for somewhere like Japan.”

Apple’s decision to switch to its own, less-polished maps does not appear to have hurt sales of its latest iPhone, which went on sale Friday in Japan to long lines and much fanfare. But it has demonstrated, on a global scale, how Apple, a seemingly infallible company, is still prone to embarrassing missteps.

Apple’s map errors have been particularly embarrassing in hard-to-navigate Japan, where maps have become an essential smartphone feature. In Japan, most streets do not have names, and house numbers are often assigned by order of registration, not location. Before GPS and smartphones, the Japanese often went around city blocks two or three times, puzzling over well-worn maps looking for an address.

Moreover, cities like Tokyo are changing fast: its 80,000 restaurants, for example, open and close at a rapid rate amid cutthroat competition. Navitime, another map app that has benefited from Apple’s map problems, updates its data every eight hours, and replaces a third of its seven million data points every year.

Against this challenging backdrop, Apple’s maps have been a disappointment from the start. In central Tokyo, they show a busy Shinjuku subway station in the middle of serene Shinjuku Gyoen park, one of many errors diligently cataloged by Japanese bloggers. The Hinode monorail stop hovers above the waters of Tokyo Bay, which is erroneously labeled “the North Pacific.”

Hikarie, the new shopping tower, is nowhere to be found, while a museum, now closed and once run by Tokyo Electric, the operator of the ravaged nuclear power plant at Fukushima, is marked as a major landmark nearby.

Apple has said that its map service was a work in progress and would improve as more people used it.

The biggest problem with Apple’s map, Mapion’s Mr. Yamagishi said, is that much of its data appears to be drawn from OpenStreetMap Japan, a Wikipedia-like service that contains a lot of incorrect and outdated information.

Moreover, Japan uses a system of longitude and latitude that differs slightly from the global standard, and Apple may have mixed up data sources that use the two systems, Mr. Yamagishi said.

At certain points, the difference between the Japanese and international coordinate systems can come to as much as 450 meters (1,476 feet), according to Japan’s Land Ministry.

“It looks like they haven’t merged their various data sources very well. That’s a painstaking process that will take a lot of time and effort,” Mr. Yamagishi said.

Mapion has been merging data constantly since 1997, he said, and has a team of engineers who scour sources for information that might require map updates. The team got the word in November 2011 that Hikarie would open the following year, and quickly updated its data with the planned shopping tower.

Those efforts have paid off: Mapion gets a combined 86 million page views of its online map service a month from PCs and smartphones.