toksta*

Wow! Seedcamp Berlin just closed its doors but at least I am already looking forward to Seedcamp London in September.

The event was great from the beginning: After the registration and a short welcome note, all startup teams (see list below) had the possibility to present their idea/concept to the mentors (see list below). Saul Klein pointed out to use this opportunity not to pitch, but rather give the information necessary to get the most valuable feedback possible. Well, there was no doubt, that quite some know-how was in the room but venture capital wasn’t missing as well: A 1 billion Euro (= 1.000.000.000) venture fund (combined) is also quite impressive.

List of mentors:

• Pratik Sharma (Core Objects)
• Sean Glass (Pikum)
• Charles Grimsdale (Eden Ventures)
• Salman Farmanfarmaian (Index Ventures)
• Stewart Townsend (Sun)
• Andreas Noth (Corporate Finance Partners)
• Andreas Schlenker (Partech International)
• Marcus Wagner (i5invest)
• Mattias Ljugman (Atomico)
• Olivier Schuepbach (Wellington Partners)
• Steffen Höellinger (Investor)
• Andreas Wuesthoff (SJ Berwin LLP)
• Katja Thuemmler (SJ Berwin LLP)
• Christopher Grew (HellerEhrman, Venture Law Group )
• Carter Adamson (former General Manager, Desktop Products, Skype)
• Christian Stein (VC Creathor Ventures)
• Ron Hillmann (Iven-Hillmann)
• Simon Schneider (High-Tech-Gründerfonds)
• Arndt Kwiatkowski (Immobilienscout24.de)
• Jochen Ramelow (MP MarketingPartner AG)
• Patrick Paulisch (Captain Ad, Linklift, Datango)
• Alain Falys (Omnis Mundi)
• Markus Schott (Holidaycheck.de)
• Thomas Bindl (refinedlabs.de)
• Lukasz Gadowski (Spreadshirt)
• Jan Beckers (JB-Ventures GmbH)
• Julia Derndinger (Dreamware GmbH)
• Andreas Haug (diligenZ)
• Prof. Sven Ripsas (FHW Fachhochschule der Wirtschaft)
• Marcel Otto Yon (Odeon Venture Capital AG)
• Christian Kapteyn (FoundersLink.com)
• Fabian Hansmann (FoundersLink.com)
• Marc Samwer (European Founders Fund)
• Alexander Piutti (Entrepreneur)
• Philipp Westermeyer (G+J New Media Ventures)
• Alexander Kolisch (Holtzbrinck Ventures GmbH)
• Sven Janszky (Forward 2 Business)
• Alexandera-Fee Beyer (AF Beyer Startup Marketing)
• Wolfgang Seibold (Earlybird)
• Ulf Baecker (Start-Up Consultant)

Startup teams:

• GroupDNA/ tickertxt.com (<– 1st. Place - CONGRATULATIONS !!!)
• toksta* (<– 2nd. Place)
• mixxt (<– 3rd. Place)
• tracksandfields.com
• OpenSolutionSales
• GrowVotes.org
• Directed Edge
• Objeckt.me
• My Bookings Ltd
• tunesBag.com
• smaboo
• mjam
• homestaybooking.com
• RapidRabb.it
• barcoo
• Zsaqa
• Twidox
• Soup.io
• Justaloud.com
• shouldido.it
• quillp
• AntexX
• GERROS
• BTW Betaface (<– thanks for the reminder!)

After the startup presentations we had a panel discussion with Lukasz Gadowski, Oliver Beste, Max Niederhofer and Prof. Sven Ripsas from the FHW Berlin followed by 2×10 Breakout sessions where mentors and startup teams could get into deeper discussion. Especially this part of the event was very valuable considering the great amount of knowledge and experience brought in by the mentors.

