Startupbootcamp

Danmark støtter egyptiske iværksættere!

2011-07-11T14:19:00Z

For snart fire måneder siden modtog Startupbootcamp et opkald fra Lars Løkkes statsministerium. Lars Løkke skulle snart have møde med Præsident Obama, og de havde forinden nået til enighed om at der skulle gøres noget for Egypten for at fremme iværsksætteri for at kickstarte situationen umiddelbart efter revolutionen.

De kommende uger talte vi sammen med udenrigsministeriet, og i fællesskab besluttede vi skabe en fantastisk mulighed for to Egyptiske virksomheder og lade dem deltage i det næste Startupbootcamp program i København fra september og tre måneder frem.

Vi blev dog med tiden bekymret for om de to hold nu kunne leve op til programmets standard. Der er stor konkurrence for at komme med i programmet, og kandidaterne har været meget kvalificerede, hvor flere allerede har haft indtjening, kunder, ansatte og den første investering i hus.

Udvælgelse af de to hold

For at vi kunne udvælge to hold til Startupbootcamp, blev vi inviteret til Nexgen i en uge for at vejlede 24 hold, som havde gjort sig bemærket ved Startup Weekend Cairo eller andre steder i Cairo. Vi opdagede med det samme at der ikke var grund til bekymring – der var mange stjerner iblandt de 24 hold. Udvælgelsen var langtfra nem, da de bedste 7-8 hold var utrolig stærke og potentielt havde, hvad der skal til for at være med i Startupbootcamp programmet.

Mentorerne som skulle vejlede dem over ugen kom henholdsvis fra Danmark og USA. De fire Startupbootcamp mentorer var Alex Farcet, medstifter af Startupbootcamp, Natasha Friis-Saxberg, grundlægger og CEO af Gignal, Kamran Jamshidi, online marketing ekspert og grundlægger af Marketing Lion og Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, Bestyrelsesformand af Podio, CEO af 23Video og aktiv business angel.

Udover de fire mentorer fra København, var der ligeledes en delegation fra USA, som havde nogle af de nye stjerne på den amerikanske teknologihimmel på programmet, såsom Ryan Allis som i en alder af 26 år har rejst $50 mio og har 300 ansatte i hans virksomhed iContact. Derudover var der andre stjernementorer såsom Jeff Hoffman, grundlægger og CEO af Priceline.com, og Alexis Ohanian som er medstifter af Reddit.com.

To fantastiske Egyptiske virksomheder kommer til Danmark.

Vi fandt to fantastiske hold som godt kan ende med at højne niveauet for hele programmet. De er utrolig teknisk dygtige, de havde stor forståelse for ”deres” markedet, de havde allerede eksisterende prototyper og nogle allerede brugere. Men vigtigst af alt kørte de videre på det momentum der var skabt ved at vælte en diktator i løbet af kun 18 dage – alt kan lade sig gøre og muligheder er uendelige.

Det er ikke forkert at sige at vi har store forventninger til de to Egyptiske hold, og er glade for at se at der er blevet taget et medansvar for hjælpe egypterne i gang med at skabe arbejdspladser og glæder os til at hjælpe dem kickstarte deres virksomhed fra København.

Startup Weekend – Nu for mobil nørder.

2011-06-10T14:46:00Z

De populære 54 timers Startup Weekends events, som tidligere er blevet afholdt i København og Århus, kommer nu også som et weekendevent for mobilnørder – Startup Weekend Mobile Copenhagen. Eventet er arrangeret af Startupbootcamp og Nokia har tilbudt deres bygninger i Sydhavnen, København, til eventet.

Kort fortalt er Startup weekend Mobile Copenhagen for fuldblods start-op entusiaster, som elsker at brainstorme, lægge strategier, udvikle og designe mobilapplikationer og til sidst picthe deres idéer til potentielle investorer. Udover at udvide sit netværk med iværksættere, designere, udviklere og business developers, er dette også en enestående mulighed for at realisere sin idé på kun 54 timer. Skulle man få samlet et vinderhold er der 10.000 kr. i præmie til den bedste idé.

Fredag aften, når eventet starter, har alle mulighed for at pitche deres idé, dog maksimum et minut per pitch. Når alle har været igennem møllen bliver der stemt om de ti bedste idéer. Herefter skal der networkes for at finde ud af det hold man ønsker at være en del af, og dette er naturligvis et par intense timer. Men det blive ikke mindre intenst herfra. Timerne tæller nu ned imod live picthes søndag aften klokken fem. Nu handler det udelukkende om at få noget lanceret – det bedst mulige produkt på kun lidt over to dage, og nå ja, lige forberede en vinderpitch. Resultatet er overvældende. Ud af første Startup weekend Copenhagen kom Memolane, som kun seks måneder efter sikrede sig en investering på $2 millioner.

Startup weekend Mobile Copenhagen bliver afholdt i Nokias bygninger ved Sydhavnen, hvor der er masser af plads til de ti hold og store armbevægelser. Nokia har inviteret deres medarbejdere, heriblandt har Head of R&D investment og Nokias Principal Designer allerede meldt deres ankomst.

Hvis du er mobilapplikations udvikler eller designer er der masser af entreprenører, som ved præcis, hvordan man bedst får produktet ud over rampen.

Er du seriøs iværksætter er dette stedet, hvor mange tekniske talenter nyder at bruge deres weekend.

Der sker løbende spændende events i København, og lignende arrangementer kan findes på www.startupbootcamp.org/events.

Der har hidtil været udsolgt til Startup Weekend, og der er snart udsolgt til Startup Weekend Mobile Copenhagen – så skynd dig at få en billet.

The Kinetik, a New App Discovery Network from Denmark.

