Business: Writing for TechCrunch Europe

Posted by admin on May 30, 2010 in Entrepreneurship & Business | 2 comments

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!

Entrepreneurship: Supporting talented startup Erasmate.com

Posted by admin on Apr 9, 2010 in Entrepreneurship & Business | 2 comments

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)

1. Go to www.erasmate.com/35k - Just vote for them by
2. Press the grey “Stem” button,
3. Put in your name
4. Put in your email address
5. 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!

Entrepreneurship: Going to Innovate!2010 Pitch Slam Amsterdam

Posted by admin on Apr 8, 2010 in Entrepreneurship & Business | 0 comments

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.

Technology: My favorite Blogs

Posted by admin on Dec 20, 2009 in Tech | 1 comment

The iPhone App post inspired me to share some of the blogs I read on a daily basis. At the opening of the academic year 2009/2010 at Maastricht University Dutch entrepreneur Marc van der Chijs said: “Dont read the news, read stuff from the source as it happens.” His statement made me think about the power one has in being up to date. Since technology and entrepreneurship are two fields that I like to be up to date.

Here are some of the blogs that I can only recommend reading:

Entrepreneurship

• Retire at 21 - Offers some very nice interviews with young tech entrepreneurs and a nice brag list of the top earners
• FastCompany - The online content is just as great as the magazine content and I like to use the feeds to forward stories that I found interesting.
• Young Entrepreneur – Great content for up and coming businesses from the perspective of young entrepreneurs and those who want o become such.
• Inc. – Another great magazine with terrific content to stay ahead of the business game.

Technology

• Scobelizer (Robert Scoble) – Best tech blog with a personal opinion touch. Robert’s content is always great and informative.
• Mashable – Just the greatest resources on social media developments, rumors, and trends. Also, I like the format and the writing style.
• Silicon Alley Insider – Great news resources to see what is going on at the “other side”. Very informative and often funny content.
• Wired – My favorite geek, gadget, and geniuses magazine. That is all.

People

• Marc van der Chijs – Marc is – among many things – the co-founder of China’s largest video portal. I really like how he is using Twitter and his Blog to keep people in the loop on what he does.
• Jason Calacanis – Jason is probably one of the most respected people in internet entrepreneurship. He is one super active internet entrepreneur and I like everything that he is involved in.
• Paul Graham – Paul is the co-founder of Y-Combinator, an incubator that has brought up more than 140 start-ups.
• Matt Mullenweg - Matt is the founder of WordPress and a true tech-startup idol of mine. The projects that he is involved in are awesome and inspiring.

The Software I Use

Most of the blogs I read through RSS feeds. My favorite prog here is NetNewsWire for Mac. I love the Google Reader sync ability so I can the exact same feeds on my iPhone and PC. The program works just fine on all three platforms.

Conference: TEDx Berlin 2009

Posted by admin on Dec 7, 2009 in Conferences | 0 comments

On the 30th of November 2009 I was one of the lucky ones to attend the first-ever TED-related event in Germany. TEDx Berlin was organized by German communication agency red onion around Stephan Balzer and took place at the Grand Hyatt in Berlin. Stephan Balzer was also the moderator of the event and did a great job guiding through the day. The location was also a great choice as it (apparently) offered all its services for free to the event and the layout of the hotel and its facilities supported the collaborative character of the event.

The event was organized meticulously and it was just a great pleasure to be guided through the day. The choice of speakers and their stories was phenomenal as the list was quite diverse, some talks were in a sense complementing, and the whole atmosphere was very stimulating.

The balance between talks and opportunities to talk to the speakers and other participants was excellent. Frequent coffee breaks and a very nice lunch gave everyone the opportunity to network.

My Favourite Talks

Till Behnke – The Web of Trust

Till Behnke’s presentation about the web or trust was another great example of how web technologies (being very intangible) can solve a very pressing and devastating issue like poverty or lack of access to resources (being very tangible). His website is achieving this through matching supply and demand. Mr. Behnke told the audience about his younger years when he made the transformation from an up and coming rugby player to corporate player to internet entrepreneur.

