Our home turf…
Interesting insights in worldwide ecosystem for startups - Munich is not on Top25 list. Doesn’t matter, we have found the perfect eco system to grow Veact here!
Great talk on Entrepreneurship! One nice quote in the direction of software engineers and geeks: “sales people are not a lower life form”
Certainly agree! To create a great product that solves a relevant problem is at the core of every successful company but the art of selling distinguish whether your business will survive or not!
Great talk on why people buy things, decision making and inspiring others!
People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. (Simon Sinek)
I came across this service at techcrunch and for me their offering is what I’ve been waiting for. 10$ per month to have unlimited online storage fully integrated on every device you will ever use - it mounts just like any other hard drive and uses the local disk space to cache files you use on a regular basis. I’m testing it right now and if bitcasa keeps its promises - this will be the next big thing!
Private email is dead but certainly not in the corporate world. It’s time for startups to spearhead towards a more productive corporate social media use
There are several observations and personal experiences that lead me to conclude that private email has lost significance to most people feeling home in the world of social media. I might even go so far that the rise of new communication channels (Facebook, Xing, Skype) and the availability of all these channels through my iPhone on one platform will make me abandon my private email account as a main channel for personal communication. It will become a seldom visited database to look up specific information e.g. flight details.
Due to less and less relevant emails in my large stream of spam, status messages from various social sites and services and newsletters I once signed up to, I have partly stopped synchronizing my private email account on my mobile device (my primary platform for private communication). The folder “unknown sender” is checked by me about 1 time a week and out of 100 emails I look at maybe one or two.
This is definitely not true for business mail but how long before it will start to change – we have started using Skype, Salesforce-Chatter…
I hate digital christmas cards unless they are handwritten
I’ve come to notice that the physical handwritten Christmas card has almost died out in my circle of friends and family. I guess people are just too busy during Christmas to find time for writing a couple of notes or nobody cares about me anymore;-)
While the stream of Christmas cards has died there has been a massive increase of mass emailed Christmas cards, Facebook posts and Twitter messages that people are spamming me with. What else to define a message that is send to hundreds of recipients without any personal note to it?
To me this is a typical example for the misunderstanding of the great advance in digital communication. Just because you can easily and cheaply reach out to many people doesn’t mean you create any personal value to friends and family by mass-communication. The personal value comes just like in the old days from a few lines of personal engagement.
I love people texting me by any means of communication during Christmas. A couple of lines letting me know how they are doing and wishing me well. This is a handwritten digital Christmas card as I like to see it. While everyone else follows the mass-communication concept I’m forced to send classical Christmas cards because I have to fear that my personal message is lost in a flood of Christmas spam.
My motivation to write this post was not to make anyone feel bad. I just thing it’s a good anology why so many corporate users suck at digital communication. Instead of using the cheaper digital channels to invest in tailoring the content to the customer, the mass-mail approach is taken. Exceptions are slowly developing but the majority of small and medium sized businesses have not taken the personal experience they create every day in the offline world to online communication. Or has your business sent out a digital Christmas card with a customized note or just a mass mail?
Techcrunch Disrupt as a startup launch platform or Veact wins the award for best dressed team
While my co-founder is already on his way back from San Fran to Germany I will stay around a couple of more days in the bay era to suck in more of the entrepreneurial spirit that defines this city.
The last 3 days we have been busy utilizing our tickets for Disrupt SF 2011. The event is one of the most important for startups to present to the public and potential investors. Our team presented at the startup alley together with 200 other startups that displayed their products to more than 2.000 participants.
As with the founder of techcrunch and other influential writers leaving techcrunch due to internal disputes and allegations it turned out to be one of the largest and best events in a long series of disrupts. I think everyone tried the best to put on a great conference partly as a contribute to Mike and partly as a stand to prove that it will go on without him.
My personal take away from this event is the following:
- As a German-based b2b-startup you have to have a compelling reason to go and you have to know exactly whom to talk. I saw many teams wasting a lot of time talking to other startups or participants that were irrelevant at the current stage. As for us we are buidling our product in a German and English version and have already established some contacts with potential customers in the US market. Our goal was to establish first contacts with potential sales partners and talk to potential investors.
- Be aggressive in approaching potential contacts and differenitate yourself from the crowd. I think 75% of all startups did either mobile or social B2C products and some did a great job in getting the crowd involved e.g. twitbitz (unfortunately they didn’t convince me). As a B2B we were one of the few teams presenting in a suite and having a product demo on our table. Than it was all about reading the company name and picking the right people. We made more than 25 relevant contacts that way, some of people we thought to be unreachable to us!
