Geekness - closer to the world » Startup

TechCrunch Meetup 2008 – A Look Back

CoCaman — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:44:31 +0000

It has been two years since UK based TechCrunch co-editor Mike Butcher has payed the Swiss startup scene a visit. My recordings of the elevator pitches have been viewed over 5000 times. Some more often like Poken, with over 600 views, others with only 14 views. Now that two years have passed, I thought it might be a good idea and look back. Were any of the startups successful? Are they still around? Have some exited or joined the dead pool? To answer this questions I have created the following list with a quick status update for each startup, which presented. The list is in no particular order.

OptionRating: fabware, creating iPhone apps
FundExplorer: renamed to ETFexplorer?
Sobees: developed clients for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others for various devices (iPhone, iPad, web)
mixin: never heard much of them, no real update since May 2009
groops: no progress or big update, seems to have stopped
dixero: not sure, page still asks for pre-registrations, not a very active twitter feed, blank pages on website
CulturePod: active, creating new interview and videos
Cassiber: doing fine
babyZbook: dead pool? no information found
Zattoo: sold to Swiss news paper group TA Media
yes: online radio with chat? still great domain name (yes.com)
wuala: joined French based LaCie (manufacturer of hard drives), stores over 200 million files
webnode: still running, not sure if this counts a Swiss startup
W2ML: no idea…
trigami: still located in Basel, still in the same business
swisspoll: no clue, they don’t have a CEO or anything
SwarmCast: no clue, last press release is from September 2009
Starfruit: create/buy goods in Second Life and let them deliver to your real life, dead?
six signs: no idea, no information found, dead?
Semacle: no updates since August 2009, dead?
routeRank: alive, no idea how well they are doing
Profession Web: not sure, blog?
procedural: doing pretty well, I suppose
poken: personally still not a fan, funding over 2 million Swiss francs, now based in San Francisco
playyoo: on autorun, last blog entry from August 2009
NewsCred: still active in creating custom online newspapers
LiberoVision: doing great, big presence in the 2010 World Cup
kleWel: active, no idea how well they are doing
key lemon: selling their software for CHF 19.95
holistis: no idea, not a clue
gbanga: product launched, expanding
Faircustomer: selling stuff
doodle: reporting 6 million unique users a month
bluewatchdog: still active, product works on new devices/phones
amiando: not really swiss startup, but doing great
amazee: launched their white label product
Supertext: doing very well

History of reMail

CoCaman — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:52:28 +0000

By now you should have heard that reMail, an email search client for the iPhone, has been bought by Google and was removed from the AppStore. What is a little bit more interesting in my eyes is a look back. What was reMail like in version 1, and what has changed.

In the very first business plan Gabor has shown me, the idea for his startup was completely different. I can not talk about this publicly, because I think this could be something Google might be interested in as well. But if you know Gabor and know how “obsessed” he is with email, you can imagine how cool his initial idea was.

reBoxed

Even before the first version of reMail was available, Gabor made some good press by creating reboxed. Basically it was just a way to learn about the GMail API, fetching emails and displaying them. But what reboxed did, was forcing you to prioritize between two of your GMail contacts. You could select if emails from your boss are more important than emails from your team-leader or girlfriend.

Version 1.x

A month later, on May 11th 2009, version 1.0 of reMail was released. In this first version of reMail, you did not download all your emails to your iPhone. Instead, you had to pay a monthly fee to reMail and your email credentials. reMail then connected via IMAP to your email servers, downloaded all your emails to their servers and started indexing them. The search was extremely fast and smart.

reMail Search doesn’t just search the subject, to, and from – it’s full-text search of your email, on your device.

Even better, reMail Search works offline! You can search your email when you’re driving through a tunnel or when you’re in a plane. Our server syncs emails you’re likely to search for on the device, and you can search them even when you’re offline. When you’re offline, you can search your entire email archives – with older search results coming from reMail’s server.

Maybe you already see the problem: You allow reMail to connect and download your emails. Many people wanted a better email search than what Apple had included in the iPhone’s mail application. But handing out credentials is something very sensible. TechCrunch Jason Kincaid noted:

The biggest issue, though, is privacy. ReMail works by sucking in your messages from your IMAP server and hosting them on its own server, which is optimized for rapid searching. Cselle says that the server is secure and that all messages are encrypted, but acknowledges that ReMail does have access to your Email. The company vows never to access or read any of it, unless they are given written permission to do so in the case of a support issue.

