Business: Writing for TechCrunch Europe
It started with a single tweet when TechCrunch Europe Editor in Chief Mike Butcher asked for German bloggers to cover Next2010 in Berlin, Germany via Twitter. I volunteered for the job and ended up writing five articles at the conference. Here is a collection of my contributions.
Next10: plista expects new funding round, launches one-click ad creator
Next10: NextWidgets announces new side tab e-commerce widget
Next10: Memonic wants to kill “copy-paste”, closes Angel funding
Next10: Fishlabs to move into mobile MMOGs, Series B round planned
Next10: Tariq Krim talks up new version of Jolicloud based on HTML5
Have fun reading! If you are interested in tech, startups, or the latest news from the industry I encourage you to subscribe to TechCrunch and TechCrunch Europe. It’s the destination with the most comprehensive coverage in English you can possibly get.
Comments are very welcome!
read moreEntrepreneurship: Supporting talented startup Erasmate.com
Ok, this is a more personal call. I need your help! I need you to help me support a great, young, talented, and ambitious student company win a €35.000 competition. Erasmate.com just launched and can use 35k to further finance their awesome web-portal, which helps students find accommodation when going abroad.
The Erasmate.com team is competing with several other but has a great opportunity to score first place as they are currently on 2nd or 3rd place and only a couple of votes from slam dunking this.
How can you help?
In order to get the 35k they need the most votes on the initiative’s website (LIOF Yeah)
- Go to www.erasmate.com/35k - Just vote for them by
- Press the grey “Stem” button,
- Put in your name
- Put in your email address
- MOST IMPORTANT: You will get a mail from “SoapBox” in which you will have to click the confirmation link!
Unfortunately, the voting-website “SoapBox” is currently only available in Dutch. Please make sure you click the link as the team lost some valuable votes already to this.I am personally supporting these guys and with your help they might make it to number one. I would highly appreciate it if you would invest about 2 minutes of your time to support young talent.
Also, feel free to forward this to as many people as you like. I know the team works very hard and they appreciate your help a lot! Many thanks from my side already for your support!
read moreEntrepreneurship: Going to Innovate!2010 Pitch Slam Amsterdam
On April 6th I went to the Pitch Slam Amsterdam organized by Innovate!2010. The whole event is part of a larger framework where the challenge is to complete locally first in order to compete on a global scale later. Guidewire Group which is the underlying organizer searches for the “most promising startups” and their partners include firms like PayPal, Microsoft, HP, HSBC, IBM, and so on.
Host of the event was Mike Sigal who did a great job leading startups, pitchers, judges, and audience. His main point in giving feedback on the pitches really stuck with me as he told us about a PepsiCo CEO. The CEO responded to the interview question “What is the single most important activity that you do” by saying “I spend about an hour a day on improving my communication skills”. Mike stressed the meaning and possible payoffs of doing this and said that he also believes that this is a crucial point for startups. Communicating what you do, who you are, and where you want to go are the most important activities when seeking investors, supporters, and customers.
Winner of the Amsterdam edition of the Pitch Slam is the website TinyPay.me (www.tinypay.me). CEO Richard gave a pretty cool and super-natural pitch which you can see here. Their concept is that you can sell anything via Facebook or Twitter without having to sign up for another service. Instead you can use their site to create an ad in about one minute and use your social media profiles to make people aware of your offers and let your friends help you promote your item. When you sell your item the purchase and deal is done through PayPal and TinyPay.me gets 5% of the sales price. In essence this allows you to sell something online without going through the hassles of eBay. If you like the concept you can become a fan on Facebook.
The value of the whole event was also driven by the enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and likable set of judges who gave great feedback on all pitches. This was particularly interesting since it offered direct insights into how a VC (a couple of them are investors) and market experts look at startups and what good and bad points they see immediately. In order to make results and feedbacks comparable on a global scale every Pitch Slam uses the “G/Score” to evaluate ideas. As the letter G might indicate it is a product of Guidewire Group and explained in detail on their website. Basically it tries to capture the most essential business dimensions of a startup and rate them on a 1 (worst) to 4 (best) scale. The score is intended to give a rough overview of a startup and help external parties to make a decision on whether or not it is interesting for them to talk to that startup. Looking at the “cheat sheet” that was passed out to everyone I found the criteria quite objective and well-chosen.
In general I can only recommend that you go to one of the other Pitch Slams that are still to take place in Europe until the end of April and then in the US in early summer. Check out the schedule here.
read moreConference: Recap of IC2010
On March 18th I was invited by Maastricht University’s study organization 3MA to participate in a panel discussion about „New Media“. I took the opportunity to take part in (almost) the whole event to get an impression on who would be sitting in the panel with me. Quite interestingly the new media conference was partly what I expected and partly very surprising. I was expecting that the only conference in recent Maastricht conferences or events history dealing with media would place an emphasis on using the new technologies when promoting the event. Unfortunately, there was no Facebook fan page to become a fan of to follow updates, nor a Twitter channel of the event to build up interest among followers. If you were not studying at Maastricht University’s School of Business and Economics there was no way that you would hear about this event. With ticket prices at 12 Euros you would think that pushing sales via absolutely free channels would be in the interest of the organization. As for the audience I was expecting students totally emerged in tech so there would be a room full of people using twitter to spread the news about what they saw and experiences or some live-blogging going on From the approx. 150 people in the room 3 were using twitter. This included me and the speaker mentioned below (After that I didn’t dare to ask who runs a blog). With all the tools available I found it rather disappointing how little use was made of them from organizers, as well as participants. Of course the recruiting aspect of the event comes into play here but I believe that you should walk your talk and not try to please a (media) employer if you don’t “live” media. It is going to show sooner or later.