And last but not least we had a friendly competition among the startup teams with Mixxt on a great 3rd place and GroupDNA/ tickertxt.com on 1st. place (we made second place). All in all a great event, so thanks again to Saul and the rest of the seedcamp team as well as all the mentors bringing the seedcamp in Berlin. Hope to see you in London…

Tags: Seedcamp, seedcamp Berlin

Techcrunch UK is on tour through Europe since a couple of weeks, and now Seedcamp hits the road as well: So if you are in Berlin this friday, don’t miss out on the Seedcamp Berlin. We will be there to check out the vibes for the upcoming seedcamp in London. Seedcamp Week is set for Sept. 15-18 2008 in Central London at UCL.

Tags: Seedcamp

We met Mike Butcher at the Techcrunch Meetup in Berlin and talked to him in a short interview about the german startup scene and his opinion about the copycat discussion. Enjoy!

More Videos to come…. So just bookmark our feed

So formuliert es Alex Hüsing auf Deutsche Startups und das dachten wir, ist einen Backlink wert

Hey everybody,

I was about to write a blog entry encouraging you to meet us at the TechCrunch/Crunchbase Meetup in Berlin (we are a proud sponsor), but I just got the notice that the event is completely sold out! No waiting list or anything, so I guess the space is going to be packed (unlike on the photo…)!

This is what Nicholas (the organizier of the event from twidox ) recommends (for the people attending and the ones staying at home):

“We have created a ‘live community’ on http://blog.twidox.com via our friends at Six Groups. If you upload your pictures and/ or videos to Sevenload or Flickr, please tag them with “tcberlin” and use the hashtag “#tcb” when twittering. There will be a live stream at the event so that you can follow the latest activities as they happen. To join the “live stream” and for your tweets to also show up, please go to http://blog.twidox.com

Also feel free to blog the event and please always mention our fantastic sponsors.

Keep checking out www.techcrunch.com and http://uk.techcrunch.com/ for more information about the event and also for the latest tech & start-up news from around the world. If you want to speak with the guys from TechCrunch, Peter Ha and Mike Butcher will be there on the night. and register for the community. When registering, state your twitter account and then your tweets will appear in the “live stream”.

Tags: Techcrunch

In my last blog entry, I asked you to please not count any spelling errors. My English is far from perfect, what is ok for writing a blog, but for our first language version of our beautiful instant messenger (and for the following ones as well), of course we did not want any mistakes. So we gave our language files to a “translation bureau” (LEO gave me this translation for “Übersetzungsbüro”…).

The price was 1.400 Euros for approximately 12-15 DIN A4 pages – quite some dough as far as I am concerned, but quality costs, right? Well, quality is not exactly what we got; otherwise this wouldn’t have been worth a blog entry.

So here are our recommendations for translating your website:

• We have stored all of our text-files in a database. This saves A LOT of time, especially when you make changes afterwards, so this should be a must, if you ever plan to go international.
• Go to a well established “translation bureau”. It will cost more but it is probably worth the extra money…
• You’ve probably spend considerable time formulating every single sentence of your website to make it sound just right. Trust me, the translators won’t. It’s their job, not their baby, like it is for you. Calculate some extra time for making it beautiful again.
• The chances that the translator has absolutely no clue about what you are doing are high! But the “translation bureau” will tell you, that they have specialists in exactly your field anyway. Ask to speak to the translator, to explain him your service prior to the translation. This will save some time after you get the translation back.
• If the translation bureau is professional, they will ask you if you prefer British English or American English (or continental Spanish or Latin American Spanish or whatever). As I said, if they are professional…
• Any other recommendations: Please comment!
  

In our case as a B2B software provider a professional translation is a must. If you run a B2C website, maybe a friend that is a native speaker will do as well. But the “terms of service” alone are usually quite some work and in my option nothing lets a website look worse than a poorly translated website, don’t you think?

Tags: translations

Hey folks, as you can see, not only the blog-design has changed: From now on we will write this blog in English! It might be a little less comfortable for you to read but it is also less comfortable for us to write

We made this decision because we start to get (yet very little) international attention. I have received mails asking about our tokstsa* instant messenger from Spain, Turkey, Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic. And even though we don’t even have a language version for any of these countries, we would like to keep everybody (and of course potential customers) up to date. And writing several blogs in different languages…come on! So please don’t count spelling errors or sometimes funny expressions – they come for free and you can keep them if you want to

Tags: toksta