Discover 10 swiss mobile start-up that have taken part to the competition during first Swiss Mobile Basecamp in January! DidThis, formerly known as Quantter, is a startup mixing the world of micro-blogging, self-tracking and business intelligence. They’ve built an application ” to spread actions”. You can start a trend and… change the world. DidThis guess is that small actions, done many times by millions of people will induce real change. In Beta phase, they had around 500 registered people. The startup applied to YCombinator and was in the last 150 (on a total of 3’500 teams applying). A potential usecase presented by Denis would be for fitness coaches, who can drive action and enhance motivation from their customers. Matthias presented his mobile mafia-game, where you can walk in the real world and play virtual games (accomplish missions, etc.). You can …
App store economics: key learnings from Swiss Mobile Basecamp
Nobody talks about app stores fragmentation and, according to Andreas Constantinou, that’s a real pain for mobile application developers. In fact, if you develop applications on multiple mobile OS (iOS, Android, Symbian, Windows, RIM), how do you manage them all efficiently (each one has different reglementation, etc.)? He quoted Steven Elop, CEO of Nokia, who imaged the mobile industry like that “Battle of devices has become a war of ecosystems: devices do not only compete on hardware & software, but also on developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social, etc.”. I’ll try to describe some key learnings of the presentation in this post, if you attended the talk and can complete it, I’ll be thankful! Appstores are a really complex business, as you have to manage 5 critical pillars: Software foundations: for instance, Google is the Master in this; Developer ecosystem: …
10+1 myths on the Mobile App Economy
Andreas Constantinou made the first presentation of Swiss Mobile Basecamp last Wednesday. Andreas is founder and CEO of VisionMobile, a London-based company providing high level market analysis. I’ve tried to catch the essence of his talk and would welcome every complementary learning. App are making profit for Apple and Google: No, Apple and Google provide great distribution platforms, which are barely profitable. For instance, Apple operates AppStore with small profits (just a bit up break-even). Apps drive platform’s core business. It’s all about smartphones: No, leading ecosystems players battle not just on smartphones, but on 4 screens (computer, smartphone, tablets and TV). Every device is dedicated to a different usecase. HTML5 is a platform that can replace native apps: No, it’s a complementary technology. HTML5 has no clear leader now, what would be necessary to bring it further. HTML5 can …
Swiss Mobile Basecamp #1
First mobile base camp took place on Wednesday at Swisscom office. Around 100 people, from which a good 80% were working in startups, attended the event. Morten Grauballe explained the story and challenges faced by his company, Red Bend. An interesting point was when he discussed about standards and recommended not to reinvent the wheel. Standards have the advantages to allow for a conversation, create market categories, foster competition, allow to reuse some technology. He also warned entrepreneurs: not everything is a platform (as lot of founders talk about their product as such). Another worthful quote was that ” software is universal, people no”, supporting that team is everything! Martin Tannerfors from Kumquat Labs talked about his start-up experience oversea (in the Bay area) and in Europe. He described 5 personal observations about Bay area, as “don’ts”, that is… don’t: …
My thoughts on LeWeb’11
Around 6 weeks that LeWeb’11 is over… Again, more than 3’000 participants, worldclass speakers including Eric Schmidt or Karl Lagerfeld. Why is this event so successful ? You can say it’s now too big to be really worthful. But I think it really depends on what you’re looking for. You have to set up some objectives for the event, not being there because it’s cool. Many startups try to announce their official product launch there… with relative success, I guess. Because everyone tries to do it during the event, there is just an information overflow… And maybe your “breakthrough amazing game-changing” application is not so… compelling. From my observation, bloggers and journalists are more looking from live and « disruptive » announcements from already rather successful companies, like « Spotify radio » or « Evernote’s to-do list » this year. Why covering the launch of unknown random …
Meeting Karl Lagerfeld
One of the first celebrity to be interviewed by Loic Lemeur during LeWeb’11 was Karl Lagerfeld, the famous fashion designer. Either you love him, or you hate him… but no one seems to be indifferent to this guy. Myself, I discovered a geeky designer, rather strange and a bit mad: he owns 4 iPhones, 100+ iPods, 30+ iPads… Or a demonstration on how you can use one iPod per playlist and one iPad per pictures collection… Hightech used so badly… Crazy that nobody explained him how to manage his playlists or pictures! Or probably, it’s because he simply doesn’t want to be helped? Karl is probably one of the best fashion designers ever, but has a complex personality (shown when the display of a video from one of his iPad was not in landscape view, he simply… cracked up a …