2010-11-04T15:00:00Z

We continue our rotating Startupbootcamp blog series. This entry is by Juan Moreno from The Kinetik.

The Kinetik is a cross promotion network for mobile app developers to promote each other and get more users without spending any money. We allow developers to choose who they promote, ensuring their users get a relevant selection of apps. So far, we have helped over 100 mobile publishers in categories like entertainment, productivity and social networking exchange clicks with other publishers.

We came from Buenos Aires to Copenhagen set out to create out a way that would help great ideas (in the form of mobile apps) get discovered. We had developed some apps ourselves and for clients and knew that with +200.000 mobile application developers like us, more than +350.000 apps are suffering from of the app discovery decease.

The Startupbootcamp experience.

First, we reached out to all of Startupbootcamp mentors and thankfully they were kind to talk to us. We started listening, shared opinions and received lots of feedback. As we set out to implement it, we had a lot of folks with questions and open minds. It made our project more fun, as we got lots of smart people helping us to realize the idea.

As we progress, we sailed the same sea and asked customers what they wanted. We build a super-quick prototype and begun spending more time with our customers.

One of our early adopters, the co-founder of Creative Mobile said “we've been doing this already by adding "more games" submenu to some of our products, but if there is a service which allows us to do this AND exchange clicks with other publishers AND control it via a web interface, then we'll happily switch to using it.” We have used his and many others’ feedback and will introduce a number of new features like adding screenshots, videos and the ability to connect directly with other members shortly. We will continue to listen to our users’ ideas and focus on their needs, all in sync with our goal to help discover, share and manage apps more effectively.

By sharing our ideas with smart people, our small team concentrated on the early advice and executed it quickly. We were lucky to build a network of people who understand and are involved with our idea and vision. They have not only been great mentors, but we have made lifelong friends which will enable us to build cool stuff, deliver a great product and have fun.

Is Gold Hidden in the Detail? – A Few Secrets on How Usability Testing can make You spot It

2010-10-21T07:46:00Z

We continue our rotating Startupbootcamp blog series. This entry is by Johan Frederik Schjødt, Co-founder of AutoUncle.

We thought our product was clear, valuable and relevant to most people: An algorithm that finds the best deals in the used car market (www.autouncle.com). Not so! User testing made us realize that real users find it hard to understand the value of the product. We learned that the key to communicating the value is hidden in the details. Here is how we are trying to bring out the value.

The Rocky Road of User Testing

Throughout the process of developing our demo we have talked to potential users to collect feedback and ideas about how to design the site. When we showed our first wireframes (build using www.mockflow.com), we got responses like – “I think this looks like something for entering water measurements”, “Is it about music? (probably an association stemming from the presence of sliders)” – not the most encouraging feedback when you are building a site for used cars. This was first indication of the rocky road of user testing lying ahead of us.

Learning the Importance of Details

1 month down the road and we were ready to present a live demo. Our excitement of having a live demo was soon to be replaced by frustration. This time, the users found it difficult to understand our unique appraisal of every car’s market price. However, by talking to more users we started to get a really good idea about what needed to be changed. To our surprise it was details, really important details.

In most markets, I guess you can succeed by paying attention to the core product and then care less about the surrounding elements. I’m no longer sure whether this is true for a web product. By talking to users it has become obvious that if something surrounding the core of product (our unique ratings) does not work it steals attention from the core product. Making sure that the surrounding elements of the service work as expected, is just as important as the core product. In our case, making sure that you can search for a car by geographical location, having the right buttons and sliders for filtering the results actually comes way before our rating of the cars value…

Testing and Learning

So how did we do our user testing? It is actually quite simple. We watched Steve Krug’s excellent lecture (watch it here http://www.blip.tv/file/1557737 ) on the subject based on his book ‘The least you should do’. Basically, if you stick to the three following guidelines by Krug, you are home safe.

Don’t spend time finding people who match your target group – it is not that important for user testing. You will find out that the usability problems on your site can be brought out by almost anyone
Give people a defined task on the website and record how they complete it with notes or video
Ask them to think out loud during the exercise

If you follow these three guidelines, you will get feedback that is rich enough to cure the most serious threats to the usability of your site.

Grow a larger mobile user base through cross-promotion with The Kinetik

2010-10-20T13:40:00Z

We continue our rotating Startupbootcamp blog series - our ten teams take turns sharing their thoughts and experiences. This entry is by Juan Moreno of TheKinetik.

Even before coming to StartupBootCamp we’ve been passionate about the mobile business. We started by developing mobile sites mainly for hotels and films, like Best Western and Filminute. Then, the application bee stung us and we developed our first apps: A Twitter-like app for jokes called La Mona Lista and Cowboy whip (for one guy in the team ;) We also continued to developed apps for clients, and were frequently asked, what now? There are quite a few things developers can do to get users, like iTunes SEO, Twitter, Facebook, promo codes, app reviews, paid advertising, and more. However, with more than 350.000 apps on the market, developers have the same question: “How the heck do people find my app?”

We struggled with this challenge of helping to attract attention in the growing jungle of apps. We came up with the idea that apps could sell other apps – so we developed Mini App Stores – like an ad exchange network for apps.

But there was still one issue; we needed the publishers to get the advertisers, and the advertisers wanted to know which publishers we had. This is where StartupBootCamp really came in for help, and through the mentor sessions we discover a new way for app developers to get more users – for free.

We developed The Kinetik- a network for apps to grow a larger user base through cross-promotion. Members choose whom to promote. Users get awesome apps. So everyone is happy.

There are already a few formal and informal traffic exchanges between developers, like Playheaven and Plus+. The Kinetik is a bit different for the following reasons:

It is not only for games

Member choose the apps they promote.

