Ammado CEO Hits Back at Independent 

€5m Losses Due to Research and Development Claims Charity Site Ammado CEO Peter Conlon

Peter Conlon, the technology entrepreneur who established the charity social network Ammado, has hit back at a newspaper article which cast aspersion as to the viability and survival of his latest venture.

In the article published last Wednesday (11th August), the Irish Independent said  "A social networking internet business established by technology entrepreneur Peter Conlon, racked up €4.8m loss in 2008 according to accounts just filed. Ammado, which was founded by Mr Conlon in 2005, had a shareholder deficit of nearly €8.9m at the end of 2008 and the firm's auditors said the financial statements indicated the existence of a "material uncertainty" which may cast doubt over the company's ability to continue as a going concern"

In an interview with IrishDev.com on Friday, Conlon dismissed the Independent's article. "As you probably appreciate, when you are building a global technology company there is a very significant investment in Research and Development. Our policy is to write off such investment as they are incurred."

Ammado aims to connect non-profits, socially responsible companies and engaged individuals in a unique environment of shared interests. It supplies the tools necessary to support online campaigning, fundraising, engagement and communication. Businesses can engage in three ways. Firstly, they may buy a presence on the site giving them a 'stage' to explain their individual Corportate Social Responsibility policy, take donations from employees etc. Secondly, Ammado acts as a Payroll Giving Platform which it claims is the only one in the world that does so, and finally, companies can also run Cause Related Marketing campaigns.

Whilst some of services are free for non-profits, a typical one-year contract ranges from €100k up to several million euro for a one year contract. Additionally, Ammado takes between 5 and 10% fee from each transaction through its payment platform. Conlon said: "Ammado has business development centres in twelve major cities around the world. Since 2008, we have started monetizing our platform and have already signed contracts with some thirty of the worlds leading companies including the Financial Times, Time Warner, Diageo and Coke. We have a strong pipeline of two hundred global prospects which we hope to sign up in the next few months. The real position of Ammado is it has an extremely positive outlook."

Conlon, who was a co-founder of XSiL which failed spectacularly two years ago, claims that the investment in Ammado has already run in to tens of millions of euro. Whilst he would not confirm the exact figure, it is thought to be in the region of €40 million.

Conlon dismissed rumours that there had been a mass exodus of people from Ammado, saying that his company suffers no more than any other when it comes to staff turnover. He added that where possible it had engaged contract staff to develop key parts of its platform like security protection, SaaS and databases.

Conlon believes that Ammado has the most comprehensive payment platform of its kind anywhere in the world, boasting payment processing in over 70 currencies. He said that Ammado has three development centres, in Dublin, Prague and Novi Sad and explained they were set-up so the company were not at the mercy from the likes of Google and Facebook in the competition for .NET developers in Dublin. Condon's risk mechanism however, seems a little hard to fathom since he also admits the company employs just 30 developers across all of its sites.

Conlon concluded that the accounts for 2009, which are due to signed off in the coming weeks, will again show significant losses but re-iterates this is due to R&D and he expects a stronger balance sheet going forward from 2010.

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