- The next big thing if they make it work - bitcasa unlimited storage across all your devices implemented in your operating system. No, it’s not synchronizing your files in a folder like dropbox, so that you need exactly the amount of space on your local harddrive. It’s using your local harddrive as a cache and has predictive capabilities built in so that it keeps the files you are using on a regular basis available local. Besides all the geek talk they have a very strong team and backup from investors. I signed up for the beta - lets see if I’m right.
The whole event is caught on video so you can get a taste of what the conference was like: Disrupt SF 2011 was great!
There are definetly pros and cons to bring in “experienced” outsiders but the article makes some compelling arguments to not kick-out the founders too early. In the end it will be a mixed management of insiders and outsiders that probably performance best. At least Google is a beautiful show case for this!
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always try to do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, are great.
“
| — | Mark Twain |
After many painstaking months of long hours, order-in sushi and cheap beer, the time arrives to release your app into the wild. In the case of our shiny new helpdesk app Groove, we spent our spring months (4 to be exact) in product development and recently staged our preliminary launch in a…
Innovation doesn’t have to make sense or how to build a take-away music system for a Guetta “Shower-Party”
I just stumbled over this boring definition of innovation. Since I love exploring new ideas and innovations I was shocked about this mechanical, outcome-focused definition that seems to be the school book answer:
The process by which an idea or invention is translated into a good or service for which people will pay, or something that results from this process.
To be called an innovation, an idea must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need. Innovation involves deliberate application of information, imagination, and initiative in deriving greater or different value from resources, and encompasses all processes by which new ideas are generated and converted into useful products.
In my opinion this misses out the geek factor. I use the term geek in a broader sense, now it’s mostly people involved with IT but that’s not the distinctive factor. A geek is somebody curious to open new doors through testing new things out, rearranging and combining established technology. Most important a geek mostly ignores established rules to the degree that he sometimes is considered a nerd!
Back in the 15th century Columbus was a geek! But unlike a nerd that is socially isolated he was social enough to convince people to invest in his expedition.
Privately I’m an “all-must-be-wireless” geek!
Example 1: One-room appartment with overenginieered w-lan network including printer
Early 2003 I moved in a one room appartment and WLan router became affordable for students. Like any student I had a desk set up with laptop but to stay focused I loved to move around and work lying in my bed, work in an upright position on my bar table or sit in the sun in front of my house.
Now my vision was to transition smoothly between my favorite study spots and integrate visitors from my study group to have internet access and use my printer. I had to get rid of cables and still needed to be able to have a fully functional workspace. I bought a w-lan card for my laptop, a spare battery pack, network adapter for my back then huge laser printer and combined in a network.
Completely non-spectatcular today back then people I told about my setup called me crazy. Their response: Walk over to the desk if you need to print something, get a long enough lan cable, wireless is too expansive in a one-room apartment,…then I invited the members of my study group to join the network and they loved it. Drop by, be online and print on the spot and everything within 200m walking distance to uni (only my coffee was awful back then).
Example 2: One-room appartment with take-away music
Now that everybody has w-lan networks and printers it’s time to try something new. Thanks to the birthday present of 2 of my friends I’m able to stream music from any bluetooth device (my laptop, i-phone, Phil’s i-pad, visitors music player) to every corner of my place through a set of wireless speakers that I can unplug from the power supply and take with me on battery.
Today was the first Guetta “Shower-Party”. I Phone streams my play list, I took the speaker with me and had high quality sound in my bathroom. I just wait for the “Kitchen-Party” to happen.
Next step will be to include my giant flatscreen to be able to stream videos from my ipad. How cool is that, small party at my place and everybody gets to connect to show the latest youtube music videos. Is there an multi-user, video playlist feature app out there already?
My point for innovation is. In a couple of years we all will live in a wireless world, if you are a geek you don’t wait for the future. You want it now.
As for innovation in the company it’s not about establishing the right processes from idea to product. That’s a side issue, get together some geeks and give them the freedom to explore.
As for my venture I’m really happy to have started it with two geeks in the area of software development and marketing. When we first started it was pure joy to talk through new and disruptive ideas. Once we decided on the roadmap for one product we are now very much constrained by rolling out this first innovation of automotive marketing.
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
(Linus Pauling)
To stay innovative in the future our team will need to get back in the exploring of some of the thousands ideas from each others areas of expertise and combine them to new products. This will only happen if we manage to get away from the daily business just like going to San Fran on the biggest geek conference in the world!
And guess what, there is no business case for this trip that’s why our former employers would have never let us go - but for our startup this trip will be very valuable to stay innovative!
