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Two new Irish video startups: one tasty, one viral

New sites out of Ireland this month. One's neat, the other--not so much.

Josh Lowensohn Former Senior Writer
Josh Lowensohn joined CNET in 2006 and now covers Apple. Before that, Josh wrote about everything from new Web start-ups, to remote-controlled robots that watch your house. Prior to joining CNET, Josh covered breaking video game news, as well as reviewing game software. His current console favorite is the Xbox 360.
Josh Lowensohn

An almost uncoverable number of Web sites launch every day. While many come out of Northern California, several parts of the world have been cropping up as hotbeds for new developments, including Israel, Russia, Canada, and the U.K. Two new Irish startups that launched this month are iFoods.tv and Little Ireland.tv.

iFoods.tv, similar to other Web video cooking sites, is a series of semiprofessionally produced how-to videos on how to make single and multidish meals. There's also a user-submitted video contest going up in the near future that will pit user against chef, hopefully Iron Chef style. However, the real meat and potatoes of the site--pun intended--is the paid premium service, which serves up a monthly dose of professionally produced cooking videos unavailable to other users.

Little Ireland.tv made its official launch this morning, despite being live for the last few weeks. Short of featuring a leprechaun hat, some shamrocks, and a few videos about Guinness, there's not actually much to do with Irish culture. There are sections for videos and photos, many of which have been pulled from other content providers. The site bills itself as good for "making communication easy for expats and lovers of Ireland" although that communication is limited to forums and some MySpace-ish profiles.

To check out several other (and more established) Irish start-ups, David Lenehan over at Read/Write/Web had a great post covering about a dozen of them a few months back.