A new Galway Tech Map, published online this week, illustrates the substantial growth of the sector in the city in the dozen years since the first map was created.
The tech community in Galway has expanded significantly in the intervening years, with new startup hubs and office blocks, revitalised technology and innovation centres, and a surge in both indigenous and FDI companies based in Galway.
In 2014, the first version of a Galway Tech Map was created to illustrate the various companies that made up Galway’s tech sector, inspired by a similar Fáilte Ireland map for Dublin, which had about 30 companies shown. One year later, a second version of the map was released that featured more than 70 companies, and popular variants that focused on the MedTech sector came soon afterwards.
The third version of the Galway Tech Map has just been launched to show the strong growth in Galway’s ICT companies (primarily software/computing and hardware/electronics ). The new map, compiled in collaboration with local stakeholders, features about 200 tech companies in or around Galway city.
These range from single-person operations to companies with hundreds of people employed locally, in areas including customer experience, computer gaming, asset management, and Medtronic’s recently announced patient care systems.
“This new map reflects the significant changes that have happened in Galway over the past 12 years,” said Professor John Breslin, who created the map and made it available to download from https://github.com/techinnovate.
“If we look back to 2014, the doughnut effect was very much in operation, with many technology companies located on the outskirts of the city and few companies based downtown. The PorterShed was a vision still to be realised through the refurbished Guiness building near Ceannt Station, now relocated to Market Street and Bowling Green. Bonham Quay and CREW Digital did not yet exist.
“The substantial ATU iHub and Galway Technology Centre extensions had not been built, with the latter yet to be rebranded as Platform94 with a renewed focus on growing indigenous scaleups,” he added. “There were no regional accelerator programmes supporting local startups with programming and funding, but these came to pass with the NDRC at PorterShed accelerator, BioExel, and last year’s AI Venture Forge, with more of this kind of thing badly needed.
“Twelve years ago, we could not have imagined how the landscape would have changed so much, as illustrated by this new map. As we all adapt and reskill in this era of global strife and AI, bearing in mind the need for new solutions and ventures to tackle climate and energy challenges for both people and the planet, we can still hope and plan for even more companies and jobs growth in Galway’s tech sector over the next 12 years.”
Galway and ICT in history
While the establishment of the Digital Equipment Corporation hardware manufacturing plant in Galway in the early 1970s was without doubt one of the key moments in the early stages of the city’s tech sector, Galway’s links to the world of information and communication technology go back even further.
In the 1850s, the two founders of Menlo Park, in what is now Silicon Valley, named it after Menlo and Menlo Castle in their native Galway. Marconi’s Clifden station, located at Derrygimlagh Bog, was opened in 1907 as half of the world’s first commercial transatlantic wireless telegraphy system, transmitting messages across the ocean to Nova Scotia. Former University of Galway physics professor George Johnstone Stoney is known for coining the term “electron” and for calculating an early estimate of its charge.
The Anderson bridge circuit, built by former University president Alexander Anderson to measure electrical inductance, was recognised as an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE ) milestone last year. His daughter, Emily Anderson, the first German professor at the University of Galway and later decoder/translater of the letters of Beethoven and Mozart, had a second career as a cryptanalyst before and during World War II, where she cracked a series of Italian ciphers to reveal battle plans for North Africa, and contribute towards Allied success in the region. Meanwhile Jim Thornton, whose father was from An Spidéal, created the CDC 6600 supercomputer in the 1960s along with Seymour Cray.
The new Galway Tech Map is available to download for free at https://github.com/techinnovate.
