A COMPANY THAT allows anyone to make a video ad “in seconds” has taken a major start-up award at the Web Summit.

Viddyad wins €25,000 along with the new ESB Spark of Genius title – the Irish company impressed by creating the “first cloud-based video ad creation tool”.

It allows you to use stock pieces of video and images, add text, logo, music and special effects and the Viddyad platform takes over and pulls the whole lot together. Only if you like the finished result, do you pay a small fee to remove the watermarks from the stock imagery.

The CEO of Viddyad, Grainne Barron, brought her whole team on stage for the presentation at the RDS, saying , “I’m really proud of my team, their professionalism and everything we have built together.”

Each of the three finalists – picked out of over 100 Irish tech start-up companies – had to pitch their product in front of the large audience on the main stage at the Summit. Barron’s pitch seemed to particularly impress with attendees tweeting:

The other two finalists were Pharmapod and LearnUpon. Both offer cloud-based services with Pharmapod serving pharmacists with management, reporting and analysis of cases on their software and LearnUpon allowing companies to create online training courses for employees.

John McKiernan, strategic partnership development manager with ESB, said: “The calibre of this year’s entries highlights the talent and creativity that exists in Ireland today, and the spirit of enterprise that will help to uphold our reputation as a centre for innovation excellence.”

This is the fourth year of the ESB Spark of Genius awards and they are open to any Irish start-up that is in operation less than three years and has had less than €1m in funding to date. Other winners include Datahug and Smartthings, who went on to raise €6m and €3m in investment after their win.

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