If you have any interest in Cloud Computing then you should be attending next week’s Cloud Computing Summit in Croke Park in Dublin.

The line-up of speakers is fantastic and the topics very relevant to businesses of any size. LouderVoice CEO, Conor, will be on a user panel speaking about our experiences of moving all the LouderVoice services to Amazon AWS. That includes S3, EC2, EBS, EIP, Cloudfront and only excludes ELB since it hasn’t launched in Europe yet.

It’s always a pleasure to meet like-minded people who understand the power of online reviews for businesses. Pat O’Neill of HotelConsult is one of those people and we’re thrilled to be working with him in the hotel space.

In these difficult times for hotels, any advantage that they can gain is worthwhile. On-site reviews are a proven way of growing sales and on-site sales for hotels means they improve their margin.

We’ve always been impressed with the Citylocal franchise which was built by Nazir Daud in the UK. Paul Brugger launched the Cork site last year and it has been growing at an amazing rate. CityLocal Cork is a Business Directory and community website that provides local information on Businesses, News, Events, Free Ads, Property and Cinema listings.

Visitors to Citylocal often leave reviews of the businesses they find there. We are now aggregating those reviews into our system, adding to the already powerful SEO mojo of Citylocal. By doing this, Citylocal’s customers will now see their reviews appearing on loudervoice.com, on Google Android mobile phones and shared by users to Facebook and a multitude of other social networking sites. In every case, the reviews point back to their Citylocal presence.

Then why not become a fan of LouderVoice over on Facebook. We’re thinking of calling it LouderFace 🙂

You’ll get all our latest updates (but not too many!) and you can tell us what you think of each new release.

Lots of categories, so head on over and nominate your favourite sites. Voting closes this Friday.

Make your nominations in the following categories:

• High Potential Start-Up award – recognises a leading company in early stage business planning and execution;
• High Growth Company award – recognises a leading established company driving forward in international markets;
• Sustained Excellence award – recognises an established company with a record of consistent growth and profitability
• R&D Project award recognises a leading innovative technology research project within industry or third level college;
• IT Department award recognises an IT department that can clearly demonstrate business benefit from IT project implementations;
• Green Technology award recognises a company that has implemented or developed technology solutions to achieve reductions in energy use
• Excellence in Education award – recognises the efforts of an individual, group or school to engage with technology for education purposes.

We’ve seen it growing year by year but the latest Nielsen research really drives it home. There is a great piece about it over on Computerworld.

Consumer reviews and personal recommendations are as important as trusted brand reviews for Internet consumers.

The Nielsen survey, the largest of its kind, shows that 90 percent of Internet consumers worldwide trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trust consumer opinions posted online.

We had a fantastic time at the second Irish Facebook Garage in Dublin on Thursday. A packed room of approx 150 people with a wide range of backgrounds heard 5 speakers cover a variety of topics over the space of 2.5 hours.

There will be full coverage including video and all the PPTs available over on Web2Ireland at some point next week. In the meantime, here are some screenshots of Conor’s live demo of the LouderVoice reviews widget + Facebook Connect in action. This widget will be formally launched in the next week or so.

We’re absolutely delighted to be nominated in the inaugural Europa Awards in the category of Best Web Application or Service (EMEA). The Europas are the Techcrunch Europe technology innovation awards for European tech companies and the ceremony will be held on July 9 in London. Public voting is now open in all categories.

Major congratulations also go to Joe Drumgoole of Putplace who is nominated in the Best Startup Founder(s) (EMEA) category (Vote here) and Decisions for Heroes which is nominated in the Best Social Innovation (which benefits society, EMEA) category. (Vote here).

Krishna De of Biz Growth Live did an extended interview with CEO Conor all about ratings and reviews. If you want to hear a lot of valuable information about why reviews make sense for your business, have a listen.

Thanks Krishna!