The concept of emerging markets is so inextricably linked to Asia (and sometimes Eastern Europe) that it's sometimes easy to miss markets emerging on our very doorsteps. Ireland may just be one of these. Its economy has been booming for a decade but in terms of venture capital activity, it has been a pretty subdued environment. This is natural - the VC industry did not come about overnight in Silicon Valley, Cambridge or anywhere else. It takes time for a body of expertise and analysis to build up and even longer for investors to be convinced that it is worthy of their consideration.

However, Ireland appears to have reached, or even passed, a tipping point. Ernst & Young's quarterly venture capital report, carried out in conjunction with Dow Jones VentureOne, shows a progressive increase in the number and value of deals being done. The third quarter showed a healthy E29.7m of deals in the third quarter. Even better, Library House's database, VenturePedia, shows that so far in the fourth quarter there have been E180.9m worth of deals. Even stripping out the E126m in a single deal for Setanta, this is a big increase on the previous quarter and an even larger increase on earlier in the year.

The Irish Venture Capital Association bullishly predicts that E3bn will be available to Irish firms over the next five to seven years, half coming from locally raised funds. If that's really the case, we should all be rushing to the Emerald Isle and setting up innovative companies.

LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman, speaking last week at Library House’s Essential Mediatech conference in London, laid out his strategy for building and monetising digital communities. Few entrepreneurs have as much experience in online communities as Mr. Hoffman. Apart from attracting millions of users to LinkedIn without spending any money on advertising, Hoffman is a prolific angel investor who has backed many of Web 2.0’s biggest community successes, including Flickr, Digg, Facebook, Six Apart and Last.fm.

Mr. Hoffman’s thesis is that the strategy for building digital communities is reversed from that of building a traditional business. Rather than attempt to earn money from the outset and gradually add more customers, digital communities should first seek a large audience and then worry about their revenue model. His reasoning is that if a service fails to attract users, then no amount of revenue model revision will make it a success. Once a service has users, however, there is usually a way to make money off of it.

Focusing on audience rather than revenue model at the outset works well for digital communities which feature user-generated content, like social networks, blogs or photo-sharing sites. As more users join the service, they create more content; more content in turn attracts more users. Digital media services which trade in professionally-produced content, on the other hand, would find it difficult to follow Mr. Hoffman’s advice.

An Internet TV service, for instance, must have compelling programming lined up in order to attract an audience – content for which it can be very expensive to acquire rights. Furthermore, since this TV content is licensed rather than uploaded by users, the amount of content on the site does not automatically grow as the user base does. These are the challenging dynamics facing Internet TV start-ups such as Veoh, Hulu, Joost, and Babelgum.

For this reason, the companies most likely to succeed as the television networks of the Internet may be digital communities whose primary aim is not video at all. Social networks like Bebo and MySpace already have attracted tens of millions of users through viral growth. That audience reach puts them far ahead of the previously mentioned Internet TV services - and social networks have attracted these audiences through viral growth, without needing to spend lavishly on content acquisition.

Furthermore, now that they are in the game, social networks are showing themselves savvy purchasers of video content. Rather than acquire an extensive – and expensive – library of television content, Bebo has commissioned made-for-online shows like KateModern, a popular but low-budget interactive soap opera. KateModern and its predecessor, Lonelygirl15, suggest a new model for video production, similar to Reid Hoffman’s method for building digital communities: make content cheaply, attract an audience and then figure out the revenue model.

Social networks like Bebo pose multiple threats to Internet TV start-ups. Because their core business is building a community of users, not serving up video, the overall appeal of social networks is not limited by their video library (or lack thereof). What video they have acquired has been cheaper than normal television and yet widely appealing. Finally, as social networks add traditional TV programming to complement their Internet-only hits, their existing audience and accompanying ad revenue could provide them with the leverage and the cash to out-gun Internet TV start-ups over programme rights.

A report this week by the Wall Street Journal highlighted the contribution of cargo ships to global pollution. The tonnage of goods shipped is believed to have trebled since 1970, and shipping is used to transport a staggering 90% of the world’s goods. In fact a study by the International Council on Clean Transportation demonstrated that ships release more sulfur dioxide, the sooty pollutant associated with acid rain, than all of the world's cars, trucks and buses combined. Because of shipping’s global nature, regulation would be difficult to impose, and it is not even clear exactly what legislative tack would be most effective.

Like all supply chain and logistic issues, savings and efficiencies can be made using appropriate supply chain management, thereby minimising the actual number of shipping miles. But there are a range of other issues relating to the actual quantity and nature of the goods being shipped, which in turn relates to global economics and consumer choice.