We support both Android and iOS

The Kinetik is therefore an invite-only network of apps that will promote each other in an effort to increase users for all.

You can watch this video to learn more about how it works

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeceyRUwJ7g

So…If you know of someone that has an iPhone or Android app, we will like to talk to them.

juan@thekinetik.com

The Kinetik - Together in motion
www.thekinetik.com

Selling on Social Media

2010-10-18T08:00:00Z

We continue our rotating Startupbootcamp blog series - our ten teams take turns sharing their thoughts and experiences. This entry is by James Hobbis of Gruvi.

Usually when we are speaking with friends we do not expect to be sold something. Sometimes we will accept a friend trying to persuade us to do something. But social norms don’t allow any selling in the commercial sense to occur. Think about the awkwardness of selling a car to a friend – what price should you set, the highest price that you’ve ever seen on a car forecourt, should you discount it as a favour to your friend? What if it breaks down – do you offer a warranty?

We don’t take the prospect of selling to friends lightly.

But Gruvi is a platform that does attempt to sell things – movie tickets – and it sells them on Facebook, which is in essence a community of friends. If selling can ever occur within the context of social media in a repeatable manner then it must follow a subtle model; the persuasion model.

Poor Marketer

Persuasion works when the “buyer” is barely buying, more being lead to an understanding. The “seller” is leading, not closing. Persuasion is something that we regularly do with our friends. When you are at work today how often will you be invited to participate in activities; “fancy a coffee”, “is anyone ready for lunch” and maybe “could you help me with this?" It is this behaviour that those wishing to sell via social media need to tap. It is a model of communication that traditional marketers are not trained for.

Pity the poor marketer, over the past few years we consumers have weaned ourselves of our dependence on mass media as the web has offered a more engaging alternative. Then when the marketers followed the audience online, they found that the people had become far harder to interrupt with a sales message. Take a look at you Facebook page, on the right hand side there will be a list of adverts pushing something which you may actually want, but probably don’t want today. We are used to ignoring these adverts, just as we ignore banners on web sites.

So how can marketers do their job? After all their need to bring products and services to our attention doesn’t diminish just because we are not listening.

At Gruvi we think that the answer is to identify the needs that people have and support them. We can’t claim that it is our idea, consumer service sites have been doing it for many years. Think of all those sites that help you to identify which is the best flight / hotel / mortgage / loan, we all have a favourite site that aggregates all the offers available and then present us with a shortlist. The consumer’s need was there before the sites were built, consumers were going to do that research any way. What the consumer service web site does is help to complete the research easily and efficiently. Because they have done that we are happy to make the purchase from their site. They have earned their commission.

Use the Voice of Friends

Selling on social media needs to follow a similar approach, but has the opportunity to fold in another extremely important voice in our decision process. The voice of our friends. In many consumer decisions that voice is the loudest, think how trends form. In the office that I work in 100% of us wear casual clothes, not suits. 100% of the men have short hair, not long. I don’t think that we all saw adverts telling us to do this, but we recognise the influence of the society that we are in.

When choosing to purchase a new movie ticket 57% of people surveyed said that the story line was the most important criteria, 55% stated that which of their friends were coming was the most important. Trailing after that were considerations of cast, genre and the influence of advertising.

This is the clue for how to answer the question posed – how do you sell on social media. You don’t, but you can support people that are already persuaded to buy your product in their attempts to persuade their friends to buy it too. A Star Wars fan will always watch a Star Wars film, there is a high chance they will watch anything by George Lucas. So once you have identified them, help them to persuade their friends to join them at the cinema. Arm them with trailer’s to share, movie times, theatre locations. Make it easy for them to invite their friends along.

Social networks are a girl's best friends

2010-10-14T11:53:39Z

We continue our rotating Startupbootcamp blog series - our ten teams take turns sharing their thoughts and experiences on their Startupbootcamp adventure. This entry is by Artas Bartas, of Spockly.

E-commerce in the Recession

You might be forgiven for thinking that e-commerce business have been thriving in the gloom of the recession: while physical retailers closed shops, pruned their workforce and filed for bankruptcy protection, online retailers busied themselves attracting increasing share of shopping dollars and reporting handsome profits. In fact, Amazon’s profits grew by the average of 28% over the last three years. Yet if you talk to VCs, entrepreneurs and new media gurus, you are bound to hear another story: online shopping has been ripe for innovative departures for some time and the new crop of ambitious startups is working hard to turn the old business model on its head by adding social dimension into the mix. To get an idea of how little business innovation took place in e-commerce world, consider the following statistics compiled by Josh Kopelman: more than half of today’s most trafficked websites did not exist back in 1999.

Disruptive innovators like Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace or Twitter shot to global prominence in a matter of few years, all thanks to their innovative ideas and willingness to experiment with different models. Meanwhile, of the top 15 most trafficked e-commerce websites today, only one online shop – NewEgg - did not exist back in 1999. This fact just shows how loath e-tailers are to experiment with the key premises of online shopping. On the second thought, why should they? After all, the current model has produced such a steady stream of revenue over the years.

Going social with your dollars

Well, one group of companies that are not afraid to get their hands dirty experimenting are startups engaged in social commerce. These clever gals and lads saw how much time we all spend networking online and thought to themselves, why not put this fact to the benefit of online retailers? Businesses they have built on these assumptions fall into three broad categories:

Flash sales: Pioneered by the French startup Vente Privée, this business model hinges on organizing limited period, usually 2-4 days, sales of branded fashion merchandise. Sales events are opened only to registered members and until recently to become one you had to be invited by somebody who is already inside. Undoubtedly, such exclusivity, coupled with the fact that traditional fashionistas were among the first ones to jump on this bandwagon, added quite a bit of glamor to Vente Privée events. Companies: Vente Privée, Gilt Groupe, Rue La La, Haute Look, Ideeli.

