Last December, the Swiss national railway company SBB/CFF launched a new mobile application to connect rail travelers. The basic idea is to let you check-in for all your trips and… BOOM: you see who is in the place or in the train (Facebook and twitter connections, random people), and you can even chat with them. As well as I didn’t put much value on at first, I’ve experienced it 3 times: 2 times, someone I’ve met years before chatted with me, once I’ve seen a friend was on board (and bumped at him randomly right after, looking for a seat. But the main point off the app is to record your travel routes and collect points (you can even buy train tickets from the app). And become a mayor and/or benefit from vouchers at rail station shops. You can get specific badges …
And so suddenly, your startup is “on the map”
This is a guest post from Christophe, CEO and co-founder of the the e-commerce startup Kireego. A couple of weeks ago, we participated to the London WebSummit, where our little venture was nominated amongst the 25 Startup Award finalists. The news came quite as a nice surprise in January, while we had still our hands full and heads down trying to finish some last tweaks before our Beta Release. We were (literally) in our bunker/cave bootstrapping – ok, we admit a little bit of seed – our project since many months. Of course, we were pulling our heads up from time to time to check with our targeted audience (independent merchants) if what we were doing and our concept made sense to them. “Kireego’s been selected for the finals at the London WebSummit!”. Well, it seems that out of hundreds …
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 …
London – some learnings
London is the older European startup hub that everybody is talking about, even if Berlin, Dublin and Stockholm are gaining a good reputation to launch businesses. As well I’ve heard and read a lot about London, I’ve never been there (except half a day as I was in language school in Brighton!) and I’ve seized the opportunity of London Web Summit (happening today) to fly here. I’ve managed to organize some meetings and discovered a bit the city following them. Many people have heard about the Google Campus, but I had never seen how it was looking. Here how the entrance look like: Impressive? Nope. Need to be impressive and extremely modern (as our technology parks in Switzerland we are so proud of)? Nope. Once you enter the building, you get a better sense of where you are when you’re looking to this: I think …
My take-aways from DLD Conference
The serie “Does Switzerland exist on European tech startup scene?” is now over. I was waiting for 2 additional posts, but that didn’t work for my fellow foreign bloggers. Anyway, being a bit short on time, you’ll find here next week some of my thoughts about how we could transform the startup landscape in Switzerland. In the meantime, I wanted to share with you some of my notes taken during DLD Conference last month in Münich (which I was lucky enough to be invited to – but that’s another story). One of the highlights was the closing talk by Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and first investor in Facebook, among other ones. Here are some tweetable content from his talk! Most ideas that people don’t agree with… are simply wrong! An engineer is the closest thing to a magician that exists in …