GIRT - 10 YEARS DOWN THE ROAD!

Well, August came and went and I completely forgot about our 10th anniversary. Little did I realise that we made it into the 4% club!

According to INC 96% of business start ups are gone in the first 10 years. Well, by hook or by crook GIRT is still here. Maybe we should jumble up the letters a bit and rename ourselves to GRIT?

From our humble origins in my front room working round the clock with Francis Phan (now of Yahoo fame) and Ken Roy (IC-1) in the US, Eileen Sweeney (now an Aerogen Director) in Galway to our long overstayed tenure in the IIBC somehow we've managed to go from radio to money!

Being one of Irelands first app development companies we had an opportunity to grab some headlines with our first offering Grab Radio. This app would allow people to grab tunes from the radio as they heard them. Without getting too technical, it used a songs' digital signature to identify it as opposed to the Shazam solution that has to listen to the tune and process the information on the web. Within 4 months of launch Grab Radio was the top grossing app in iTunes and the number 1 music app ahead of Shazam.

Following some great PR from Eileen Sweeney we had a request from Screentime Shinawill to appear on RTE's Dragons Den. I have to confess my memories of appearing on RTE's Dragon Den are pretty mixed. From borrowing my friend Jay Ryans' red transit van to hauling a giant sized iPhone up to Dublin in a blizzard and then finally up the snowy steps of the Taylors Three Rock pub in Rathfarnham this was a real exercise in resourcefulness and tenacity. Thank God for friends! I'll never forget how I had to manoeuvre the giant phone around Gavin Duffys' Bentley to get in the front door then wait almost the whole day before I was 'seen'. After seeing one disenchanted entrepreneur after the other thump down the long stairs post having their dreams squashed like little flies , my hopes were not high. At 5.45pm after numerous cups of coffee and bucket loads of trepidation I was told by one of the production team that the valuations were too high and the sums being sought were 'out of line' with the dragons expectations. On the the spur of the moment I revised my pitch and started up the stairs. An hour and a half later, after intense gruelling under the RTE lights I was literally shaking in disbelief . Incredibly I had been offered investment by not one, but two of the dragons! Shocked? ..no I was stunned particularly by the fact that our main target Gavin 'Bentley' Duffy, consultant to Vodafone, was not one of them.

After Dragons Den, following a spell of being all things to all men and women doing apps for a variety of different markets, (including doing a Sexual Health Guide for Aids West), we decided to focus on a niche. Money. Before long we had established a Centre of Excellence for mobile payments and produced our first banking app. Unfortunately the company we were dealing with didn't have a happy end so we had to look elsewhere. The year was 2013 and just a year later we had the good fortune to partner with another top quality Galway IT company selling our on-line and mobile banking apps into Credit Unions in Ireland and the UK.

To date there are 26 credit unions using our technology with over 200,000 users being able to access their accounts on everything from their laptops to their smartphones from any part of the planet.

The story does not stop there as 4 years ago the Company began to see the potential in Distributed Ledger Technology (or Blockchain). Shortly after it developed a unique hybrid system for banking and payments which uses a blockchain based backend, bolstered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The system means that it is incredibly reliable, secure and fast. For payments it also cuts out up to 14 middle men that can be involved in any one transaction. This is particularly useful for those generally costly and slow international payments.

One of our missions is to create platforms for the fairer distribution of wealth in the world so it really excites me when I see the potential platforms we've created . The technology means that some of the poorest people on the planet can receive funds for a fraction of the costs associated with some of the 'traditional' providers. Our plan is to make these payments channels available to Credit Unions and community based financial organisations all over the globe, enabling transcontinental payments in less than 5 seconds for fractions of a cent.

The team are incredibly proud of the enabling technology it has developed over the years and is super excited about the next phase in the GIRTs' development on Payment Optimisation using AI and software that can used on a range of different devices.

Another area we are passionate about is doing what we can to help save our precious planet. It is so heartwarming to see teenagers truly outraged by what they are inheriting. The reality: our generation have not done a good job.

The good thing is that this pain will drive change. One of our roles is in providing software that enables optimisation of resources, driven by a financial infrastructure that supports ethical activities leading to improved levels of financial inclusion. Why shouldn't an entrepreneurial child in Angola be able to charge users for charging their phones off their solar panel?

Particularly encouraging is how some of the new 'computers on wheels', or upstart automotive companies, such as Lightyear are changing the game. Incredibly Lex Hoefsloot and the team in Eindhoven have won the Bridgestone Solar Challenge in Australia no less than three times and are now producing a solar power production vehicle. Ingeniously, they're engineering the car so that you get enough power from the solar cells to power your average commute.

Key to the success of any electric vehicle is the quality of the software so it is our intention to not only integrate our payments engine into these types of sustainable future proofed vehicles for tolls vehicle sharing, etc but also to use the expertise we've developed in security, penetration testing mission critical finance applications, to ensure they are well protected against attacks and vehicle hijacking.

We also plan to use Blockchain to create a new way of identifying electricity generated using renewable sources such as wind and solar. This will allow individuals to consume responsibly and allow producers to generate income for themselves by selling or trading their excess electricity using the built in payment mechanism.

This means that anyone with access to a solar panel, wind turbine or other renewable energy source will be able to generate an income for themselves.

Okay, so after either losing the majority of you or giving away the crown jewels I'll finish up.

In summary, the ups and inevitable downs over the past 10 years have been interesting, but never boring, tough in parts but strangely rewarding.

Thank you for reading this and a big up to all the customers and the team that made this happen.

Customers and Partners

All those who bought the Grab Radio app (many thanks for kicking us off!), Aerogen, 4FM, 98 FM, East Coast Radio, Aids West, CUPlus, Microsoft, Nokia, Camden Transport Unit, Volvo Ocean Race, Caremark, CGA, Don't be Stuck for Words, Irish Yapping, Rossmore Engineering, Wellington, Wayra, Backload, BGFS, Galway Safe - Western Region Drugs and Alcohol Task Force, My Club Finances, Halo, Gobus, E-CFS, Intuity, Dexapoint, Budding, Growth Financial, ADL group, FiveIslands.

The Team

Francis Phan, Ken Roy, Eileen Sweeney, Jason O'Neill, Mary Longworth, Frank Sweeney, Phil Kelly, Roseanne Carroll, Toni Daly, Esteban Moreno, Thomas Lynch, Thomas Chalan, Catherine Guaghan Smith, Dee Walsh, Juan, Alex Bean, Garath Davis, Mengxi, Naomi Campbell, Cian Smith, Fabio Dantas, Ina O'Murchu, Richard Dunne, Ultan Connell, Christopher Robbins, Cathal Hanley, Renan Soares.

Apologies if I've missed anyone.

Thank you all so much.

https://www.inc.com/bill-carmody/why-96-of-businesses-fail-within-10-years.html