Version 2.x

So instead of connecting and indexing the emails on reMail’s servers, the version 2.x of the application (released in August 2009) downloads all or selected email folders to your iPhone. One of the biggest challenges the team had to overcome, was the limited space on your iPhone. Hundreds of thousands of emails can easily add up to several Gigabytes of data. But they managed it! And 100’000 emails only need 500 MB (5.12 KB/email) if downloaded and indexed. The initial price was $4.99, raising to $9.99 after September 1st.
On September 21st reMail for GMail was launched. It allowed to connect a single GMail account to reMail. The price was $1.99.
The business model of reMail was changed on December 14th 2009 once again. Instead of charging for basic features like GMail connectivity, these features are now free.

Support for Gmail and Google Mail accounts is included for free. You can purchase IMAP support inside the application,by clicking on “Buy reMail Features”. IMAP support costs $3.99:

In November 2009, reMail announced the availability of a $0.99 reMail version for Rackspace customers.

reMail version 2.11 seems to be the last released version of the application before Google bought the small and smart startup. In an interesting move, somebody claims to reverse engineer reMail and release it as open source. Personally I think this is not okay, but I can also understand that people seem to depend on reMail and the possibility to search emails very fast and in an easy way.

Update March 5th 2010: Gabor just informed, that reMail is now Open Source. You can download the source code from Google Code.

I really hope Gabor can fulfill his vision of email at his new job at Google.
All the best, my friend.

Communicating with US Blogs

CoCaman — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:19:37 +0000

The following presentation was just a small idea in my head on a train ride from Zurich to Basel a few days ago. But I think and after talking to a few friends, colleagues and partners I decided to go for it. The following presentation should give every startup a basic idea on how they can contact an American blog like TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, CenterNetworks or any other blog and pitch them your idea or business. If you follow these tips, your chances are much higher than if you just sent a mass email to all of the blogs.
The slides should be self-explanatory. But if you do not understand something or want to discuss about it, please feel free to send me an email or add your input to the comments below.

Communicating With US Blogs

View more presentations from Corsin Camichel.

You can also view the presentation on my SlideShare account.

And if you have any more tips or ideas, please feel free to share them with us. Maybe we can create a better resource and get more Swiss startups covered on US blogs.

“Communicating with US blogs“ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Switzerland License.

Startups at the StartupCamp2010 #scs10

CoCaman — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:14:26 +0000

Close to 150 people showed up at the StartupCamp 2010 edition in Basel on February 2010. And most of these people actually are working or running a startup. My question is, what startups where actually on site to talk about their product or company? I tried to compile a list of the startups that came to mind. If I forget yours, please leave a comment and I will add you.

Amazee
Amiando
memonic
Procedural
mySwissChocolate
wuala
Doodle
SoBees
GetYourGuide
SuperText
Rahel’s Sweet Temptations
cyon
PolitNetz.ch
FashionFriends
Romazini
Offerten24.ch
razuna
openfactory
GRYPS Offertenportal
Your startup is missing? Please post a comment with name and URL.

The list is in no particular order.

21 Tips On How To Build A Cheap Startup

CoCaman — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 12:20:05 +0000

At the second Swiss StartupCamp (see my coverage here and here), Dorian Selz and Toni Birrer held a presentation with the title “21 Tips On How To Build A Cheap Startup”. And if you know or have ever heard of Toni and Dorian you know, these guys have something to tell and you better listen. The same was true this time again. No wonder the room was fully packed with current startupers, coming startup founders and some general interested people. Their 21 rules are actually quiet simple, but also a good resource to take care if you launch your own startup.

I will outline the most important points in my opinion (and as a developer, not primarily as a business guy).

Rule 3 Get a business person into the team. This rule goes with Rule 4 “Get a professional bookkeeper”. If you are a techie, you don’t really want to worry about to much business or finance. Dorian also mentioned, that a bookkeeper is really, really important. The bad tax guy can always wait around to corner and have a few surprises for you. And also your investors want to see numbers and crunch them. At the end, your business is sold based on numbers, less on lines of code or design patterns.

