For the first time of startupolic short existence, I’ve decided to invite Miguel Molina, CEO of MySollars (on which I’ve blogged here some time ago), to share his experience attending ICT Spring 2012 in Luxembourg (I was unfortunately not able to attend). If you were going to ask me about the profile of people that attended the ICT Spring Event in Luxembourg, I would not hesitate with the answer, clearly, a little bit of everything! According to the official numbers, over 3’000 people attended and such a volume clearly gave the event the bandwidth to have salt and pepper, and a few other spices. We had startups, medium IT companies and large Telco companies on one side, all of us fighting for the consideration of attendants that were listening to presentations and discussion panels from ICT related experts, such as …
Discover the 10 startups awarded by De Vigier Foundation
2012 is the 25th anniversary of the creation of De Vigier Foundation, which aims to foster entrepreneurship in Switzerland. Bill De Vigier was a successful swiss entrepreneur, who was the man who revolutionized the building industry worldwide. The foundation created by Mr. De Vigier has one unique goal: foster entrepreneurship and bring a bit of friendly money to promising startups. Each year, 10 startups are selected for the award ceremony, and 5 receive a prize money of CHF 100’000.00. I’ve written down 3 interesting quotes from Bill De Vigier that are displaid in the De Vigier residence (amazing building by the way!), like: “Never spend seed money – spend income” “It’s better to aim big and fail than stay in the shadow and neither experience success nor failure” “If you can dream it – you can do it” For the …
8 web startup unveiling the Blue Lion Incubator in Zürich
Monday was time for the 6th ICT Investor Day, organized by Business Angel Switzerland‘s president Jan Fülscher. The concept is rather interesting: 8 startup pitch their idea in 90 seconds (with or without slides), and investor’s crew then select the 4 ones they’d like to see in 7 minutes presentation. Host of the event was this one the brand new startup incubator Blue Lion, which focus on ICT and clean tech. Tthe infrastructure of this coworking place seems really adequate, with a big open space of 36 desks and around 10 separated offices. The park has already tenants, but is far away from beeing complete. Normal, it’s just the beginning! Everything seems perfect… except if you’re coming from outside Zürich by train… you need more than 30 minutes. But come back to what you’d like to learn about: the startups! …
Meet Christophe Maire, a successful serial web entrepreneur (from Switzerland!)
Normal 0 21 false false false FR-CH X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:”Tableau Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:””; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:”Cambria”,”serif”; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} During my attendance to NEXT Berlin 2012 , I took the opportunity to meet a successful web entrepreneur originally from Neuchâtel, who is kind of unknown on the swiss web startup scene: Christophe F. Maire. Graduated in Business & Administration at University of St.Gallen, completing his education by attending executive education in NYU and Stanford Graduate School of Business, Christophe started is career in Japan as an Innovation Manager. Christophe moved to Berlin “by accident”: that was where he found the skills he was looking for. His first startup project was called CyberCinema, which was the first European network of electronic cinema venues, back in …
Discover 17 venture leaders, who build cutting-edge startups!
Tuesday afternoon has seen the first public appearance of the “Swiss Startup nationa team”, selected by the Switzerland-wide entrepreneurship education program venturelab. These 20 founders will travel to Boston early June and have the chance to present to US VC’s, meet US startups and many more other cool stuff. Here they are: STAFF FINDER is a startup dedicated to smooth the peaks and downs for Human Resources needs. It represents a “just-in-time” gap management solution for HR. OsmoBlue Energy provides a solution to transform low heat (<100° Celsius) into electricity, thanks a patented technology. Elodie Dahan, the founder, has been nominated captain of the team and was also granted the newly launched « Helbling innogrant award ». Swissto12 is supplying components and systems for terahertz signal transmission. SoSense is an online market place to match philantropy and entrepreneurship, selecting quality proven social …
Wake up, warm up… JURA startup!
This weekend was the first edition of Startup Weekend Jura, taking place in a crazy location: a wellness center! Around 50 people were participating to this event and not less than 23 ideas were presented on Friday night to the crew (just 60 seconds to tell what’s your idea, why you think there’s a great potential and who you’d like to recruit to work with you during the weekend!). After this pitch session, speakers had to get investors to finance their idea (each participants had dollars to spend on the 3 projects he likes most). Finally, 8 projects were selected and project leaders had to convince other participants to join the team… and 48 hours later, they had to pitch the project to a jury… But stop explaining what a Startup Weekend is, here are the projects! PickSell: a service …
7 new laws for a world gone digital
Velocity is a book written by Ajaz Ahmed (Founder of AKQA) and Stefan Olander (Vice President of Digital Sport at Nike), who experienced the rapid changes in digital technology and how they had to evolve in their businesses to adapt. The speed at which we are all having to adapt and change as technology drives our businesses forward breaths new dynamics into the way we need to work. Here are these 7 new laws added from some interesting and inspiring quotes used during this presentation and that I’ve tried to catch: A Smith and Wesson beats four Aces: Velocity doesn’t care of who you are or how good you were yesterday. Evolve immediately, entitlement kills. Have a passion for innovation as much as making profit. Change is often seen as a threat, but to an entrepreneur it’s oxygen. By Sir Richard …
Startup competition @NEXT12: discover the 12 finalists
As every good tech conference, NEXT Berlin hosted a startup competition. The 12 finalists (selected among 800) presented Tuesday afternoon to a mixed jury panel componed of investors like Charlie O’Donnell, Patrick Meisberger or TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher. Flakka is a startup developing a P2P (peer-2-peer) technology to synchronize functionalities across devices (rather than data). Flakka first product is a free photo sharing application and hope to make some money out of subscription-based premium feature (like editing). Questionable is if P2P is really needed for photo sharing, but founder Till Haunschild seems confident about it regarding his experience (launched a previous tool reaching 4 mios users in 2 weeks, picscatter). MarkTheGlobe is trying to solve SEO tools problem, that is, enabling multilingual andinternational campaigns. Value proposition seems huge and on a growing and rentable business. Unfortunately, founder failed to …