One of the most significant B2B events in Ireland, BizExpo is coming to CityWest on April 25.
One of the best business-to-business events will be held at The CityWest Hotel, Dublin, April 25, 2018.
BizExpo 2018 is more than a networking event; it allows business owners to connect with new and potential business customers. It is also a showcase for new and innovative business ideas from around Ireland. Businesses can meet new customers, sign deals and get inspiration from a host of useful speakers.

Over 1,000 people attended the previous event.
Barbara Gordon, the event owner and organiser, says, “Anyone who has a business should attend this event. As well as the business and networking opportunities, there is a host of great speakers including Greg Fry, who will explain how to make money from social media; Michelle Rudden who will talk about Facebook advertising; Alec Drew who will give insightful business development tips; Pat Slattery who will talk about business growth; and many more.
BizExpo 2018 is designed for SMEs and invites business owners to exhibit or attend. It costs just €195 to exhibit and is free to attend.
For full details, go to BizExpo.ie. 

From award-winning animation studios, industrial and graphic design agencies, photographers, illustrators, fashion and filmmakers, Ireland is seeing growth in the creative sector.
Despite cuts in funding and a lack of policies, Ireland exhibits a healthy environment for the creative sector. Design conference, OFFSET recently brought together the most dynamic Irish and international practitioners from these fields to discuss all things design.

Games with heart
Transforming our idea of a typical board game, Anita Murphy and Rory O’Connor of Hub Games, based in Belfast, have created games that help us tell stories and make us think about the world in new ways.
“We say our games have a heart because they offer more than entertainment,” said Anita, speaking at the conference. “We realised the power that play has to bring people together and explore narrative and creativity.”
Their game, Rory’s Story Cubes has sold over five million sets in 50 countries.
Touch Press, an Irish company that makes games and apps featuring some of the world’s best-loved children’s characters, such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Elmo, and Batman, also stressed the importance of making gaming a more meaningful experience.
“If you can pare back a story and create opportunities for any player or user of whatever age to empathise and influence things in their way, it’s much more powerful,” said Emmett O’Neill from Touch Press. “There are so many negative aspects of games apps. We are trying to make things that are more meaningful, especially for kids. We want to slow things down a bit and educate.”
“One of the most marginalised groups in our society today are young people.”
Designing liveable cities
Playing was an important theme at the conference with A Playful City, Ireland’s first not-for-profit focused on co-creating a more playful, engaging and inclusive city, speaking on the importance of designing with and for the community.
“One of the

From a humble start, two brothers built a farm, food and hotel business based on quality and provenance. 
Redmond Farm, situated in Craanford, North Wexford is a compelling farm-to-fork story. A business success created by two brothers, Paddy and Tommy Redmond, who left school in the 80s to train and work within farmyard and residential construction. Starting with a small acreage, Redmond Farm has grown over the years, into an award-winning, 300-acre beef and vegetable farming enterprise. And then there is the matter of the two four-star hotels.
The farm employs a closed-loop, feed-supply chain, using a combination of home-produced forage and locally-sourced grain. The farm specialises in providing, dry-aged Angus beef, along with seasonal daily-fresh produce. All of this produce is destined for the family’s two bustling hotels, the Ashdown and Amber Springs. Paddy and Tommy Redmond, who employ over 300 people in the North Wexford area. Here they talk about their business and their focus on quality at all cost.
“When we left school, we went straight into the construction business, building farmyard walls.”

Farmland and hotels
At home, we kept cattle and pigs, and our Mother always had some turkeys for the Christmas market, says Paddy Redmond.
When we left school, we went straight into the construction business, building farmyard walls, before moving onto one-off housing and subsequently developing large-scale residential sites. During that period, we bought our first piece of neighbouring farmland and as the years went by – we kept adding to this.
Our first foray into the residential market was when we purchased a site in Gorey and built 150 houses on it. Then In 2001, we noticed that Gorey lacked a four-star hotel, so we decided to build the Ashdown Hotel, on the remainder of the site. We also bought a 40-acre site on the Courtown road and decided to

