Highlights from 2024 at The Digital Hub
The Digital Hub closed out a very busy and productive year with 56 companies and organisations counted as members of our campus in Dublin 8. Our wide range of buildings were 93% occupied by the beginning of December, while hundreds of children and young people have engaged with our community learning programmes in 2024.
Below are some of the main highlights from The Digital Hub across 2024.
Our Members
January: MEG named as one of Ireland’s Top 100 Most Ambitious Companies by Spark CrowdFunding, whose report celebrates innovation, resilience, and the visionary spirit driving Ireland’s business landscape.
January: Dublin Inquirer piloted a youth journalism training programme for people aged between 17 and 23, who care about Dublin city. It was part of the YoCoJoin project, a pan-European initiative with five other newsrooms and organisations.
February: Good Travel Software selected as the “Cars-as-a-service (CaaS) Solution of the Year” award winner in the fourth annual AutoTech Breakthrough Awards for their GTS Car-as-a-Service Platform.
March: Odin launch Pax365, a new booking and fleet management software solution to help tour, activity and fleet operators in the tourism sector.
March: Akara Robotics was amongst 12 startups selected for the prestigious Techstars Healthcare Accelerator Class of 2024, which took place in the tech ecosystem of Los Angeles over three months. The mentorship-driven programme brought together founders from a variety of backgrounds and geographies, and the startups were chosen for innovative healthcare solutions addressing current inefficiencies in the US healthcare system. After a successful trial in a US hospital, Akara has gained momentum in the American market.
April: UX Design Institute’s industry survey finds the demand for skilled professionals in User Experience (UX) is expected to grow over the next 12-24 months. UX Design Institute polled 537 UX professionals in Ireland, the United Kingdom, the US and other major markets.
April: Cian Donovan and Robbie Scott, co-founders of healthcare technology start-up Akara Robotics, amongst several Irish entrepreneurs recognised in the prestigious Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe ranking.
May: Post-Primary Languages Ireland and H2 Learning’s work with Cavan Monaghan Education and Training Board, to develop the Polish for Leaving Cert Blended Learning Project, is awarded the European Language Label for its innovative approach to language teaching, learning and promotion.
May: patientMpower announce agreement with Erasmus MC, a European Expert Centre for Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD). They will use patientMpower’s technology to enable a new digitally enabled care pathway for patients with ILD.
May: Gráinne Humphreys, Executive Director of the Dublin International Film Festival receives the ‘Creative Businesswomen of the Year’ award at the IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year Awards 2024.
June: Neuromod Devices, a medical technology company that developed a tinnitus treatment device, Lenire, expanded its U.S. presence by partnering with 14 new clinics to offer its FDA-approved Lenire tinnitus treatment device. The company was also awarded a contract from the US Government, to make Lenire a treatment option for the 2.9 million US Veterans living with tinnitus.
October: Pocket Forests launch their Tree Pack — a multi-stage pack with exclusive member’s page access for a guide to choosing the area, preparing the ground and planting native Irish trees and shrubs. They collaborated with fellow Digital Hub company Juvo to create how-to videos to guide growers every step of the way.
October: A new Irish legal-tech company, hd-Intelligence, launches its innovative e-discovery platform to allow small and medium-sized law practices to compete with larger rivals at a cost they can afford. Mark Murphy, founder and chief executive of Juvo is appointed chief technology officer.
November: Context Studio won an IDI Design Award in the Best Experience Design category for their work on the “Sustainable Energy Communities: From Plan To Do” project, funded by Creative Ireland’s Creative Climate Action fund.
November: MEG were ranked 24th in the 2024 Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards, a ranking of the 50 fastest-growing technology companies in Ireland. Rankings are based on average percentage revenue growth over four years. MEG credits the company’s remarkable growth to the dedication and talent of its team, along with its focus on innovation in healthcare technology.
November: Cultural insights agency, Bricolage, make available their Culture Lab report on Loneliness, which explores why Ireland – historically known for its communal spirit – is topping European wide loneliness polls. It explores how brands – through the simple act of bringing people together – can have a role in this space.
December: Akara deployed two state-of-the-art decontamination robots at two NHS hospitals that are part of the South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. The innovative UV decontamination units work alongside the hospital’s environmental services team, enabling quicker room turnover while maintaining high standards of cleanliness.
Our Campus
January: The Abbey Theatre begins six weeks of rehearsals in Bay 1 for the first Irish language version of Aeschylus’s tragedy The Persians/Na Peirsigh, translated by Nuala Ni Dhohmnaill.
February: We Love Markets returns with their monthly flea market at The Digital Hub. The outdoor flea focuses on sustainability with vintage, slow fashion, upcycling, bric-a-brac, furniture, arts and crafts and artisan baked goods.
February: The Digital Hub facilitates Gareth Kennedy, lecturer at the National College of Art and Design, and his students from NCAD FIELD for a pear tree grafting workshop with expert, Brian Dillon of the Kilkenny Orchard project.