Group buying: The idea is to feature daily offers from local businesses – a restaurant meal, flying lesson or hotel stay – at a steep discount (50% is expected, 90% not uncommon). The snag is that offer comes into effect only if enough people sign up, which gives potential buyers an incentive to spread the word among their friends, colleagues and relatives. Needless to say, by now the concept of group buying has became so widespread that one almost expects to read of retired grannies and laid-off carpenters starting their own deal-of-the-day websites. Companies: Groupon, Living Social, Woot, Buy with me, Tippr.

Social graph: Then there is a big group of new startups with funny names that attempt to leverage shoppers’ social networks to achieve greater personalization and/or drive new sales. For example, Blippy and Swipely publish individual’s purchases in a public feed so that her friends can see, discuss (and envy) them. Kaboodle and ModCloth help shoppers make up their mind by stocking merchandise selections already vetted by website users. Finally, companies like theFind, FFlick and Vitrue tailor shopping experience to reflect visitor’s and her friends’ interests. Thus, rather than browsing some strangers’ comments, visitors can see what their friends think about the film or those racy American Apparel leggings. Companies: Blippy, Swipely, Kaboodle, ModCloth, theFind, Vitrue.

But will it fly?

I bet many a CEO would like to know if social commerce is a real deal or just another fad spawned by the band of usual Silicon Valley suspects. Well, according to latest projections, Vente Privée hopes to bring in €800 million in revenues this year, Gilt Group plans to reach the mark of $450 million. Groupon is adding, on average, 500,000 new users a week and expects to grow to 25 million users by the end of this year. Blippy shares sales data on $1.5 million worth of purchases every week. And I haven’t even started with valuations these companies are attracting (let me tell you this much – Mark Zuckerberg would be proud of these guys). So, despite all the exaggerated buzz, there is something going for social commerce in terms of actual sales it engenders.

Recent whitepaper published by e-commerce provider Optaros goes as far as to suggest that the rise of social commerce challenges status quo on the most fundamental level: whereas traditional shopper is a rational individual who plans his purchases, studiously compares prices across websites and has little desire for online conversations, the new generation of shoppers are impulsive chatter birds always on the lookout for new exciting deals and opportunity to spread the word around their network. Thus, rather than spending marketing dollars on bringing customers to the site one by one, retailers can simply capture the interest of critical influencers and then ride the wave of (free) word-of-mouth promotion into the world of fat margins and speedy promotions.

As many other cozy illusions, this one does not withstand critical scrutiny. Social commerce model does not provide universal answer to all of retailers’ ills: flash sales still have to prove their appeal outside of apparel category; Groupon’s capacity to accommodate all business owners wishing to be featured on the website is constrained by the number of offers it can send out on any given day; even personalization of shopping experience through Facebook’s social graph is of limited use if you cannot get a critical mass of people to come and click the Like button.

There is, however, no denial to the fact that smart retailers can no longer be content with simply attracting faceless crowds of anonymous web visitors. Shopping just does not feel the same once you remove the joy of sharing the purchase with others.

To know more about the ways you can make your business more social, check Spockly home page.

The Eternal Battle – and Mobile Phones

2010-10-13T15:17:00Z

We continue our rotating Startupbootcamp blog series. This entry is by Andreea Chiriloiu, Community Manager Webcrumbz.net.

Men vs. Women

We like to believe that we have a rather homogenous team, here at Webcrumz.net – 2 guys and 2 girls, so we try to keep the atmosphere as chilled and relaxed and work-focused as possible. But we apparently never succeed no matter how much we try to. We always end up in a competition: Ciprian against Ionut, Alexandra against me, or simply just men versus women.

It’s obvious that the guys think that they are smarter and more technical than us, and by that they believe they can rule the world. We, the women, know that we can make better things faster than them and more accurately and therefore more profitable than them. This has been a battle since the world began and, it’s superfluous to say, no one will ever win. Because we, as individuals, are as different from one another, as the sun and moon. But we still fight. And we always will. It’s just human nature.

Because of the project that we are running now, we started fighting on, of course, mobile usage. Do women use the mobile more than men? Are men the gurus of mobile technology?

Do Women Yap on the Phone?

Granted, there is the traditional stereotype of women staying on the phone for hours and still aren’t tired of talking, but how much of that is actually true?

A fresh new research made by Opera says that the number of women using the Internet on their smart phones is catching up with the number of men. Actually, between May 2008 and July 2010, the number of female users for Opera Mini increased by 575%, while male users increased by 233%.

While we use the mobile web for everything from ordering pizza to discussing politics, it appears that men, use their mobiles „in the same way that peacocks display their plumage”, says techdirt.com. Men are much more likely to display their mobile phones in social situations, and the article suggests that this is a way to pick up women. Also men are eager to display their mobile phones to other men to make themselves appear more important. Let’s just say 1-0 for the women.

But lets even things out, so that men do not feel bad. Jennifer Bowcock, Director of Consumer Media Relations, Cingular Wireless, helps the men our on this one: „Starting with 2005 and up until now, men have been the undisputed leaders of talking on a mobile phone, winning this round with an devastating number of 571 minutes a month spent in order to comminicate via mobiles, compared to an average of 424 wireless minutes a month for women”.

Social on the Phone

The last one evened things out for the guys. But hear this: Women use social mobile more than men. And it is not just me saying that. A Nielsen Company study showd that women aged 35-54 are more active mobile social networkers than any other age group across the genders. Orange on the other hand, found that based on their users across all ages, men spend more time on social networks on their mobile phones than women. Here are some fun facts which came directly from Orange: While men love to play games that do not stimulate them at all, like Tetris and read the latest sports results, women love an interesting strategy game like Monopoly and love to text more. Let us put that one down as a tie.

