We would like to congratulate Sonru  who last Wednesday won the Bank of Ireland National Bright Ideas Challenge with a  prize of a €100,000 interest free loan and the title of the National Bright Ideas Winner. With 85 initial applications Bank of Ireland had their work cut out to whittle the competition down to the final four regional finalists.

Alexandra College has been using Sonru’s online interviewing software this year to assist Leaving Certificate students with preparation for their modern languages oral exams.

Dublin Regional Winners Rendezvu, Galway Regional winner Eventovate and Cork Regional winner ResourceKraft, all provided stiff competition to the Waterford Regional winners Sonru. Notably, all four finalists are to a large degree web based businesses, highlighting the way the digital world has changed the way Irish business is carried out.

Sonru is just another example of the entrepreneurial  opportunities that the Internet can create.  If any future budding entrepreneur would like to find out more about this competition please click here.

VirtualPiano lets you play the actual piano online with computer keyboard. Each letter on your keyboard corresponds to a key on the piano.

A new website which aims to support the oral Irish syllabus in post-primary schools has been launched.  Abair Leat will allow students to listen to native Irish speakers, record their own material in Irish, undertake self-correcting exercises and interact over the internet with native Irish speakers.

Zamzar is a very handy and entirely free (for files under 100MB) website for converting more or less any standard file format to any other:  PDF to Doc, m4a to mp3, PNG to JPG etc.  Even better, its all online so there’s no software to install – your converted file is emailed to you when its ready.

Irish software company Redwind Software has released a free iPhone app which provides the full text of the King James Bible. “King James Bible” also comes with “Bible CHallenge” (€1.59) a quiz app which contains five Old Testament and five New Testament question categories.