Rule 7 Atlassian Starter License, this should make your techie happy. Even if it sounds stupid to have to track all bugs, requests and so forth, this is a really important issue. And of course this is not only valid for startups but also for bigger corporations.

Rule 12 Do online backups! First of all, do backups and backup everything.

Rule 13 Use free stuff. Don’t run your own email server (use Google Apps), don’t run your own webserver (use Metanet). Don’t spend time and money on such things. And the others do this well and it is their core business, not yours.

Rule 20 80% of success is showing up! Attend free events (eg. WebTuesday, WebMonday, BarCamp, StartupCamp …). Present your idea, product, team. Host an event at your offices. If you do not talk about your product, others won’t either!

Of course there are many other rules and points to take care off. Toni has collected all relevant links in a collection on memonic. As soon as the presentation is available online, I will link to it.

Update 15th February: Toni and Dorian put the slides as PDF and the talk as a MP3 file online. Thanks guys!

StartupCamp2010 #scs10

CoCaman — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 10:53:02 +0000

My first reaction at 5pm yesterday was like “wow, this was the best startup event I have ever been”. Everything just feels right. Looking back at the second Swiss StartupCamp I thinks this is definitely something we can and should repeat. Lots of people discussing, interacting and sharing ideas.

Things I liked much more than last year

No keynote speaker: The audience did show little to no interest in the keynote speaker.
Less rooms: Only four rooms so people either participated in a discussion in a room which very often where full or in smaller groups at the food and drinks corner
Handmade Swiss Chocolate: mySwissChocolate.ch are very nice and smart guys. Love their idea and product.
No Poken: Sorry, but that hype is so not hot any more…
… and finally, I took the right tram and train home

You can find the rest of my coverage on StartupCamp2010 under this link.

A big compliment goes to Dania, Patrick, Ansgar, Daniel, MatthiasS and the rest of the organizational team. Also a big thank you to Oona, Carola, Soojung, Fredy, MathiasM, Michael and all the other volunteers! And I promise to help more in the preparations next time. But they all did a great job! And of course a big thank you to all the sponsors: i-net Basel, FHNW Basel, acceleris, Oracle, CTI Invest, De Vigier Foundation, amiando, amazee.

Photos of the event can be found on Flickr, tweets should be tagged with #scs10 and blog posts can be found on Google’s Blogsearch.

Thanks for coming and giving us a little of your time and sharing your ideas and thoughts! It was great!

Webtuesday Job Board

CoCaman — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 10:07:02 +0000

A couple of days ago the official Webtuesday Job Board has been launched. Head over to the Webtueady wiki to take a look at open positions at some technology and Internet related companies in Zurich and Switzerland.

No matter if you are looking for a job as PHP or Ruby On Rails developer or as a system administrator in a Linux environment, chances are good some swiss startup is looking for a highly talented person.

Or if yourself are looking for talent, add your positions to the wiki and I am sure, people will contact you.

Register for StartupCamp 2010 Switzerland in Basel!

CoCaman — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:07:49 +0000

The first StartupCamp in Switzerland took place in January 2009 and brought together young and future entrepreneurs in Switzerland in the process of building or planning a business in the high-tech, Web or life-science industry. The StartupCamp 2009 was such a success that the organization team clearly decided to organize another camp in 2010!

The StartupCamp aims to transfer knowledge and know how in the relaxed atmosphere of a Barcamp and to demonstrate the various possibilities to get help on your way to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Tracks can include writing a business plan, fundraising, building the right team, startup support agencies in Switzerland, web technologies, marketing & PR and much more. The attendees learn from each other and expand their network with new interesting contacts. Thanks to all sponsors this event is free for all attendees.
The sponsors are Acceleris, FHNW Basel, i-net BASEL, CTI Invest, Oracle, SUN Microsystems, DeVigier Stiftung, Amiando and Amazee.

Date & venue

The StartupCamp Switzerland 2010 will take place in Basel on Saturday, 13 February 2010 from 10am to 5pm at the same place as last year: University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz FHNW), right at the main train station, Peter-Merian-Strasse 86, 4002 Basel. The registration opens at 9am and an after-party is planned for the evening, so reserve the whole day and evening!