Marketingchartes.com says that the mobile phones appear to be displacing the PC among women, when coming to usage. When asked about the top benefits of owning a smartphone, the top answers among women are convenience, the ability to send texts and email, access to social media. While this fact puts us on top of the race again, the following one does exactly the opposite: Young adult males are driving a recent increase in access to mobile dating services across Europe – out of nearly 11 million European users aged between 25 and 34, 22% of men use mobile devices, compared with just 8.7% of women in the same age group.

The battle is even again and the conclusions are simple to be drawn. There is no difference between men and women using their mobiles, as well as there is no difference between men and women using social media on their mobile, or talking on a mobile, or just using the mobile web. Or, at least, we didn’t see one. Until there is a noticeable difference, Webcrumbz.net can be used, with spectacular results, by both men and women, with or without any technical abilities.

Software is the best tool we humans have to create a better world

2010-10-11T08:06:00Z

We continue our rotating Startupbootcamp blog series - our ten teams take turns sharing their thoughts and experiences on their Startupbootcamp adventure.

This entry is by Thomas Jam Pedersen of 3Djam.

Intro

Since ancient times, we humans have achieved mind blowing progress. This progress seems to follow the hockey stick curve, which is extremely difficult to grasp for us. Yet, the world around me often reminds me that there are a myriad of problems that we humans have not solved yet.

Check out this video:

http://www.vimeo.com/7395079

To the Reader: You must watch the first 2 videos else will miss my points.
I believe what is stated here IS TRUE: We are on a hockey stick curve and we will solve more problems and achieve bigger things during the coming 20 years than we did during the last 1000 years!
In this blog I will tell you why and what it has to do with software, but first I need you to watch this video: Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex

Google Goggles

Today I tried Google Goggles, which is an image analysis application for Android mobile phones, which allows you to take a picture, which it then analyses for you and helps you find stuff on the web related to what is in the image. Today, it works best with text and logos. You can take a picture of a book, DVD etc and find it on the web, however Google is working on making it better, such that it can find people on the web if you photograph their face. Or you can take a picture of your empty product packaging before you throw it out and your phone will let you order a new one with only 2 – 3 clicks. No need to implement scanners and computers in your fridge, like we talked about just a few years ago. In addition to this, Google can also help you shop cheaper and greener, more sustainable and more healthy. At restaurants you can take photos of the menu and of your food and give feedback and rate the food and service. This way the web will have realtime updated statistics, menu and price-information from every restaurant in the world. When you walk by a restaurant you can take a picture of the restaurant and Google will show you pictures of their dishes, ratings, pricing, etc. Google may even suggest another restaurant in the neighbourhood in the same price range but with better ratings. And few years from now, Google may even relate this to other restaurants and dishes you your self have had recently. Naturally, this works not only for restaurants but really in most industries.

What it really is all about is saving time on things you don’t care about such that you can spend more time on the things you are passionate about. Just a few tabs on your phones touch screen and it has helped you select, order as well as pay fpr products and services, which with high probability is the exact product you would have selected if you have had more time to go into details. I am not arguing that we will use this for everything. In the beginning, only a small fraction of the population will use it for a few types of products, however in 10 – 20 years from now, the majority of us will use this us select and order the majority of all the products that we buy in a typical everyday life. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhgfz0zPmH4

A few months ago my wife and I spent well over 30 hours looking for a summer holiday for our family. I would gladly have paid US$ 100 if someone had offered me the possibility of typing in my priorities and budget and a system would have spit out several alternative packages for me. From experience I know that I would not be able to come up with a significantly better list myself by researching for 30+ hours. And what if those results had had user ratings and maybe even links to people in my network that had been there, whom I could contact to get a more personal introduction / rating / feedback ? As an examples of how this market is developing, four of the teams in Startupbootcamp.dk actually work with rating of products and services…

Feedback Production

This brings me to my next subject: Feedback Production. Today most products are mass produced. Typically a company designs a product or collection. They then get bids from factories and subcontractors, place a big first order and maybe 12 – 18 months after the planning has started, the products hit the stores at which time planning of the next product has already started. This is very risky, because it is difficult to predict this many months ahead what customers want, what other competitors will supply, production cost, costs of raw material etc etc.

Due to this big risk it is very difficult and very expensive to raise money for a new unproven product. Should a new product become a big success it is very expensive and often impossible to scale up a mass production and supply. It is all inherited in the way we manufacture and invent products today. If you want to bring something new to the market, you have to start in the small and build it up slowly. Thus it is very difficult to make any revolution - you can really only make evolutions. Since patents do not work for most products it makes it very risky to be first movers.

This is why progress and invention has been so slow in the past however I believe this could very likely change fundamentally over the coming decade.

What is different now is that IT will help designers get very rapid and accurate feedback from customers, through channels such as Google Goggles, Facebook and Twitter. We will see new types of production lines, where scaling of production is much more flexible and shipment to the store is less than a month. Thus designers can make small series of products with a lot less risk. As soon as the first 1000 units hit the stores they can get the feedback from customers and change the product accordingly and adjust the production capacity accordingly. Thus we will start to see products that change not every year but every 2 – 4 weeks. It will be much easier for designers to order more production capacity for block buster products in a very short time.