March: The Digital Hub collaborates with St. Patrick’s Festival on A Better City (A.B.C) — an outdoor gallery of street art from six artists, created with the Guinness Storehouse in partnership with The Digital Hub and Dublin City.
April: 10 – 13 Thomas Street reopens following extensive work to upgrade the central heating system and improve fire safety in the building. This was the first phase in a multi-year project to make the building more environmentally sustainable.
May: The Digital Hub hosts the Humans of The Liberties photography exhibition and a special edition of the monthly We Love Markets flea market as part of the Culture Date with Dublin 8 festival programme.
May: FLUX launch a new art exhibition at The Bank at The Digital Hub to display a diverse range of creative work including visual arts, photography, video production, glass art, ceramics and sustainable fashion pieces.
June: The campus hosted an event to celebrate Ukrainian Independence Day with a concert featuring Ukrainian and Irish performers alongside fun activities for children and Ukrainian cuisine.
July: The Digital Hub hosted some events as part of The Liberties Festival programme including Relax and Draw, Skate and Forage, a special We Love Markets flea and Out of the Box – a project from students of NCADs Master’s Degree in Arts and Social Action.
August: The Abbey Theatre returned to Bay 1 for six weeks to rehearse the Lady Gregory classic, Grania.
September: The Digital Hub was joined by students of NCAD field and their lecturer, Gareth Kennedy, for the annual community harvest of pears from the historic fruit tree.
September: To mark Culture Night 2024, The Digital Hub facilitated We Love Markets with a special night market.
October: The Digital Hub campus hosted two performances as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival; Global Desires from Outlandish Theatre, and Shanna May Breen and Wayne Jordan’s Walking Across Ireland in An Age of Mass Extinction.
October: As part of the Open House festival of architecture, The Digital Hub hosted a workshop, Field Notes: Drawing and Writing the City, which saw facilitators, John Dorman and Sheila de Courcy, guide participants through lesser-known part of the city centre and examining it from surprising and unusual angles.
October: The Townhouse Twenty2 car park was the venue once again for The Liberties Haunt, a community-led Halloween Festival from Dublin City Council and local community Groups.
Our Programmes & Partners
Weekly: The D8 Surfers Club continued their Tuesday in-person gatherings at The Digital Hub. The group are guided by a tutor in their discovery of how digital technologies can benefit them in their everyday lives.
January: The Digital Hub again partnered with Teen-Turn on the global Technovation Challenge 2024. The twelve-week curriculum, which challenges teams of girls to code mobile apps that address real-world problems, was delivered in schools across ten different counties.
January: As part of their commitment to fostering a healthier and happier Dublin 8 community, Smart D8 announced a range of health and wellbeing initiatives, including nutrition and cooking classes, delivered in partnership with organisations across Dublin 8 from January to March.
February: Following three years of success, Smart D8 opened its latest call for pilot projects focused on community health, health literacy and the environment. The call was open to all enterprise, academic institutions, and public and private sector organisations who offer innovative and scalable solutions that address unmet needs of the community and can be enabled by collaboration with Smart D8 partners.
February: The Digital Hub commenced RoboHub Kids – a new STEM learning programme for a group of 10-year-olds from a local school in Dublin 8. Over five weeks, 22 children learned about robotics, coding, sensors and created their own small robotic buggy. RoboHub Kids was delivered by industry experts including tutors who work with Akara Robotics.
February: The week-long “Design Your Future City” programme delivered by the Academy of the Near Future (a collaboration between CONNECT, the SFI Research Centre for Future Networks at Trinity College Dublin, and Dublin City Council) expanded into the Smart D8 District in partnership with The Digital Hub. Nineteen students from Dublin 8 and the surrounding areas, participated in hands-on workshops at The Digital Hub where they explored how technology can be leveraged to address challenges in the areas of good health and wellbeing. They were guided through the design thinking process to develop creative solutions to health and wellbeing challenges, while collaborating with experts in STEM, design and innovation.
April: Smart D8 offered The Digital Hub’s D8 Surfers Club the chance to experience the world of virtual reality technology. Through an interactive demonstration and hands-on activities, the participants, who are all older people in The Liberties, explored the possibilities of VR technology and its potential for entertainment and education.
April: The Digital Hub ran the Roblox Rising Producers programme in collaboration with Hologen. Over nine weeks, the programme engaged 46 students (23 each from fifth and sixth class) from Scoil Treasa Naofa Primary School with the aim to shift their focus from simply playing games to designing and building their own. The students developed their creative and technical skills to become versatile digital creators.
April: Over 500 primary school students in Dublin 8 had an opportunity to improve their motor skills though a pilot programme, Smart Moves, from MoveAhead and The Digital Hub. MoveAhead is the world’s first child-centred motion tracking platform, with the aim to improve children’s motor skills through digital play and was a 2023 Smart D8 pilot project. The programme evaluated the motor skills of over 500 children in Dublin 8 and developed a six-week programme to build on movement skills that were identified as needing support in the evaluation. Previous research found that majority of children can no long hop, skip or run properly due to increasing digital use.
