Berlin Digital » Deutsche Startups

BerlinWebWeek: GirlGeekDinner, Echtzeit and Zanox Summer Party

Alexander Kölpin — Sun, 31 May 2009 18:22:26 +0000

Wednesday and Thursday evening of the BerlinWebWeek 2009 were a good occasion to meet new people and catch up on old acquaintences. Nicole Simon invited the GirlGeeks who were around to her GirlGeekDinner to CoffeeKarma in Friedrichshain and Alexander Hüsing from Deutsche Startups invited the movers and shakers of the web scene to his Echtzeit III event at the zanox campus. Both events were invitation only, at least for men.

Women are of course the target group of the GirlGeeKDinner, so men to come along need to find a female companion, thankfully the website allows you to ask to be “adopted”. ..and the concept works, more than half ot the people were were women. The atmosphere was relaxed, one is encouraged to present ideas and projects. A student presented her idea to write about the History of the Push Button, something I really liked. Or was it the Button Push? I do not know, I just hope she finds partners to write with, and do it interactively, in some kind of portal, web site, as she suggested.
Echtzeit (Realtime) was invitation only for everybody, no matter which gender. Short presentations were followed by networking between a lot of entrepreneurs, founders and investors. This concept works as well in my opinion, the relatively small event (under 200 people) allows you to find the people you want to talk to or get intros to new contacts. The businesslike atmosphere suits the event and is nevertheless relaxed enough, no wonder, it’s all about the web.
A much bigger crowd gathered when zanox called for their summer party – I can only repeat estimats that roughly a thousand people met at Spindler&Klatt on the other side (seen rom zanox’ offices) of the river Spree. It was a great party, exhausted as I was from the BerlinWebWeek (it was the 5th day of conferences, barcamps, networking and parties) I left after midnight, the twitterstream tells me that the last people left when the sun was almost up… I would not have liked to miss anything of this and was happy that I could be part of it. A big thank you to all the organizers!

BerlinWebWeek: Webinale, RailsWayCon, PHPConference und Virtual Worlds Camp

Alexander Kölpin — Sun, 31 May 2009 12:36:54 +0000

This week, the BerlinWebWeek 2009, was hard so far – lots of events, meetings and parties to go to. Having initiated this BerlinWebWeek I tried to be at all the events and I almost succeeded. Most of my time I spent at the webinale conference, the strategy and business oriented conference track of the Software & Support Verlag presented by create or die in the Berliner Conference Center bcc, accompanied by the two technical conferences RailsWayCon and International php Conference. The webinale also hosted the Frogster Virtual Worlds Camp, which concentrated on virtual worlds and virtual goods.

webinale conference at bcc, Berlin

The bcc, designed by the Bauhaus Student and probably most well known East German architect Hermann Henselmann, lends itself very well to conferences like this. It is small enough to not feel lost inside and has an open atmosphere. That it is located in the very center of Berlin is another point for it. It suited the feeling of the webinale, many tracks to choose from and lots of networking opportunities. I was there every day for at least half a day, from the first startupday on monday to the following full conference days. I missed the webinale crawl, 3 parallel guided office tours through Berlin-based web companies but I look forward to join next year. Looking for food for thought I joined the keynotes of Ossi Urchs and the one from Karlheinz (call me Charly) Toni, the Austrian CEO of the British startup Piins. Piins is his 2nd project after Miomi.

Karlheinz Toni, CEO of Piins

Toni’s key note topic was “The flaw of the internet and modern communication“. It started out well with some maths about exponential functions and their relation to the internet and its growths resp. question, whether its growths (data flow) could be accomodated by the technical infrastructure/standards. However, at some place it turned into how contents can be combined and displayed on the same page/window. ..which is where Piins comes into play. I enjoyed the start of his speech, he was very entertaining and invited everybody to visit him and his team on his houseboat Nr. 10 in London.
An invitation to play was the keynote of Kevin Slavin from areacode. Areacode produces cross-media games and entertainment, his examples were entertaining and thought provoking. A member of areaplay is also involved in botanicalls, a device enabling plants to twitter and text messaging. His scarce use of powerpoint was also enjoyable.

Kevin Slavin of areacode

Deutsche-Startups.de online and offline

Alexander Kölpin — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:27:21 +0000

To get an overview about who is who and who is doing what in the German (speaking) Startup scene, a regular visit of Deutsche Startups is recommended. The portal, whose editorial office is located in Berlin, publishes a daily newsletter, offers a huge list of existing web startups, a long list of potential investors and an equally interesting list with companies already in the “dead pool“.

For entrepreneurs and employees equally interesting is the Jobboard with jobs for interns. The shareholders of the portal are chief editor Alexander Hüsing, Stefan Vosskötter (managing director of DS Media and founder of „Webnews“) as well as the European Founders Fund (a.k.a. the Samwer brothers) and Holtzbrinck Ventures.
Since the end of 2008 on one can experience Deutsche Startups also offline, Alexander Hüsing has established a series of events called Echtzeit, which has been organized with the help of sponsors already twice in Berlin. I was on the 3rd of February at Echtzeit II Berlin in the premises of Zanox with over 170 other guests. The topic of the day was “External Financing vs. Bootstrapping”, very suitable for the economic situation of the first quarter of 2009. Since the event is an invitation only event the percentage of entrepreneurs and investors was very high among the guests. I can only recommend to use Deutsche Startups.de online (if you know a little German) and offline to get introduced to what is happening in Germany and German speaking regions in the web 2.0 area.