zero budget heroes

ruff stuff

so we’re taking part in the startup 2.0 competition now, which is kinda awesome. we’ll be producing a video to get higher visibility, so stay tuned for some seriously cool/silly/sexy/hot/lame home video action.

this weekend, i will also post an extensive article about views on the importance of blogs, bloggers, the small world we live in and about learnings on approaching bloggers.

this is it for now!

in the future, i’ll also include the recommended track of the minute. you’ll find a lot of hiphop there, sorry if i bore you.

recommended track of the minute:

Lupe Fiasco - The Cool - Hi Definition (ft. Snoop Dogg)

internet world - a story of courage and failure

So we were at the internet world fair yesterday. “Business for the digital age”. And business it was. In fact, there was so much business and suits it was creepy and we completely out of place. 

Hansjörg came all the way from Vienna to check out the Seminars and probably talk to a few people. Did not happen. Why? Read on. 

The sessions would suggest that there is a lot around entrepreneurship, starting up, running and improving your company, exploring new ventures and areas and plain simply just learn a lot from a lot of smart people. 

We’ve sat through an awful presentation of Sun NetBeans. The app is interesting to quickly build all kinds of apps (desktop, mobile, web), but well.. I’ve seen better.

The “How to attract VC” seminar was interesting, but lasted on 30 mins. After each session, everyone had to leave, there was no time for talks, discussions, questions or any other kind of conversation. Pissed us off big time.

Firsttuesday, at least, will host an “afterparty” on the 6th of may which I’ll probably attend. 

They hosted an “award show” with 3 finalist startups pitching for the award in front of a jury of 3, consisting of James Gray (just sold Getmein.com), an editor from FT.com and the director of the London Business School.

I will not name the Startups, but the one claiming “there is no way to send money over the internet yet” was plain awful and actually the FINALIST of a 150 companies. The other one who was asked by the jury how their traffic figures were wouldn’t give a straight answer to the question, even after 6 months in operation, stating that since they’ve introduced a “photo feature” churn has gone down a couple of percent. Wow. Naturally, the 3rd one with the better presentation and the better prepared guy won. 

To sum it up, the internet world is a sales party, not a meeting place for entrepreneurs or startuppers. The sessions are way too short to get something valuable out of it, there was never time for Q&A and pretty much everyone ran off right after they’ve finished. 

We did however manage to grab hold of James Gray, the founder of getmein.com which he sold to ticketmaster, asking for advice on how to create momentum for a small startup with a (naturally) great idea. We had a brief chat, he was very friendly, and gave us our business card, promising to be happy to discuss matters further via e-mail. Let’s see how that goes, but that was the only thing where we really felt we had gotten something out of that timewaster of a conference.

So, what’s the learnings:

• Don’t ever go there again if you don’t want to end up getting spammed with direct mail and e-mail crap from several companies trying to sell you their stuff
• Don’t ever go there if you want to learn something
• Don’t ever go there if you actually want to meet people
• We will be more careful in selecting the stuff we go to

Waste of time and money for the plane ticket, but a good hit on the head with the bat of frustration. Keeps one focussed. Hansjörg is probably now out in London kicking someone’s arse to blow some steam off. Just kidding.

Well, at least we got admitted into the startup2.0 competition and will produce a video about tunesbag.

Picking the right sessions @ Internet World

Planning the trip to the "Internet World" / London (29 apr - 1 may)

Next week will be a very exciting one - Blundstone an me will attend the Internet World taking place in London. This event covers the most important companies in the digital business and we will try to talk about tunesBag as much as possible with the right people and check out the possibilities for cooperations or other deals.

This week our job is it to finish a short presentation, get the business cards and order cool T-Shirts with our URL on it.

I have to admit that - although I’m an official zero budget hero - I have booked a flight with BA instead of Air Berlin, Ryanair, EasyJet or SkyEurope. Why that? The low cost airlines have such stupid departure times, are far, far away from London and their websites promising cheap prices just suck (in fact the price difference is about 40 EUR between BA / Air Berlin for example). It’s incredible for me that going by plane in Europe is still so expensive. 

How to NOT launch a webservice with a lot of data traffic

Today I read an article on TechCrunch about the ongoing troubles at “HP Upline”, a service which should be named “HP Downtime” according to the author.

The article features a statement from HP that technical reasons are responsible for the long downtime, so maybe an overwhelming amount of incoming data might have been the reason.

This sounds very funny for me as they should know that such a service attracts a LOT of traffic and needs massive pipes, uplinks, storage and other resources. While we can only dream about the big budgets and hype that they’ve gotten for simply just being a known brand and filthy rich, there was a reason for a private beta.

Its not only because we’re using the “invite model” as a marketing tool. It’s because we try to improve our service by slowly opening up and fixing possible issues and  bottlenecks before we launch publicly.