As you already probably know, the two biggest startup scenes in Europe are London and Berlin. The last one is growing. And making extremely good progress to catch up. I’ve published some thoughts and facts about London some weeks ago. As well as you often hear about the European startup capitals, you often don’t know where to go to get the pulse of the scene. Here are the two hotspots I’ve discovered and visited during my trip in Berlin: Sankt Oberholz and Betahaus (if you know other places, please comment!). These place are 2 co-working places, but are basically…restaurants for the public side. Seems strange, no? Is there a place like this in Switzerland now? Nope. Or at least I don’t currently know! You can simply come there, benefit from a free wifi and that’s it. Sure, they also have …
One week left to Next Berlin!
We are getting closer to NEXT Berlin, happening next Tuesday & Wednesday. Program of the conference has just been released (discover it) and… it looks really exciting! For keynotes to workshops, actionable content and advices are key. The only problem I see: I cannot duplicate myself! The conference has now selected the NEXT100 Top Influencers of the Digital Industry in 2013 (remember my post back in February). Two Swiss entrepreneurs have make it, even in the Top40! Samuel Müller, founder of mobile barcode scanning company Scandit. Dominik Grolimund, serial entrepreneur who has, to date, already founded and sold 2 startups: Wuala and Silp. Big applause to Samuel and Dominik, who deserve it! I’m happy to have suggested and registered these 2 smart guys to NEXT100. If you have once the opportunity to grab a coffee with them… seize it, you won’t …
Where to get the skills you need for your startup journey
It is (or it should be) common sense that the team is what matters the most in a startup. And its ability to execute. Because if you have a rockstars team which fails to work together, well… It doesn’t bring the venture anywhere! You can be extremely competent in sales or in UX or in software development. But starting is a business is often tricky. You have suddenly many things to learn on the go, alongside working on your product. And no time. Yes, no time. The scarcest resource for startup entrepreneurs is T-I-M-E (well, money comes second and is really close, of course). As an entrepreneur, you only have “priority 1 tasks”… and everything seems urgent. Scaring? But so exciting, too! How do you get the skills you need as quickly as possible? Yeah, you can read blogs and …
It’s time to plan your trip… to Berlin!
We are already only 28 days away from NEXT BERLIN 2013… which is special for me, as it was the first conference I attended as a blogger, last year! Next is one of the leading European tech conferences, and probably the biggest in Germany. The conference’s main theme is, as you’ve already guessed with it’s name, “what’s next?”. Many technology and business trends will be discussed there. As well as there are some similarities with LiftConference (which is more about disrupting innovations), the main point of Next Berlin is: START-UP! Theme of the 2013 edition is “Here be dragons”, a phrase used to denote dangerous or unexplored territories, like in the medieval practice (where people put sea serpents and other mythological creatures in uncharted areas of maps). The digital map for the future will be discussed, that is, topics and …
Don’t miss Start Summit 2013!
We often hear people complaining there are no big startup events in Switzerland (except Lift Conference, but which is not so directly startup centric). But how many of you (especially in Western Switzerland) know Start Summit, happening next week in St.Gallen? I know it’s a bit far away from Geneva (just kidding… if you’re a startup entrepreneur and St.Gallen is the end of the world for you… please stop your journey now, you don’t have the global ambition your project deserves). Organized by the local team of the global student association START, the event expects welcoming more than 350 startup-minded guys from all over Switzerland (and also from Germany & Austria). They’ve managed to convince startup rockstars like Klaus Hommels (investor in Spotify, Skype, Facebook, etc.), Christophe Maire (serial entrepreneur currently managing txtr – as a regular reader of startupolic, you …
Hack finance at Open Data Camp!
Data is everywhere… What about encouraging our government and businesses to put more data online, and make it easier to extract knowledge and insight… adding value to currently disconnected pieces of information? Everyone generates many new data each minute, each second… and most of them are just stored and not really valued. Opendata.ch, the national chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation, invites every developer, designer and innovator to its hack days on finance, procurement, budgets and material worth taking place on Friday 22nd and Saturday 23rd of March. The hack days will happen in two locations (each will welcome at least 50 participants): Bern and Sierre. Everyone is qualified to attend the – free – event, you don’t have to be a rockstar designer or coder… you just need to have a good dose of creativity and energy to explore data …
Don’t know any female entrepreneurs from Switzerland ? Now you do.
It’s a coincidence this week that the 2 posts published on startupolic are on women in tech… as you’ve probably seen my post on Wednesday about Lady Pitch Night happening in Paris in April. Most of us, startup founders, has already seen that tech entrepreneurship is rather populated with men. We could debate the reasons, but that could be a subject for another post. I’ve asked some time ago charming tech blogger Roxanne Varza to write me a guest post… what she has kindly done today. Roxanne, a French girl but Silicon Valley native, is pretty engaged on the European tech startup scene and is currently serving Microsoft France as Startup Lead. She is the former Editor of TechCrunch France, co-organizes the annual Failcon Paris conference and has cofounded Girls in Tech in both Paris and London. She shares her thoughts on entrepreneurship in France/Europe on Techbaguette.com. …
Lady Pitch Night 2013
For the third year, Girl in Tech Paris and Orange partner to organize the only European startup competition dedicated to female entrepreneurs. There is a few days left to apply (deadline: 10th of March) and be selected to the final event happening in Paris on 4th of April 2013. Conditions of participations are wide open to every European (yes, Switzerland-based companies too!) startups which is (co-)founded by at least one girl. And which is less than 36 months and developing a tech product/service (that is: web, mobile, game, electronic). It’s not clear to me what you can win at the competition, but the 5 selected startups (on 60 applications last year) will be offered accommodation & the flight to Paris by Orange. Last year, for instance, the winner has been granted a ticket to the tech conference LeWeb (which, as you …