Ronan O’Boyle

In 1992 I started a taught masters degree in computing & design at Magee Campus (University of Ulster) in Derry. This was the first year of this programme and the university had invested heavily in a full suite of NeXT workstations. Technically years ahead of the competition, these terminals enabled us to experience multimedia for the first time – e.g. video running on a computer screen. It was while at Magee that we were introduced to the internet with a demonstration of how to search other university libraries online.

Once finished, I intended to move to the University of Limerick (UL) to begin a PhD. My supervisor at Magee arranged meetings in UL which led to a research position with Dr Steven Plagemann, the Ireland-based technical director for the EU-funded BRAIN project. Steve had previously worked at Broadcom Eireann Research in Dublin and at NASA, designing the navigation system for the Voyager mission around Uranus and Neptune. A physicist from California, his PhD supervisor at the University of Cambridge was Dr Stephen Hawking. Steve was an amazing man and an inspiration. Regrettably he passed away from cancer in 1998. He was only 56.

The European Commission regarded BRAIN as a flagship project because it educated technologists from all over the EU on the results of the RACE programme The project showcased communications technologies, especially IP video, and broadcast the proceedings of its annual summer school over a 2 Mbit/s ATM network – at that time the European broadband backbone!

IEunet and regional development body Shannon Development established Shannon Internet Services as a regional internet service provider and held a launch event in October 1994 in Castletroy Park Hotel. While working on BRAIN, I was based nearby in UL’s Foundation Building, where I had met John McHugh, who was completing a masters in marketing. We decided to attend the Shannon Internet Services event.

Cormac Callanan from IEunet gave an internet demonstration, pushing the benefits of email. However it was his references to the web which registered with us.

After the event John and I agreed that we could do something together with the internet and incorporated W3 Services in December 1994. The PhD was shelved indefinitely. We were primarily focused on creating websites, although we did also offer consultancy. John took charge of the company’s finances, while I focused on prospecting, although in those early days we largely did whatever was needed together including government grant applications.

We wanted experienced people on the board, so Dr Steve Plagemann and Charles Stanley-Smith (CEO for the software re-engineering company Piercom) became non-executive directors. Barra Ó Cinnéide, a professor at the UL business school, gave us a desk in the Foundation Building at UL. I also got to know Liam Relihan, who had set up a web server for UL back in 1993.

We learned HTML from other website source files, replicating their key characteristics for our clients. I liked sites which contained images and worked on trying to incorporate images which possessed the minimum number of bytes without losing quality!

We attended the third International World Wide Web Conference in Darmstadt in April 1995. I believe it was here we realised the true potential of this new technology and how it would revolutionise every aspect of business and life.

Meanwhile I became the Irish manager for BRAIN. For the 1995 summer school I had to negotiate with Telecom Eireann for the first time use of the fibre cable between Dublin and Limerick.

My work with BRAIN introduced me to Patricia Byrne, CEO of the National Technology Park (NTP) in Plassey, Limerick. W3 Services developed its first website. We estimated that the NTP was the first business park in Europe with a website.

We soon moved into the NTP Innovation Centre and worked for high profile clients, including Dromoland Castle, Adare Manor and Ashford Castle. Other clients included the Belltable Arts Centre and Castletroy Park Hotel. Back then, however, there was very little importance placed upon a website.

In Q3 1995 we came up with the idea for an online directory of Irish businesses. The result was Commerce Ireland and we registered commerce.ie as a domain name. We required content for the database, so I approached John King at Shannon Development to establish interest in a regional online business database.

Commerce Ireland subsequently went online in November 1995 with listings for about 900 businesses from the Shannon Development database. It was Ireland’s first online company database and was extremely innovative. It enabled ‘Google-style’ searches where visitors used keywords to search through the database for products or services. Crucially Commerce Ireland also enabled individual businesses to log in and update their database entries.

W3 Services was not only based in the National Technological Park in Limerick. It also created a web presence for the organisation that managed the estate. This was believed to be the first business park in Europe with a website.
(Source: Shannon Development booklet published in 1996)

Our partnership with Shannon Development enabled us to secure Michael Lowry, minister for transport, energy and communications, to officially launch Commerce Ireland on November 22 1995. This took place in the Castletroy Park Hotel. John Riordan, the Irish-born, Netherlands-based CEO of internet service provider Chello, also attended. He approached us after the event with an offer to buy W3 Services. Although it was not the right time to consider such an offer I kept in touch with John.

Through our Shannon Development partnership, we added Forbairt‘s company database to Commerce Ireland in Q2 1996. The database consequently expanded to over 14,000 companies.

Listings on Commerce Ireland were free for the companies. Back then our model was to offer web services to companies listed in the Commerce Ireland database. We found some clients but interest in websites was limited.

1996 was a year of door knocking for W3 Services. We took exhibition spaces at every possible event and gave evening talk after evening talk. In many ways we were doing missionary work. I recall people saying, ‘Why would I want to use email when I have a fax machine?’ We were probably about three years too early.

Joe Duffy, who had previously owned a floristry business in Dublin, joined the company in 1996 to help sell our services. Joe brought in hard-nosed selling experience. There were often differences in opinion which were not easily resolved. In hindsight, this was primarily due to unclear leadership within W3 Services.

Towards the end of 1996 I received an offer of employment from Multimedia Technologies Ireland, the UL arm of a national programme in advanced technology, specialising in the development of multimedia information kiosks. The company was about to rebrand itself as Into White Ltd and to relocate to the International Business Centre at UL.

After much reflection, I decided it best to sell most of my shares to John McHugh and Joe Duffy and move on. W3 Services was a valuable learning experience, lessons I used in subsequent ventures.

In January 1997 I joined Into White as its client manager. Under a new managing director, Dermot McQuillan, the company shifted its focus to web-based projects and we subsequently secured high profile work with such clients as London design agency Imagination and Murphys Brewery. Through Imagination we worked on projects for Ford and Heineken and developed the online presence (including games) for the Bond film ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’. Chello Broadband was one of my major clients and I spent a lot of time in the Netherlands. We developed their first portal website for European customers.

Dermot was extremely creative and inspired real confidence in our high profile clients. However his disagreements with the board, which was drawn from academia and semi-state agencies, ultimately led to his departure in May 1999. I moved on to a new position in June.

Chello CEO John Riordan invited me to join ECET Labs, a start-up venture in Killarney. It developed shared work environments for clients in Europe, USA and Australia, using contracted developers from India. ECET opened an office in London and I became global channel manager with a team based there. I was a frequent passenger on red-eye flights each week.

W3 Services meanwhile, had opened a Dublin office in CityWest Digital Park, while retaining its base in Limerick. It lasted long enough to experience the collapse of the dot com business model in 2000. Dublin-based MissionMaker acquired the firm in 2002.

Last edit: November 2023

© Ronan O’Boyle 2023