As we bid farewell to 2014, we reminisce on some of the highs of the year gone by, both for the wider sector, and for some of our tech PR and marketing clients.
Jobs
One of the major achievements of 2014 is an overall drop in unemployment rates where they went from 12.2% in November 2013 to 10.7% in the same period of this year. A reduction in unemployment is always a good indication of a positive year for Ireland as a nation and it is great to see that the tech sector is a major driver of this success, with thousands of new jobs created in the industry.
Silicon Republic is in the process of preparing its round-up of the top 50 IT job announcements of 2014, so we won’t steal their thunder, but make sure to keep an eye out for it.
IDA Ireland has continued to deliver some great results, by continuing to retain some of the biggest names in world tech in Ireland, and getting some fantastic new entrants to select Ireland. It is brilliant to see the next generation of global players choose Ireland as a major hub.
Enterprise Ireland can be proud of its success too, with The Irish Times Top Performers Top 1000 Survey 2014, showing that Irish companies out-perform those who invest here from other countries.
Web Summit
An obvious major triumph for the Irish technology sector this year was the Web Summit. Hosted in Dublin’s RDS, it doubled the attendance since last year, to an astounding 20,000. This included some of the world’s most renowned names in tech and it generated the ‘not-so-shabby sum’ of over €100m to the Irish economy. Its growth looks set to continue into next year too. We well remember attending its earliest versions with just a few hundred attendees.
International success
Kinsale students Ciara Judge, Sophie Healy-Thow and Émer Hickey gave us a brilliant boost when they won the top award at the Google Science Fair in September. Amazingly, they followed that up by being named in Time magazine’s most influential teens of the year list. We were privileged to see Ciara present at the Digital Ireland Forum in September.
Comit and client successes
We have been thrilled to be involved in some of our clients amazing news and PR successes this year. Our long standing friends and clients in Halo Business Angel Network scored a landmark triumph by attracting more than 350 elite business angels and investors from across Europe and the US to Dublin for the European Business Angel Congress. This is the first time the congress has come to Ireland. It won’t be long before it is back again, based on this!
PayPal, a relatively new addition to our client base in late 2013, delivered the biggest jobs bonanza among our clients this year, when Louise Phelan announced 400 new jobs for Dundalk. PayPal already provides well over 2,000 great careers in Ireland and, by 2018, it will be up to almost 3,000 recruits here.
We also witnessed some great innovation and exciting new product launches from a number of clients, such as the launch of TERMINALFOUR’s new higher education digital engagement platform following a €1.4M investment and 18 months of R&D from their Dublin HQ. International media and analysts showed considerable interest and provided some glowing reports.
Other Comit highlights of 2014 include welcoming fantastic new clients to the Comit family, including eircom Wholesale (which announced that 1M premises all over Ireland can now access ultra-high speed broadband from its networks), TelecityGroup and Ward Solutions.
We look forward to providing our PR and content marketing services to these market leading new clients and our stable of fast growth indigenous and multi-national clients in 2015.
Finally, at Comit HQ we have also been thrilled to welcome new teammates and expand our public relations and marketing communications team.
Happy Christmas
We would like to take this opportunity to thank our colleagues, clients, media and many other friends for a fantastic year and we look forward to working with you all in 2015. Merry Christmas and we wish you a very prosperous new year.
P.S. We are hiring our next teammate to kick-off 2015 with a bang. If you are - or know – a talented PR account manager looking for a role in Ireland’s leading tech specialist PR and digital content marketing agency, have a look here.