Having visited South Africa and having seen its beauty and foremost its devastating problems he decided to attempt to change something about it. He started off with organizing some volunteers for a housing project but was never quite satisfied since he could not find access to a larger lever that would really move things. When researching opportunities to raise money he was shocked by the amount on in-transparency in most charitable organizations. His project betterplace.org is giving people with lack of resources access to people with resources. They are “merely” matching people with projects to people with money and the desire to invest it in charitable projects. I enjoyed his presentation a lot since the level of energy was very high. Till Behnke was not really talking just about a problem but more a problem that he made his own. The level of pure passion to talk about this topic was very inspiring.

Ralf Schmerberg – Who is Independent in the 21st Century?

What I liked especially about Mr. Schmerberg’s talk was that he showed some vulnerability and shared some very personal thoughts. He talked extensively about his “past” life in which he was part of a corporate machine that he started to hate more and more. Finally, he broke out of it and changed the direction of his life. Instead of using his energy to promote and sell products in large amounts he dedicated more and more of his time to “independent” (film) projects.

An interesting approach that his projects take is to not pay anything. According to Mr. Schmerberg this works out perfectly. The idea is simple: They don’t pay themselves, external service providers, and they also not sell their movies. He made the comparison of what would have happened if they tried to sell their latest documentary. Had they tried the traditional channels he claimed that they might have sold 50k copies of the film but instead they made it available online and had 4m views in a very short time. Overall, Mr. Schmerberg’s message was to really think about how independent you are from people, money, ideologies, and preconceived opinions.

Peter Eigen – Grand Corruption & Petty Corruption – Fighting them Through Civil Society

Mr. Eigen was the most inspiring speaker of the day for me personally. Having worked for the World Bank Mr. Eigen told stories about facing grand corruption and his deep desire to stop it. In other words he said that corruption is in many developing places the root of all evil and rather culminates problems than to solve them. He named corruption as prime reason for poverty since corruption creates inefficient and economically unjustifiable situations.

He founded Transparency International with this dilemma in mind and formed the hypothesis that corruption could only be fought through the formation of a civil society. Mr. Eigen went on to explain this: The backbone of the idea is that corruption is criminalized (in many developed nations this is apparently still not the case) and society itself is the driving force behind an enforcement. In other words corruption becomes socially unacceptable and is not tolerated at all by the citizens. This is especially important in developing nations as this would prevent waste of public money.

One of the most remarkable things about Mr. Eigen’s talk was that he spoke from decades of experience. His service in the World Bank gave him a great look and perspective from the inside that he generously shared with the audience. Also his level of passion for the topic and clarity with which he presented made is a pure pleasure to listen to him.

My Favourite Video

One rule a TEDx event has to apply is to show a certain amount of videos of the “real” TED conference in Monterrey. The team of TEDx Berlin presented a great choice of videos: David Logan’s “Tribal Leadership”, Pattie Maes’ “The 6th Sense”, and “Hans Rosling’s “The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen”. I knew Hans Rosling’s and  Pattie Maes’ talk already and they are more than a must-watch.

The talk given by David Logan is very inspiring and fascinating since he shows how our society (or better: all societies around the globe) actually work like tribes. His main point is that we all live and work in tribes and that we are part of many tribes.

You can find the video here: David Logan on Tribal Leadership

(At this moment TEDx Berlin has not yet published any pictures or videos – I will add them when they come online eventually.)

So would you go again?

It was the very first TEDx in Germany and I will try to attend all the upcoming TEDx events near me. The level of inspiration is overwhelming and I can only recommend it to anyone who is interested beyond whatever it is they are doing. Luckily, the organizers announced that in about 6 months they will try to realize TEDx Hamburg which I will try to be a part of as well. Thank you for the great event!