Economics might dictate that it is cheaper to manufacture certain goods in one geography and ship them to another, but the actual shipping space taken up by each product may be subject to some control. Shipping air is neither economic, nor environmentally friendly, therefore innovative ways in which this can be reduced should be encouraged.

Simply making things smaller can have a significant impact, for instance by minimising packaging, concentrating liquid or chemical freight, or reducing moisture content where possible. However these issues are often out of the control of the actual shipping companies. They are instead influenced by educated consumers and savvy corporates.

So what can shipping companies themselves do to lessen their environmental impact? A handful of companies are currently offering cleantech solutions directly applicable for the shipping industry.

SkySails are a German company offering wind propulsion systems for modern shipping which consists of a fully automated towing kite. This may sound like a rudimentary solution, but given its claim to be able to reduce fuel consumption by up to 50% in ‘optimum conditions’ and with financial backing exceeding €14m, it may just be taken seriously.

The somewhat smaller, but equally ambitious California-based outfit, KiteShip, have cottoned onto a very similar idea, marketing their precisely named Very Large Free Flying Sails (VLFFS), which have applications on a small and large scale.

Startups are putting forth radical ideas as well, such as the entirely new and efficient combustion engine under development by Cyclone Technologies. But it is likely that such innovations will take years to scale and implement into the freight industry. In this respect, solutions that can be easily retrofitted – such as sails - and offer immediate benefits are likely to see the greatest uptake in coming years.

Most people hate overpaying for things. Getting outwitted at the antiques market, failing to get a discount on that nearly new car or overpaying for a company - it all amounts to the same thing: a nasty taste in the mouth. Prices are a key issue in our lives and paying what we believe is the right price is essential to our wellbeing.

But we are all wrong. And venture capitalists are particularly wrong to get hung up on price. At least that's according to Tom Perkins, the legendary VC investor who is often credited with being the founder of Silicon Valley. Perkins, not given much to public appearances since his whistle-blowing last year brought down the board of Hewlett-Packard, is suddenly everywhere again. He has resurfaced to promote his autobiography "Valley Boy" which was published in Europe this month.

In his many appearances on TV networks around the world in the past few weeks, he has been happy to dispense advice on any number of subjects, but the quote that caught my eye was given to The Times. Perkins says: "Venture capital funds sometimes do have a tendency to pay too much, because they have too much money. Even when there was no money in venture capital, they still had too much money. Markets just have to deal with it."

In other words, the aphorism about quality being remembered long after price is forgotten, is true. Amid all the noise about high-tech companies being sold at unreasonable multiples and cleantech valuations spiralling out of control, the simple truth is that if you buy into the right company, the price is a secondary consideration.

While successful people at or beyond retirement age do tend to exaggerate the ease with which they were able to make their fortunes and gloss over the difficulties they had to overcome, Perkins' belief that price is relatively unimportant carries no little weight. After all, at his VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, he helped to launch 525 companies, creating $500bn of value and nearly 300,000 jobs over a period of decades. He has the distinction of seeding companies of the stature of Netscape, Tandem Computers and Genentech, all pioneers in their fields at the time.

Just to prove he really doesn't care about price, Perkins recently ordered a custom-built 289-foot clipper which ended up costing over $100m by the time it finally touched water.

(PS Has anyone read the book? Any good?)

The final session of Essential Mediatech 2007 was moderated by Chris Coffman, senior analyst at Library House and involved Anshish Patel of Intel Capital, Ray Anderson of Bango, Marcus Stuart of Eros New Media, Jamie Conyngham of Telcogames, and Nicholas Wheller of ITN On.

Despite the session's name, the panel started out discussing whether "divergence" was more appropriate given the growing number of platforms and devices. Most people felt that this diversification is necessary but difficult. One of the challenges identified was making sure the expansion into new channels offered customer value. For example, moving a mobile game onto a console can allow for expanded game-play, but moving from console to mobile can cripple functionality and disappoint customers.

I thought Ray was one of the best contributors throughout the day. I liked his idea of "user anger" which he explained as the customer frustration that develops when new technologies achieve a certain penetration (~15%) and people recognize that their hardware/software functionality/experience doesn't match their expectations based on what else they have seen. He felt we were reaching the user anger inflection point in the mobile space which should spark rapid innovation.

One of the questions raised Google's possible bid for the 700 MHz spectrum in the US which spurred a few comments about "leapfrogging the carriers". They pointed out that carriers currently take a 50% cut from mobile transactions and compared that to ISPs taking half of every iTunes purchase. Content players may take dramatic steps to bypass this toll so they can make more money from their offerings.