May: Beta Festival, of which The Digital Hub is a co-founder, and the ADAPT Research Centre announced the open call for S+T+ARTS4WaterII – a European project bringing together Science, Technology + Arts which uses artistic residencies as catalysts for innovation addressing global challenges.
May: Smart D8 came in second place in the Excellence in Innovation in Public Administration category at the European Institute of Public Administration Awards. This recognition is a testament to the outstanding efforts and achievements of the Smart D8 team in advancing public sector excellence and innovation.
May: A new Podcast programme was piloted over five weeks from May to June with 16 sixth class pupils from South City Community National School (formerly St. Enda’s). It consisted of five one-hour sessions held at The Digital Hub. To further enrich the podcast content, the programme included educational tours of the surrounding area and Dublin Castle, organised by the Dublin City Council Culture Company.
July: Dr. Glenn Curtin is appointed as The Digital Hub’s first Designer-in-Residence, following a call for applications from forward-thinking designers in areas such as product design, UX and UI who are interested in bringing their unique perspectives, inventive ideas, and pioneering approaches to challenges in health and wellbeing.
July: Five Pilot Projects selected by Smart D8 are selected to focus on speech and language, community health, disability support, dementia and medical administration. Each Pilot Project receives support of up to €12,500 in resourcing to advance their existing work.
September: Pocket Forests and artist, Bernie Colhoun, held a unique art workshop to allow attendees a chance to unplug and reconnect with nature by crafting their own brush from natural materials and crafting beautiful, organic patterns in a folding book.
September: The Digital Hub’s Designer-in-Residence focuses his work on Cervical Screening and Cardiac Arrest Interventions. As the Residency progresses, Dr. Curtin works on a new pilot project that uses drones to bring life-saving cardiac equipment quickly to patients who suffer heart attacks at home.
September: In September and October, The Digital Hub partnered with the Smart D8 Tutors and Facilitators Panel to offer a series of health and wellbeing workshops for companies based in The Digital Hub. The series of lunchtime workshops were devised to support the good health and wellbeing of members of The Digital Hub, from guided meditation and chair yoga to a chess class. Later in the year, the Smart D8 Panel delivered choral sessions to the staff at the National College of Art and Design and other health and wellbeing courses for the Guinness Enterprise Centre’s community.
October: Smart D8 held its annual showcase event to highlight the innovative Smart D8 pilot projects’ innovations in population health and wellbeing, ranging across themes including speech and language, community health, disability support, dementia and virtual care and through networking, future collaboration opportunities were explored.
October: Bee Garden – a garden project in Dublin 8 won the Best New Entry award in the Dublin City Neighbourhoods Competition which is an annual competition for communities, schools and businesses in the city organised by Dublin City Council. Bee Garden, situated on Watling Street is a notable example of the meanwhile use of a small section of The Digital Hub campus, where the space is generously provided free of charge as part of The Digital Hub’s collaboration on the Bee8 project.
October: Fifteen sixth class students from St. Audoen’s National School participated in an interactive Wormery Workshop at The Digital Hub’s Pocket Forests Tree Nursery. Hosted by The Digital Hub in partnership with Pocket Forests, a social enterprise based on its campus, the workshop introduced students to the critical role of earthworms in composting and soil health. The students learned how worms aid humans by transforming organic waste into fertile soil and created their own worm farm to take back to school, where they will maintain it using food scraps like apple cores and banana peels.
November: Beta, an international arts and technology festival, co-founded by The Digital Hub and Aisling Murray, returned for its second year with a series of innovative exhibitions, discussions and workshops. The events and exhibitions examined the relationship between technology and power and included an assembly on AI and Art and a Cannes Film Festival winner, Noire.
November: Following August’s open call for the first ever Female Technologist-in-Residence at The Digital Hub, Dr. Dunja Skoko, PhD commenced her six-month residency with a primary goal to engage with ecosystem of companies, innovators, creatives, learners and the local community and to impart her first-hand knowledge of starting a deep technology business, protecting IP and the use of AI.
December: The work of the Designer-in-Residence, Dr. Glenn Curtin, concludes with successful test flight of drone delivery of life-saving AED. In the simulation, a defibrillator was carried from Manna’s hub in Blanchardstown to an address in a housing estate nearby, about 10 minutes’ drive away. The drone, brought the defibrillator to the house, dropping it safely into the back garden, in around two minutes.
December: Following the return of The Liber8 Music Project in October, 28 students aged 14 to 16-year-old from seven participating schools in Dublin 8 and the surrounding areas graduated from the creative afterschool programme. A special showcase gig in front of family and friends marked the occasion and celebrated their music skills and digital creativity.
December: As the year ended, the multiple educational programmes for primary and secondary schools in Dublin 8, underway since September, concluded; RoboHub Kids, Roblox Rising Producers, the Podcast Programme, the Introduction to Coding Workshop, The Liber8 Music Project, and the Stronger Together Video Challenge.
To view the full list of companies and organisations based at The Digital Hub see our Member Directory.
See our News page and Press Releases for general updates on our activities.
For a list of events and other activities taking place in our venues, see our What’s On page.
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AuthorDigital Hub Team