From a world champion hurdler to championing wellbeing, Derval O’Rourke is delivering real solutions to women to achieve greater health and happiness.
Derval was very savvy in her career trajectory. While competing as an athlete internationally and pushing herself to the limit, she also completed an MA in Business Management, something which allowed her to transition into business upon winding down her sporting career. She now promotes health and wellbeing through her bestselling cookbooks and most recently the online platform that promises to transform women’s lives in the areas of food, fitness and mindset.
“Upskill and identify gaps in your skill set and where you need to plug into other people.”
Make time count
“The platform is aimed at women between 30 and 50 years old,” explains Derval. “Women of this age group don’t tend to prioritise their health and wellness because they have jobs or kids. Women who reach out to me don’t know where to start regarding fitness. There is a whole market that doesn’t want to put up before and after pictures of them in their underwear. I want a platform for them that is accessible, relatable to their lives and is excellent value.”
Derval got the idea for her business when her friends began asking her to coach them to lose weight, but it turned out to be more about prioritising themselves and their time than it was about fitness.
“Women need to carve out just 30 or 40 minutes three times a week for themselves,” advises Derval. “It isn’t a lot of time, but it makes a massive difference to wellness. I want people to upskill for themselves instead of trying a diet or workout routine for 12 weeks to get into a bikini. It’s about lifelong wellness.”
“Go after the prize and don’t be afraid to say you want to earn

IDI President Kim Mackenzie talks about the current gender imbalance in the design industry and why design matters. Interview by Lesley Tully.
The design industry prides itself on embracing uncertainty, challenging orthodoxies and using creativity to carve out a better world and yet recent research conducted by the Institute of Designers in Ireland (IDI) surfaces an alarming imbalance in gender diversity with a 25% female to 75% male divide across the Irish design industry.
IDI President Kim Mackenzie-Doyle talks about the purpose behind this movement and how redressing this balance can positively impact society, the economy and the education system.
“I was advised against joining the tech drawing class by teachers as I would have been a distraction being the only girl.”
Tell us a bit about your background and journey to become a designer?
From a young age, you could say that I was creative, the first spark of interest in product design happened when I was six. I took apart the family remote control (one of the first released, it put me out of a job being the youngest of the family, I got to change the channels), I did not trust that this object could control the TV without wires, so I had to find out more – reverse engineering at its finest.
In school I was advised against joining the tech drawing class by teachers as I would have been a distraction being the only girl, so was directed into art. I loved art and over 25 years later my school drawings are still on the wall in the school where I studied. At leaving cert stage, discussing my future with my parents my father stated ‘there is no money in design’ and recommended I take up a career in the sciences. Respecting his advice I started off my college journey studying

Áine McCleary is the newly appointed director of distribution channels at Bank of Ireland and the incoming President of the Institute of Banking. Here she discusses the realities and myths of ‘balancing it all’, and why enabling customers, colleagues and communities to thrive is the priority in her workplace.
I’ll start with a bit about myself. I am from Dublin; married to Alan, we have four children aged between six and thirteen. In my spare time, I enjoy family time, walking, travelling and GAA.
Following on from my Bachelor of Commerce in UCD I undertook an MBS in International Business through the Michael Smurfit Business School. Since joining Bank of Ireland, I have completed the QFA diploma, and I have obtained the Certified Bank Director designation through the Institute of Banking.
My career to date has been across a variety of roles. I started in Ulster Bank as a foreign exchange dealer before moving to Bank of Ireland Global Markets in 2000. Over the following twelve years, I led sales and service teams engaging with retail, corporate and institutional customers.
After my last maternity leave in 2012, I decided it was time for a change, and I moved to the retail banking division of Bank of Ireland. Since then I have held a number of roles including strategy and planning, head of mortgages and director of direct channels. Earlier this year, I was delighted to be appointed the director of distribution channels.
As you can see, I have moved role many times, and my ethos is to take all opportunities.
“Women can tend to be quite hard on themselves and can suffer self-doubt.”
The stats show that Irish women are more likely to hold a third level qualification than men, yet women fall below the EU average for employment. Why do you think that is?
I believe there

A Playful City’s aim is to put people first and nurture communities, thus making Dublin a better place to live, work and grow a business. 
Ireland scores above the European average for rates of entrepreneurship and the ecosystem is considered healthy, but startup culture brings its own unique set of challenges and solutions. Here, two female entrepreneurs talk about social enterprise, the realities of female entrepreneurship in Ireland and how they have dealt with the rapid growth of their business.
“It has been difficult to define ourselves in terms of a business structure,” says Neasa Ní Bhriain, one of four co-founders of A Playful City, a social enterprise intent on making Dublin the most playful city in the world. “We want to continue growing and become more sustainable, but because we are not a charity, it can be difficult to get traditional sponsorship and grants.”
“With over a million users on Facebook and with an international conference under their belt, all in just over a year, it’s fair to say things have changed a lot for the founders.”
To combat this, A Playful City has restructured its organisation to offer services like A Playful Street, an initiative where communities partially close down their street for a day so all ages and abilities can come out to play together.
“Rather than constantly trying to get funding to put these on, we provide A Playful Street as a service for companies looking to meaningfully connect and engage with their local communities or for councils wanting to introduce more play and bring people in communities together,” continues Neasa.
A Playful City has further adapted by offering consultations on play with the community using their unique, mobile, pop up consultation device. The Pow Wow, designed with Sean Harrington Architects, gathers insights from the community which are then analysed and used

This is the story of an Irish entrepreneur on a mission to save the planet’s bees.
Ireland has long valued the hive and the honey bee – as evidenced in the Bechbretha or ‘Bee Judgements’ texts, recorded under Brehon law, dating back to circa the 6th Century. Today, an Irish startup seeks to write a new page in beekeeping history.
ApisProtect, a business co-founded by Fiona Edwards Murphy is focused on the growing global problem of the stressed honey bee population. Here, Murphy talks about her idea and her journey of discovery into the secret lives of bees.

