The Rubicon Centre

27th May 2011: Rising Cork company WeddingDates.ie, based at the Rubicon Centre in Cork has beaten off competition from the likes of PizzaHut and Vodafone Ireland to win the Best Online PR Award in the inaugural Social Media Awards in the Mansion House in Dublin last night.
 
The Awards recognise the best and the most innovative use of Social Media for businesses and featured a good mix of owner-managed start ups as well as larger well known brands represented.  State agencies such as Enterprise Ireland and the Defence Forces were also finalists as well as Charities and NGOs such as Fota Island and Bernardos. 

Irish Times Feature: 27th May 2011

Since it opened in 2006, the Rubicon Centre in Cork – a 24-hour incubation centre for new businesses – has more than doubled in size. Its ethos of collaboration is helping dozens of start-ups to buck the downturn, writes BRIAN O'CONNELL

CORK-BASED filmmaker Aidan Mulcahy is one of the many who emigrated from Ireland in the 1980s, first to Germany and later Australia. When Ireland’s financial rise began to make international headlines, he returned home in 2002 to chase the Tiger. The experience, though, was not what he expected and it has taken him several years and many closed doors to get his film production company off the ground.

A study group of nine people led by Professor Valdis Avotins , Director at Ventspils University College, Engineering Research Centre and  representing Latvian and Estonian Universities, Science Parks and Public Administrations, was based at the Rubicon centre for meetings during the week ending the 13th May.

The study visit was funded by the Latvian- Estonian cross border project and its objective was to see at first-hand how centres such as Rubicon and Nimbus cooperate, within the context of a large high level educational such as CIT, to deliver very meaningful and valuable supports to entrepreneurs and business start-ups.

Over the course of its three day visit, the group had a number of interesting discussions with representatives of the Rubicon and Nimbus Centres and with the Industrial Liaison Office and it is hoped that arising from the visit, new project links will be developed with the new EU Member States in the area of innovation and entrepreneurship.