We got to Paris, enjoyed the Leweb experience and met terrific people! Here's our Leweb adventure.

I began the trip to Paris by leaving from Limerick (Ireland) on Tuesday. The weather in Limerick was cold however snow was forecast for later in the day. About 20 minutes after leaving Limerick snow flakes began to fall and I thought "... isn't this nice and christmassy!". However, the snow continued to fall and it was getting heavier and all thoughts of Christmas faded away as the realisation of what heavy snow could mean. The snow was forecast but there was no sign of gritters or snowploughs causing a lane on the motorway to be closed. Very quickly the roads became very dangerous and cars started to crawl.

The roads were treacherous. At one point the car went into a bit of skid after tipping the accelerator - I contemplated leaving the car at a nearby train station and getting the next train to Dublin. The AA and news reported the snow was falling in the midlands only and that it wasn't as bad in Dublin.

Thankfully the reports were right and as I drove towards Dublin the motorway (and weather) was much better. I eventually arrived in Dublin to meet with Ian at his place. We sat down had a cup of coffee (the first of many!) and was chatting about Leweb when an email and sms simultaneously arrived from Aer Lingus saying the flight to Paris was canceled! Boooooo!

Bugger Bugger Bugger. (we may have used stronger language :) )

We had to work quick in finding an alternative way to Paris - checking out the main airline carrier but this was proving to be very disappointing - all seats booked out or no availability. Starting to get worried we tried our old friends over at ebookers.ie and they didn't disappoint! Flights to Paris secured. Phew. Time for another coffee.

The flight was great, on-time and they even gave us free wine with our free meal - thank you CityJet (it's been a while since we flew with 'regular' airlines). We got to the hotel after 12.30 so no time for exploring - straight to bed but happy to be in Paris :)

We arrived nice and early at the LeWeb. The registration queues weren't too long (I hear it got quite bad) and we headed over to the Startup competition building. We briefly met with the folks from Enterprise Ireland and then headed for the stage.. going through the curtains leading to the startup stage we caught the first glimpse of PinPoints on a giant banner.
.. brought a little tear to my eye!!

The stage looked amazing! The lights, the stage, the sound setup was of the highest quality.

We didn't have to wait too long to get things set up - the level of efficiency was amazing! Once everything was setup we took a spot of breakfast and waited for the competition to begin in earnest.

Just a quick note about the food at Leweb. It was absolutely amazing!! Free nespresso coffee all day, plenty of delicious hot & cold food all day. yum yum yum.

So now to the pitch!

The pitch went well - it's amazing how quickly 5 minutes goes by! The Q&A went well also and we felt we did a pretty good job in answering all the judges questions. The pitch was streamed live on the day and then uploaded to youtube.com.

We didn't get to take photos of the pitch but thanks to John Peavoy for sending this one on to us.

Sitting in the audience was Mike Butcher from TechCrunch. He wrote up a great article about pinpoints on TechCrunch entitled: "Yourpinpoints is like a Bit.ly for URLs which points to locations Thank you Mike!. Back at home Silicon Republic published the following article: Cauwill Technologies represents Ireland in global start-up competition. Barry from Irish Dev posted the follow article.

John Peavoy and the guys over at Web2Ireland did a video interview straight after the pitch.. (watching it back we were a little hyper after the pitch!)

We didn't win the competition :( but we had two terrific days at Leweb - meeting loads of people interested in using/buying/investing in PinPoints.
We'll have another update on some potential new partnerships in January (it's gonna be exciting times ahead for PinPoints!).

So who did win the Leweb startup competition? Well, A big congrats to Waze, paper.li and Super Marmite. Amazing people from amazing companies! It was terrific to meet you all at Leweb - stay in touch!

The Enterprise Ireland (EI) played a big roll too in the Leweb experience. A big thanks to Clare, Hugh, Karen, Ray and Brian for sending people over to us and promoting Cauwill/PinPoints. I hope EI got as much out of Leweb as we did! I hope they will be able to do it again next year.

Finally, a massive thank you to everyone for their support, votes,best wishes and help. We couldn't have done it without you. A special word of thanks to Mark Cahill who was handling all the online social aspects over the two days.