For us working in IT this is great news since this requires a lot of new IT infrastructure and this is what the majority of us will build during the next 10 years. In 20 years from now it will involve very little risk to bring a new product to market of the sort that do not require a huge R & D effort. Cost of those first series will be very small and it can scale fast. If you can keep the feedback away from competitors then you win the race for this new type of products. The winner will be the company that can manage the shortest loop from feedback to the next generation of adjusted products. The feedback production paradigm is coming soon and it is going to remove the risk significantly and speed up production evolution and revolution cycles drastically.

China Raw Material and Fast Trains

Did you know that China is the country in the world with the fastest trains? Did you know that they acquired this technology after working with companies like Siemens, French TGV and a Japanese company while building a railroad for the Olympics in 2008. When the economic crisis hit in end of 2008, the Chinese government decided to build a huge number of high speed railroads connecting all the big cities in China. Instead of investing in help packages in the bank sector they invested in infrastructure and jobs.

At the same time, they also invested US$30 billion in a factory to build passenger jets to compete with Airbus and Boing. Rest assured, that within the next 10-15 years they will be a worthy competitor to those two old giants.

Did you also know that the Chinese Government has announced that they will build a high speed railroad from Beijing to London before 2020. Upon hearing this my first reaction was “why ??” My next reaction was “can they really do that?” Then I wondered who actually would be the customers and finally how they could possibly make agreement with the countries which this railroad will pass through. It is planned to run average 320 Km / hour and cross 17 countries.

After some research on the topic and thinking a little more about it, I realized that this railroad is not for passengers. It is for shipping products from China to Europe very fast for the feedback production era. To get raw materials like oil, iron, steel, cobber, lithium, etc into China fast. The Chinese government realized that what is most important to sustain their growth over the next 10 – 20 years is to get the raw materials they need and do so a very predictable rate and price. Most of the countries that have these raw materials are actually some of the 17 countries on the planned line between Europe and China. None of these countries has the technical, economical or political strength to build the world fastest railroad and connect their respective countries with 2 or 3 of the most powerful regions in the world. So China figured that if they offer to build such a railroad through these poor countries at no initial cost, they could probably get a good long term deal on raw materials. Thus over the next 10 years China are going to send a million railroad workers out to build this link. Basically the do what the Europeans did ruthlessly 200 years ago to conquer the world. Exchange technological advantages for world dominance. China wants to be READY for the feedback production era.

Another mindset

Staying on the topic of China, another thing that strikes me as very important is the mindset among successful young Chinese. Throughout their entire life they have experienced very rapid growth. In the west we have a mindset that everything changes very slowly. The only industry where we really expect rapid growth is in the silicon industry, where we have learned to expect doubling of processing power and storage capacity every 18 month. This is a fundamental part of our mindset and most of our actions and inventions are tightly coupled with this relation. In China the young generation has a mindset that they can expect enormous changes in almost all areas of the society within a decade. What is even more important - contrary to the Western world – is that it is less likely that new ideas get rejected because peers and investors don’t believe in them. In China there is an atmosphere where everyone believes in big changes within the next decade and they admire those who push these changes forward. I think this atmosphere will drive many other industries into rapid growth similar to what we know in the silicon industry and consequently China will become the leader in most of these industries!!

About 5 years ago I started to realize some of those things I have described above and what enormous progress we humans can make when everything get connected. I decided that I wanted to use my skills and my life to do what I can to contribute to this venture. I am a software engineer and I fully believe that software is the most important tool we humans have to build such complex systems and solve complex problems.

Having decided that I wanted to contribute, I asked myself where I should start and realised it should be

a) Today the majority of hours spend on software development are spent on stuff that could be solved or reduced by more than 50% if we had better tools.

b) The consumers of software could also save more than 50% of their time if it was easier to discover and consume software. And if that software was faster in general, so that we could reduce all the million of seconds each year end users wait for the computer to respond.

I Have Dreams

1.) In my dreams, consuming software should be like watching a video on YouTube:

Easy to find what you are looking for. (shows ratings and number of views)
When you click on a link, it starts to play after a few seconds of download
It is easy to find other videos about the same topic
I can give feedback and have a discussion with other viewers and the author.

2.) In my dreams, publishing software on the Internet should as easy as publishing articles on Wikipedia. The initial creator put it online and others help correct it and review it to make it more perfect. Having this open review creates trust for those that only consume it.

3.) In my dreams, most errors in software can be automatically fixed, if the end user tells the system where the error occurred and how the application should have reacted, to give the correct result.

4.) In my dreams, end users would be able to rent games and applications by the hour or day and the license agreements of most software should be standardized.

5.) In my dreams, I am thinking how great it would be if someone could create a platform that would do all of the above and which would not require software applications to be rewritten to run on that platform. Would it not be great if the majority of software could just be converted to run on such a platform without changing the source code at all and without taking any performance hit at all?

6.) In my dreams, I wish that this dream platform would also have strong built-in copyright protection and make it safe for the end users to run software.

When I Wake Up

When I wake up, I wander the streets of Copenhagen thinking that it would be much easier to discover and consume software if my dream platform existed, and how much easier it would be for software developers to make money and create new and better software in super fast loops.

Enough said: It is time to stop dreaming and instead support a small start-up team of 3 who are part of the Startupbootcamp, and actually creating a platform that will allow all of the above to happen. It is the Roozz platform, which makes it possible to run applications directly in the webpage very similar to the way you view a video in the webpage today.

Of course it also supports cross platform software development and allow full hardware access including high speed 3D graphics.

What is the really great thing about the Roozz Technology is that it actually doesn’t force software developers to use a specific programming language. They can use the programming language and tools that they already know well and there is no learning curve to get your application on the Roozz platform.

We have a humble hope that the Roozz Platform will help scale software development and consumption to the trillions notes as we saw in the first video, simply by making it much easier and less time consuming to find and use software and to help you reach your personal goals – whether those are buying a customized product or inventing the next “computer mouse”.

