Simple idea delivers €50k for Best Young Entrepreneur

Eamon Keane (28), who studied engineering in UCD, fended off competition from more than 1,000 other entrants.

Eamon won the award for his start-up 'Xpreso', a programme that allows online customers to track precisely where their delivery is and when it will arrive.

"The idea came when I was waiting for a takeaway. I had ordered some Thai food online. Then an hour later when there was no sign of it, I was thinking 'did they get my order and where's my driver?'. Originally we were trying to tackle that whole pain of waiting when you're hungry," he said.

"Then we saw a better opportunity to apply it to the parcel sector because you could be waiting all day for a parcel."

Eamon co-founded the company in 2013 when he poured €10,000 of his own money into the project. It now employs eight people and will launch with a courier firm next month. It is the first year of the awards which was supported by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, and received €2m in Government funding.