Registration is now open

Registration for the StartupCamp Switzerland 2010 is now open at http://www.amazee.com/startupcamp-switzerland-0
For registering you just need to click „I’m attending“ on the front page of the project magazine.
If you RSVP “I’m attending” and later decide that you will not attend the StartupCamp, please remove your name from the list as soon as possible as space is limited.

Spread the word!

Please give others the chance to find out about this event by talking and writing about it. Help us spread the word and make the StartupCamp 2010 a great event!

The StartupCamp Switzerland Team
Ansgar Wollnik, Dania Gerhardt, Patrick Liechti, Matthias Sala, Carola Ettenreich, Daniel Ebneter

Lacie Promotes Wuala with new Hard Drives

CoCaman — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:07:13 +0000

How could I miss that? Swiss idol startup Wuala, part of French Lacie, gets integrated with new hard drives from Lacie. If you buy a new LaCie Rikiki drive (either 250, 500 oder 640 GB) you get at least 10 GB of Wuala online storage.

To bad there is not more information on the Lacie webpage. But be sure, according to the photo above from Wuala, the 10 GB will be included.
I think this is pretty cool and definitely the way the two companies should work together. Wuala is an amazing online service and their backup system is great. Now you can backup to your USB and your most important stuff to Wuala.

Buy Lacie Rikiki 500 GB USB Drive at Amazon.com

How To Correctly Inform Your Customers, @slideshare

CoCaman — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 11:43:15 +0000

SlideShare is updating its webservers. How I know this? Because I got lucky. There is no notice on the website or on the blog. The homepage loads fine. But if you click any link or want to view a presentation, all you see is a stupid 500 error message.

At around 7:21 am CET, the team posted a short notice on Twitter. But not a single word on the website. No news at all. So instead of presentations, all you see is the above message. And if they really are “being noticed” on the error, they are getting quiet e few messages .

Lesson from this hiccup: Put a down notice on your website and homepage. Don’t let your customers search for information, push it to them! And no, Twitter isn’t a good way to inform customers.

Project Participation Offer: Web Developer in Zurich

CoCaman — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:38:49 +0000

For a small start-up I am looking for a skilled web developer. For this project, I seek somebody that is interested in a partnership and gaining shares of the business to start and NOT, somebody that is “just” looking for a single assignment.

Required Skills:

Graphical know-how for front-end design
profound knowledge in various web technologies
Typo3 experience
PHP
HTML/CSS coding

Nice to have:

SQL (mySQL DB skills)
JavaScript
APIs (eg. Facebook connect)

If you are based in or around Zurich, Switzerland and are interested in the position, please drop me an email.

Memonic – The Information Capturer and Organizer

CoCaman — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:13:19 +0000

Yes, I admit it. I love chaos. At least that is what surrounds me. The icons on my Desktop seem to augment themselves. And I will not even start talking about my bookmarking technique (there isn’t any).

Luckily, I got help. And that help is a newly launched service out of Zurich, Switzerland. Nektoon, a one year old company has launched their first product memonic.

It is a simple but very useful little web service that allows you to capture (= copy) and organize snippets of information, images, maps, texts or websites and organize them. The user interface is similar to Google’s Gmail and users should understand it very quickly.
Inbox - Memonic_1257403046581" title="Your collection > Inbox - Memonic_1257403046581" width="450" height="279" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-2193" />
Above you see my little collection of things. You can group your items in different sets (Apple, CenterNetworks, Inbox) and re-order them. The interface also displays which of my items are public accessible (green icon on the right) and which are not (red icon).
The capturing of new items is very easy. You can either add them by hand with a rich text editor, mail the new snippets or use the memonic bookmarklet. This allows you to browse the web and highlight anything you like. After clicking on the bookmarklet, memonic captures the information and stores it in your collection. As easy as pie The bookmarklet even works if you are in private sections that are not accessible by others, like the Facebook stream or a private forum.