We strongly believe that the types of changes that we have talked about in this blog will come. We also believe that the key technology, which will drive these change, is software. This is why making it easier to develop, discover and consume software is very essential to the speed of evolution towards making the world a better place. We hope that the Roozz Plaform will help bring better software tools to you such that you can excel in the things that you are passionate about. We believe that is the best way to contribute to a better world.

Please give us your support, subscribe to our streams:

Mobilize or Die!

2010-10-06T19:57:51Z

We continue our rotating Startupbootcamp blog series. This entry is by Andreea Chiriloiu, Community Manager Webcrumbz.net.

In regard to the radical title, it is actually easy to comprehend: everything is done via mobile nowadays. And what is not done now, will be done in the near future - or else! I am being so radical because everything around us point to that conclusion. From comprehensive studies to everyday situations, the facts still remain the same - either you stay connected via your mobile device and make it a part of your life, or you don't exist.

Mobile media firm, BuzzCity, indicates that the global mobile advertising industry grew by 17% during Q3 2010. This means that in countries like Libya, Kenya, China or the Republic of Korea, the mobile advertising industry grew up to 150% compared Q2. In total, 14 countries have witnessed double digit growth in mobile advertising over the last three months, with three markets, Libya, Korea and Kenya, experiencing triple digit growth. This only transforms into huge incoming numbers for businesses that are open to the mobile advertising idea.

The Development of Mobile Marketing

For those who still find it difficult to understand the concept of mobile media advertising, here is a little point that may shed some light on the idea. Mobile marketing is now considered to be the 7th mass media channel alongside print, recordings, cinema, radio, TV, and the internet. As a consequence of this new ranking the following question appears: What the best way to approach marketing to users of mobile devices?

Marketing to mobile devices is believed to have started in the year 2000 with text message news services, that were free but sponsored by advertising. This easily and quickly transformed into mass promotion of events and alerts. But text message advertising can often be annoying, and even more if we consider costs for users depending on their mobile service's inbound text message rates. Therefore a new method had to be developed - and it was to "pull" a medium rather than to "push" one. And the method is now known as polling or voting for programs like American Idol or Dancing with the Stars.

How to Attract Traffic

Now that you got the beginning of the mobile marketing, let's look more into more recent mobile advertising techniques. In these the work surrounding the mobile web is very different than that of the traditional web, with many key differences in everything from display advertising to search. With traditional search, SEO is the key to getting your site noticed in the never-ending reach of the Internet, but with mobile search, the methodology is hugely different.

While certain optimization is still needed to make sure people can find your mobile site, location is the primary attribute that determines who sees your site and when. Hence, for sites that have no location-relevance, the same SEO techniques that work on the traditional web will work to some degree on the mobile web as well. For those with sites and business listings that are location-aware, such as retail locations, small businesses and local service providers, you are at the mercy of the devices that your audience is using. For example, a local business owner in Copenhagen who runs a restaurant would normally develop a traditional website and optimize it to rank well for basic keywords such as "restaurant in Copenhagen," or "cheap meal in Copenhagen". With the new mobile targeting, however, those keywords are irrelevant. That business owner has to rely on users searching for "restaurant," and being within a geographic proximity to their business. So it is more or less a matter of taking a risk.

All in all, the rules of mobile SEO and techniques of utilizing the "location-optimization" are yet to be written, but one thing is sure - the view is rapidly changing into a more mobile-focused ecosystem, and many aspects will have to change on numerous levels to keep up.

After such a concise lesson on mobile SEO and advertising techniques, from their early beginning and to the present day, let's also take a quick look over how profitable this new market really is.

How to Deliver Your Message

It has been calculated the average urban consumer encounters up to 5000 ads a day via every channel. A small percentage of this number, though, is being delivered via mobile. So to put it simple, mobile marketing is personal marketing and between Blackberries, Q's, iPhones, and other devices, mobile advertisers have plenty of opportunities to reach the consumer on a personal level.

Mobile advertisers are using five main tactics (drive traffic to branded mobile websites, click-to-call, campaign-specific landing page info, email capture, and sending text, picture, audio, or video message to user) in order to deliver their messages. These tactics offer a wide range of opportunities to effectively convey an advertiser's message throughout a campaign. Of course, it goes without saying that the issues of privacy, clutter, and irritation of the consumer began to appear. In order to help marketers, an Austrian study conducted by Haghriigan and Madleberger, called „Consumer Attitudes toward Advertising via Mobile Devices", came up with 7 practices that successful marketers use.

Ads must be targeted, provide informative and/or entertaining content with a level of effective credibility. However, one finding in this study addresses the nebulous area of mobile device marketing; those that highly value privacy will have difficulty finding value in ads delivered via their mobile device. Despite ad content, the „mobile addictive" people are the group most difficult to crack for advertisers and marketers, but the progression of marketing through mobile devices indicates that they are still more than willing to try.

All in all, it is a tough nut to crack, but it is not impossible and, intriguingly, the tougher it is, the more followers it gets. Mobile marketing is a growing bubble and everybody wants a piece of it, but the first step into having a mobile advertising campaign is to have a mobile version of your website, and this can be easily made with the help of Webcrumbz.net by entering the website and follow the steps there.

Being new to an old business or being old to a new business

2010-10-05T18:25:14Z

We continue our rotating Startupbootcamp blog series. This entry is by Niels Kristian Schjødt, Co-founder of AutoUncle.

Setting Our Sails

The other day I found myself looking back at the first year being an entrepreneur with my brother. I was thinking about how we had gotten along, how we had managed the first ups and the first downs, and what we have learned from it.