Light bulb moment
From my studies, I had gained some insight into the world of beekeeping. Annual hive losses run up to a startling 50%, for some of the 81 million hives. Around that time, I had won an international IEEE/IBM award and was invited to speak on Morning Ireland about the award and the sensor possibilities that could benefit beekeeping. Post interview, I was inundated with phone calls from beekeepers, at home and abroad, saying, ‘I would love to have these sensors in my beehive’.
“Worldwide there are 91 million beehives and roughly 45 million beekeepers.”
The sting in the tail
There is a tremendous amount of beekeeping research taking place all over the world; unfortunately, it’s failing to translate into solutions to save the bees.
I set out to design a technological solution with a commercial application for beekeepers. Since then, we have developed a sophisticated platform with temperature, humidity, (Co2) and accelerometer sensors within it. The information produced is collected, and machine learning is then used to interpret the data.
“Your hives are too hot or too cold.”
What are beekeepers’ main concerns?
Beekeepers are not concerned about the data or the technology but are interested in solving their beehive problems. Such as, ‘Are my bees healthy – am I

Letterkenny Chamber created the ShopLK initiative in 2004 to keep people shopping in the town. It has been so successful, other towns should take note. 
ShopLK, ‘Love Shopping Letterkenny’, an initiative to promote local shopping by using gift cards brought €1.5m in sales into the town in just three months. 
“Christmas 2017 sales increased by 16% with over 9,300 cards sold between November and January which led to €1,553,574 going into the local economy.”
ShopLK gift cards are now accepted in over 190 outlets across Letterkenny with more to follow. 

Letterkenny as a retail destination
The ShopLK idea came about to promote Letterkenny as a retail destination, rather than just the commercial hub of the county. The initiative has been able to grow thanks to financial support from Donegal County Council.
Letterkenny Chamber says it makes no money from the sale or redemption of gift cards so every cent brought in through ShopLK is invested back into the promotion of the service. 
“This is by far the most successful town scheme in the country and we are also outstripping shopping centres with similar gift cards,” says Leonard Watson, president of the Letterkenny Chamber. “We are always thankful all the outlets that support us. We know from our customers that they love the variety. The can get grocery shopping, petrol for the family car or spend the money on a treat, the choice is endless.”
“One-third of customers using the card almost always spend more than the value of the card itself.”
“The cards can only be spent in Letterkenny and we know that at least one-third of customers using the card almost always spend more than the value of the card itself. This is a huge amount of money to be circulating in Letterkenny. It not only puts money directly into the hands of local businesses but in turn plays

This AgTech firm aims to save farmers money and time. 

AgVis, based in Oranmore, Co. Galway is developing and commercialising a smart connected cattle monitoring solution, for total herd insights, to bring value to the farm on a 24/7 basis. It’s a significant advance in precision livestock monitoring, using diagnostic sensors in an IoT device, allied with embedded artificial intelligence. AgVis founder and engineer, Denis Healy provides some background behind this exciting Agtech startup.
Innovation experience
I have over 15 years of innovation and problem-solving experience with my existing company OSTC. Most of our work is within the medical devices sector, working with some of the leading global brands. We offer a full-service engineering approach with product design, 3D printing, production, quality control equipment and services.
“A typical Irish dairy farm with 100 cows, is incurring associated opportunity losses, in the region of €30,000 per year.”
Why transition from Medtech to Agtech?
As a team we have powerful, hands-on experience and background in livestock farming – as well as real understanding and expertise of the myriad of technologies available today. We also believe that our track-record and domain knowledge will allow us to overcome any challenges that we may face along the way.
What problem are you solving on the farm?
Our focus is to assist livestock farmers within the calf, beef and dairy sub-sectors. The problem to be solved is opportunity loss, which is currently being absorbed by all farms today. In an Irish context, a typical Irish dairy farm with 100 cows, is incurring associated opportunity losses, in the region of €30,000 per year. The improvements we offer enhance animal welfare, food quality, sector sustainability, operational efficiency and profitability for all stakeholders, within the farm to fork value-chain.
The principal behind AgVis is the provision of a miniature multifunctional sensor in one piece, which is unique in