H Bay

Already some time ago (August 11th 2011) I met the author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” Tim Ferriss in San Francisco at the Evernote trunk conference (the kooaba team thinks that he is my secret Idol, which is of course not true ). Alex Pachikov from Evernote was so kind to make the introduction.

Tim Ferriss and me at Evernote Trunk Conference

Tim loves wine and takes photos of wine labels to remember. I showed him our app kooaba Déjà Vu, which we launched that very day. Déjà Vu recognizes wine labels automatically from a photo of the label and adds direct links to the wine on Vivino. Tim was very impressed.

I am still very impressed by Tim and his book “The 4-Hour Workweek”. It is a good read and I can recommend it to any marketer, entrepreneur, Internet startup company, and life hacker.

However, I didn’t read his new book “The 4-Hour Body” yet. I wonder the name of his next book. Maybe something like “The 4-Hour Company”?

For the 10th anniversary of the Swiss Venture Leaders program on Sept 3rd 2010, about a hundred Swiss entrepreneurs met to party in the Residence of the US Ambassador Donald S. Beyer Jr. in Bern. The event was perfectly organized by Venture Lab and the Gebert Rüf Foundation. It was like a family reunion in a warm and welcoming environment. Companies such as Amazee, Doodle, Poken, Routerank, etc. were present.

Some of the Venture leaders 2007, from left to right, Christian Broennimann, Dieter Naeher, me, Jochen Mundinger, Silvia Santini, Giovanna Davatz.

The event started at 4PM with a networking Apéro. At 5PM, the US Ambassador Donald S. Beyer welcomed the invitees with a charming speech, followed by some words of Rudolf Marty, president of Gebert Rüf Stiftung, and a short speech of Walter Steinlin, president of Innovation Promotion Agency CTI.

At 5:15PM, the entrepreneurs were leaving their footprint with a short pitch and overview about their respective state-of-the-art.

Poken Founder Stephane Doutriaux

After the pitches, everybody was invited to take place at the dinner tables. Before the dinner was served, there were two extraordinary keynotes. The first one was given by Robert Hemphill, president and CEO of AES Solar Power Ltd. His presentation was both educative and very funny. He was speaking about his do’s and dont’s as an entrepreneur. The audience applauded when he said that business plans are useless . The second keynote was held by Xavier Comtesse, director Romandie Avenir Suisse. He announced that he is planning to establish a creative think tank for Swiss entrepreneurs.

US Ambassador Donald S. Beyer Jr. and me.

The food was delicious, I never saw such a vast choice of tomatoes of all colors, red, green, yellow, violet, etc.

While talking to Mr. Ambassador, we figured out that we both read Yvon Chouinard’s “Let my people go surfing“, he also recommended the movie “180 south“, which I will certainly watch soon. By the way, Yvon Chouinard is a highly productive manager. He practices what he calls MBA, Management By Absence. There is no more productive. 0 effort, 100% outcome .

At 9PM, Donald S. Beyer was presenting some closing words and a great event was over. Back to family .

The second day at TechCrunch50 was by far more interesting than the first one, because I had the chance to visit all the booths and seeing some presentations. Many companies like Clixtr, Wander Mobile, OnTheRoad, etc. present an iPhone as an image taking device. The images are synchronized with the user’s online profile and there used for sharing and collaboration. Basically, what we do without recognition

A useful application comes from myinfoQ. In order to remember things, the user can send any text via SMS or app to her online profile, where it is presented with all the needed context information (direct links to related Websites or Google search results). This saves browsing and searching time.

Also Interesting is the approach of the news aggregator thoora. It presents just the relevant news in a condensed manner. Very useful in times of information overflow. Another interesting approach comes from motally. The idea is to provide Google analytics for mobile websites and mobile applications, which in general do not support javascript (in other words Google Analytics).

There were many more companies, but frankly, none of them really impressed me. All cover a bit about the same social media type of applications.

The winner of this year’s TC50 award is RedBeacon. Here the description by The Washington Post. “RedBeacon is a new service making its public debut today at TechCrunch50 that further streamlines this process by bringing the OpenTable model of online transactions to much broader spectrum of services.Using the site will be easy for anyone who has used a local review service like Yelp. Simply type whatever service you’re looking for (be it plumber, gardener, or hair stylist), and the site will present a list of recommended service providers in your area. RedBeacon also employees natural language processing so it can figure out exactly what you’re looking for (for example, “Cupcake maker” would search for any bakers in the area). The site will then present a list of profiles for each match, featuring reviews and comments from other users, basic information like their hours, and star reviews imported from Yelp.”

That was it for this year’s TechCrunch50 conference.

Recently, I presented kooaba at TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco on September 14th – 15th, 2009. Here are some thoughts about the event.

In general, the organization was great and everything worked fine from registration to presentation, even enough parking space was available. Only the men’s toilets were congested from the first day on. Thanks to my jetlag I had no problem to get up at 5AM (actually, I was already up at 3AM) in order to be at the Concourse Exhibition Center at 6:30AM to install and setup our booth. Networking already started at the entrance of the conference location.

Our booth at TechCrunch50

Surprise, when I was installing the booth, somebody gave me a pat on my back. The two founders of shout’em, Victor and Sasha were presenting their venture right at the neighboring table. We first met in spring 2008 at the Mobile 2.0 conference in Barcelona. It is always fun with them.

The DemoPit was extremely busy. In the afternoon more than during the morning session. Thanks to the kooaba developer team, the demos were working fine without a single issue. From the visitor side, I met all sorts of people, mostly people other startup companies, some press representatives, investors (easiest to recognize ), and regular visitors from various companies.

With the time, my pitch became more and more efficient and I more and more tired. At the end, I was victim of the jetlag. It was 4AM in Switzerland, but here only 7PM. I needed a shower before the networking event at 8PM. The networking event took place in a club with loud music. Therefore, not an ideal environment to talk business, however, contacts during networking parties are often lasting longer than others. Summary of the day, over 100 business cards, no more Swiss Chocolate, and a good feeling about the future of kooaba (got great feedback).

Intermezzo about Swiss Chocolate at conferences. This is a secret hint to all Swiss Startup companies, which intend to present their company abroad. Take Swiss Chocolate to distribute to the visitors, it really works. It is much easier to get people to your booth. It’s less offensive to say “Want some Swiss Chocolate?” than “Wanna see our product?”.

That’s it about my first day at the TechCrunch50 conference. Stay tuned to read about the second day.

As winner of the venture leaders price 2007, I had the opportunity to follow a four-days workshop for entrepreneurs at Babson College in Boston, USA. At one of the numerous networking events, I had the chance to meet Jessica Livingston, author of the bestseller “Founders at work”.

Jessica Livingston and me at Y-Combinator.

Founders at work – is one of the best books I’ve ever read about start-ups. It describes everyday situations of well-known companies such as Apple, Hotmail, etc. during their star-up phase. It helps to see that others had similar problems as the ones we had at kooaba. A must-read for every IT start-up. Buy it now!

By the way, here is what Guy Kawasaki has to say about it. Obviously a bit more than me

Jessica was so kind to sign our copy of the book.

Jessica Livingston signed the book that I had with me by chance.

Thanks Jessica.