It all started out around Christmas last year, when the idea evolved from a burning wish to help ordinary car buyers to find way through the used car jungle. However, at this stage the product and solution was only a fragile thought about ways of using powerful statistics to make it possible for ordinary buyers of used cars to easily spot the good buys.

In this very disordered and somehow chaotic scene of memories, impressions and thoughts, I felt both satisfied with our work and progress so far, and at the same time grateful and humble because of the great wind we have had behind us along the way. Now, after we have actually survived many of the first pitfalls, I still find myself wondering how we managed to get the first people to believe in us and our idea, in what could seem like a dead ocean sailed by huge ships like eBay. I think it must be the fate of the entrepreneur always to have a little doubt and anxiety about his product and the waters he is about to set sails in. Even though many of the biggest challenges are still to come, we are still here; we haven't given in yet and we are still working hard on preparing ourselves for Investor Day on of November 9^th. - And now, the one million dollar question: how and why did we manage being brothers, having family living 300km away from the job, being new to tech-business, and being a first time entrepreneur in a field of many competitors? - and oh yeah, throw a 5 week old baby in the mix as well.

A Small Fish in Big Waters

Firstly, it takes some basic knowledge of the sea you are about to navigate - in our situation; mathematics, statistics, IT and of course used cars. Skills we both possess partly from our education and partly from our devotion and passion for cars. At the other hand, we did not have much knowledge about building up a tech business. So how might this at all be possible to do, especially when you consider the situation of the market of used cars? Starting as a small fish in big waters might not be such a big disadvantage after all - especially if you swim in a different direction than all the others. Even though you might have a hard time establishing yourself, you are not struggling with the trouble of turning a big old brand in another direction to engage in the battle with a smaller brand, that really hasn't got that much to lose - why do you think privateers mostly were small ships? - Not because they could not afford a bigger one, but because maneuverability and being agile was more important than having the most canons.

The same is true for the entrepreneur - do not be annoyed by your lack of funds and ability to produce huge marketing campaigns. Be glad instead that you are a quick mover and that you are able to change direction within the time it takes to refresh a website. If you remember this and remember to use it progressively, you will have a much bigger chance of surviving in the battle of customers and market shares, than any other marketing campaign you can afford at this early stage.

Sail into Unknow Waters - Now!

What can we learn from this? - Well, when you are new to being an entrepreneur, it often seems like an obstacle that you have to challenge companies that are many times bigger than you. But the fact is - yes, it is a different challenge sailing waters that are unknown, but the fact is also, that this might be a much more well-defined task, and maybe there will be some wins out there that are much easier to grab than in known territory where everybody is fighting to become ruler of the all the highest waves.

So if you are sitting out there wondering whether your idea is good enough, or whether you will be able to survive in waters of hungry sharks:

- "just f**king do it" - your own worries might as well be the most fierce shark of them all.

Happy entrepreneuring!

Niels Kristian Schjødt - AutoUncle

If you are curious to know more about AutoUncle, please visit our site www.AutoUncle.com or Facebook page www.facebook.com/AutoUncle. Here, you will find our blogs and within a few days also our fresh beta version of our used car appraisal tool.

Mobile Apps or Mobile Sites?

2010-10-01T13:38:00Z

We continue our rotating Startupbootcamp blog series - our ten teams take turns sharing their thoughts and experiences on their Startupbootcamp adventure.

This entry is by Ciprian Borodescu from WebCrumbz.net

Want to go Mobile?

Let us say you have a company with a great website and you want to have mobile web presence as well. What are your options to go mobile? Do you go for a native app based approach or the web based approach?

Right now there are more than 250,000 iPhone apps in almost every category: games, lifestyle, social networking, education etc. But is that an argument for producing an app rather than a mobile site? Before you decide you need to think about your target audience and distribution.

Clash of the Titans

Yesterday, at the GigaOM Mobilize 2010 conference in San Francisco, a great panel of experts confronted each other in a death match between native and mobile web apps supporters. I watched the discussion and it was like the "Clash of the Titans". Adam Blum - CEO of Rhomobile, Michael Mullany - vice president of products and marketing for Sencha, Ilja Laurs - founder and CEO of app store GetJar, Jay Sullivan - vice president of products for Mozilla and Krisha Vedati - senior vice president and GM of mobile for AT&T Interactive went head to head.

Even if the discussion was a little bit technical, it is safe to say that native apps continue to enjoy an edge on native. To a large extend because they have better distribution channels through established app stores and don't rely on networks. The mobile sites are indeed appropriate for certain cases where companies want users to find them faster through mobile searchers and access them directly through mobile browsers, while not being constrained to develop a different app for each mobile device. Of course, it's also a matter of maximizing cost efficiency and decreasing support costs.

Who Will Win the Fight?

Browsers like Mozilla's Firefox are increasingly getting access to control hardware components like GPS and cameras, making a wealth of apps possible through a browser. So the Web is evolving rapidly with the help of CSS3 and HTML5 and in fact, according to "The State of the Mobile Touch Web" report on Taptu.com, the touch-friendly web will have an estimated 1.1 million sites by the end of 2010.

We have seen companies from different business categories such as shopping, services (restaurants, hotels, etc.), entertainment, technology, news, sports, men's interests, women's interests and others, launch their mobile websites and experience traffic growth rates as high as 30%.

So, although the native apps are still out there and will be for years to come, the mobile web is growing fast and what we are doing now is to focus our attention on providing small and medium companies with easy to use tools for building and publishing mobile websites within minutes. Our goal is to offer a platform that is as easy to use as signing up for an e-mail account or shopping online.

We invite you to register for free to our beta platform. Tell us about your needs and let us provide you with the best tools for building and publishing the perfect mobile website that can be accessed by your users on the go.