As far as I know, the business model behind the service is similar to Evernote. User are getting a freemium version with reduced space for items. If they want more space or other functionality they have to pay a low monthly fee.
Behind this magic lies the cloud computing technology of Amazon’s S3. I think it is safe to say that the service can handle a few users. So please, go ahead and register an account (you don’t have to, but it is more convenient). It is free and it helps you organize your chaos

Clicker Invites – Get Them Here

CoCaman — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 12:22:30 +0000

Clicker is a new way to watch your favorite TV-shows on the Internet. Instead of surfing from hulu.com to abc.com and to nbc.com, clicker allows you to view all the shows in one nice interface.

To bad its once again limited to the US audience and viewers. So if you are looking for an easy way to watch shows online, go ahead and register with the link below and get a exclusive beta invite to clicker.com.

http://www.clicker.com/invite/mlnWNzFHPmef2545C6yZjA

Also, check out the email Clicker sent out to their beta testers:

So, here are 5 invitations, bundled in one convenient link for you to distribute to whomever, and however, you wish. Email your friends or invite your Twitter followers or Facebook friends. It’s your call. (Just don’t sell them on eBay.)

Brizzly Invitation

CoCaman — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:22:54 +0000

Update November 10th Use this link for your Brizzly invite: http://bit.ly/iIHtY

After my in-depth review of Brizzly a new web-based Twitter client, I have now 10 invites to share. If you want on just add a comment below with your email address filled. I will invite you after that.

The Twitter Bird is now a Bear/Grizzly

CoCaman — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:34:58 +0000

There are hundreds, even thousands of Twitter clients out there. But most of the people still use the twitter.com website to update their tweets.
A new and in private beta testing mode Twitter client is “brizzly” and it offers some nice features for Twitter users.
The general user should be understanding the website quiet fast. The interface is very simple and light. The input area is bigger than the one of Twitter and has more buttons.

The draft button saves your text for later editing. The photo camera icon opens a file dialog which allows you to upload a picture to brizzly.com and adds an URL to the picture to your tweet.
This is also something brizzly does for tweets. If a person tweets an image or a video on YouTube, it is embedded directly and you do not need to browse away from your stream.
Something I find particularly good is that brizzly changes its title tag and adds an asterisk (*) if there are new tweets to read. So you can keep a tab on brizzly and write a blog post or read an online article and change to brizzly if a new tweet came in.

Same as the original twitter website, you have different options to navigate.
The @cocaman link displays all tweets mentioning you username (as expected), favorites displays your favorite tweets. New is the drafts and pictures links. The first shows tweets you have stored and not yet published. The later displays all the pictures you have uploaded to brizzly.

Another great feature is the “groups” section. You can create your own groups and add users to it.

If you click now on one of your groups, you only see the tweets of people in your group.

This really is helpful to follow your friends. The same goes for saved searches, that only display tweets from your followers that match your search.

To add a person to your group you simply click on the profile icon and select “Add to Group”. Easy

Something I always wanted for Twitter is some sort of “muting” or “hiding” of an user or a hashtag. With brizzly you can mute an user while still officially following him or her.

My feature request is to have the option to mute a topic or hashtag.

Which brings us to the last feature of brizzly I want to report. The trends and topics. This is something very important on Twitter. And brizzly puts a lot of weight in it. What brizzly does different from twitter is that they explain a topic. You can simply click on the topic and a text shows why this is trendy. Those texts are entered by users and therefor should be very relevant to the actual topic.

You can also add another twitter account and tweet from different accounts. I think this is one of the first websites that allow this.

I will give Brizzly a few days to see how good it fits my twitter-client-needs and maybe I switch from the twitter.com website over to it.

Geekness - closer to the world » Startup

TechCrunch Meetup 2008 – A Look Back

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History of reMail

reBoxed

Version 1.x

Version 2.x

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Communicating with US Blogs

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Startups at the StartupCamp2010 #scs10

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21 Tips On How To Build A Cheap Startup

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StartupCamp2010 #scs10

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Webtuesday Job Board

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Register for StartupCamp 2010 Switzerland in Basel!

Date & venue

Registration is now open

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Lacie Promotes Wuala with new Hard Drives

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How To Correctly Inform Your Customers, @slideshare

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Project Participation Offer: Web Developer in Zurich

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Memonic – The Information Capturer and Organizer

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The Twitter Bird is now a Bear/Grizzly

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