Ireland's boom, and its banks

With funding from banks drying up, and a limited pool of Irish venture capitalists and investors, it might look like a tough time for startups. But Dublin's hardy entrepreneurs are convinced that the financial implosion will have little impact on their businesses; in fact, it is already helping them by pushing down the price of office space, built with loans that will never be repaid. And the banks never lent them money anyway.

The technology entrepreneurs

But for the technology entrepreneurs, that's simply not relevant. They're chasing something for more interesting: success. And a number of them are finding it. Bitbuzz, which started in 2003 and provides wireless internet in conference centres, hotels and public spaces, has overtaken the telecoms incumbent Eircom in its sector and seen off competition from BT's OpenZone; now it has its eyes on the UK mainland. "The number of times we've had people tell us they'll put us out of business in six months," says Shane Deasy, its co-founder. "But it's a lot harder [to do] than that."

The elephant in the room when talking to any Irish business is Ireland's famously low corporation tax, which, at 12.5%, is less than half the average rate found across the rest of Europe. It survived the IMF's examination last week, though it is unclear whether it will be raised next year; unsurprisingly, nobody in the tech industry would favour that.

Corporation tax raised about ?3.9bn (£3.2bn) in 2009, about 10% of Irish government revenue. If it were to rise, would all the major foreign companies that presently use it as part of a tax avoidance system - such as Google and Facebook - remain in the country?

The Celtic Tiger

Even when the "Celtic Tiger" was in its pomp, Ireland was not in the forefront of the internet revolution: around two-thirds of its 4.6m population had an internet connection this year, and by July this year it only had 1.5 million Facebook users (a useful metric for engaged internet use). That represents 35% of its population, which lags behind the UK (42% are Facebook users) and US (40%).

The result of all this is that Ireland has only a small pool of technology expertise, in which those with know-how find that opportunities look as good as ever. Joe Drumgoole, the chief executive of cloud-computing management specialists CloudSplit, says he had to make eight engineers redundant during the slump in November 2008 at his previous startup. "But they all had jobs by Christmas, and that's typical. I don't know a single organisation in Ireland today that can fill all its slots for technical people."

"The future will be based on indigenous companies exporting out of Ireland, so it's important that we do continue to proactively invest in internet companies," says Tom Cusack of EI. "[In the] internet and games area we've seen huge growth."

The 2010 Nude London Tech calendar

Web entrepreneurs pose for the 2010 Nude London Tech calendar, which features 24 pictures of the capital's internet pioneers in all their glory. Here's just a sample of what's on offer - and remember, it's for charity