When we took over Ireland’s oldest ISP, almost 3 years ago, we hoped that we would be able to turn it around in 6-12 months. Unfortunately it was in much worse shape than we had been led to believe, and it took a lot longer than planned.

After several tumultuous years, the beast has been tamed, and, barring unforseen trouble in the next couple of months, we’re about to post our second consecutive year of clear profits – an unparalleled feat in over 10 years of trading.

And with that I believe I have successfully made myself redundant, and can move on.

As longtime readers will know I have been using wikis for a long time, and most recently have been abusing the Semantic MediaWiki extension to layer a financial reporting tool on top of a wiki. As part of the discussion surrounding this Ross Mayfield of Socialtext had pointed me at Dan Bricklin’s wikiCalc, the project by the inventor of the original computer spreadsheet to merge that concept with a wiki.

Although I don’t believe that that would be able to do what I need yet to build a full financial system, or indeed to do much beyond creating simple web tables, the idea intrigues me greatly, and after a variety of discussions over the last month or so, I’ve decided to join forces with Dan and Socialtext to see what I can do to help it get there.

I’m really excited about moving back into startup land again, and working with some really great people who are actively engaged in trying to change the world.

And hopefully I don’t fall into the trap, seemingly all too common in this line of work, of being too busy actually creating “social software” to post here anymore…