One of the most interesting speakers of the day from my perspective was Markus Kucborski from Vodafone. He is leading the Social Media department within Vodafone that tries to leverage new technologies and incorporates them into Vodafone activities. He gave a rough overview of how Vodafone is doing it and the slides of his presentation can be found here. Following his presentation he gave a workshop about the actual incorporation of social media in larger companies. I found it funny that the format that he said he was used to (rather barcamp style) did not really correspond with the format that a Maastricht business student would be used to (totally über-formal consultant or financial service company style that just makes me smile every time I see it). Content-wise it was a little similar; business school questions and answers to (business) problems that are not meant to be solved this way. The main question that Markus brought up was how to measure the involvement in social media. This goes back on his efforts to find a social media “currency”. The basic idea behind it is how to measure in monetary terms what is going on online. You can find Markus’ presentation here.
The panel discussion was very lively as 9 panelists faced 10 questions in a little more than an hour. I had the feeling, however, that everybody made good use of their time. I realize that every single question could easily spark a month long discussion and it would have been fun to go into a little more depth. The input from the different company representatives mostly related the question to their efforts and activities. I kind of did the same by offering a start-up perspective on things. The use of social media of a start-up works a little different for team and company than lets say firm like Vodafone or Axel Springer with tens of thousands of employees… My main point was that through more transparency through social media (profiles) teams have a great chance and opportunity to present themselves to customers and investors alike. Anyone involved in a tech venture will most likely be an avid social media user. After all, these new tools allowed many businesses to thrive, make money, and create jobs.
Summarizing, I can say that the conference was well organized as almost all segments started on time and the selection of speakers was diverse, thus interesting. The team did a great job pulling off a beginners-level-conference on “new” and social media that gave everyone the honest opportunity to find an easy access to the topic. Also I feel the conference employed the right recruiting segments for the students desperately looking for a job in this area. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank 3MA for the invitation to participate in the panel and not mentioning one word of thanks. I had a fun time anyways.
read moreConference: What to expect at IC2010?
A couple of weeks back I was invited to speak on a panel at IC2010 and I am very much looking forward to the event. Although, I am not really sure yet what is expecting me I am quite happy to be involved at an event at Maastricht University again. The marketing and strategy study association 3MA is not only the host of the Maastricht Marketing or Consultancy Day but also host of the “International Conference” with yearly changing topics. While all other events have quite the similar content and topic every year the “International Conference” is rather diverse in topics.
This year’s topic is: The Changing Face of Media: A Burden or a Gift”. As someone who is definitely in love with all the new tools that are coming out to make our life easier I don’t really see the burden in any new technologies. Maybe someone can explain this to me at the conference. Overall the lineup of companies indicates that there will be just companies using, developing, or supporting tech and its going to fun again to get in touch with some corporate techies.
Since the event is also a recruiting event I hope that the focus is not drifting away too much from the topic of new media and technology towards job hunt. The program seems to be densely packed which should yield some intense content. I am definitely looking forward to it.
Some good and bad
Just recently I have seen some great examples of how companies could use “new” technologies such as Facebook or viral advertising. One company I did not expect to have a solid new media strategy and perfect execution is Nespresso. The team at Nespresso shows with every move that they have fully understood how to use Facebook and how to interact with their customers through this channel. Their fan-page counts a whopping 242k fans and was Nespresso’s place of choice to announce the release of their new commercial with George Clooney (another great move). It is by far the only coffee-related Facebook fan-page that yields an incredible 1600 comments on the question which capsule color will be the color of this year’s Limited Edition. The almost 4k “Likes” to the question which “pure origin” capsules people like indicate a huge brand interaction that comes almost for free. The use of Facebook is free to anyone and maintaining a fan-page doesn’t take a huge team. Another aspect of why this is also very rewarding for Nespresso is the immediate feedback they get to their campaigns. People on the fan-page are most likely also customers so the quality of the answers is likely to be high due to authenticity and honesty. This approach saves Nespresso a ton of money every day. Not only are they able to track the results of their campaign they can also get in touch with the customers for free.
A perfect example for a company which did not understand social media at all is probably German sports-clothing manufacturer “Jako“. The company actually decided that the best strategy against bloggers who don’t write positively about their products is to sue the hell out of them. This has earned them the reputation of worst embarrassment on the web.
read moreToby who?
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