Category Archives: Event Summary

STARTup Live Vienna #3 Roundup

June 14 2010 5 comments


STARTup Live Vienna

Key facts

  • Date: 11th to 13th of June 2010
  • Place: Microsoft HQ, Vienna
  • Participants: 94
  • Guests: 55
  • Mentors: 33
  • Experts: 7
  • Idea pitches: 27
  • Venture teams: 16
  • End presentations: 16
  • Pivots: 4

The third STARTup Live Vienna!

The event started with a bomb – 27 pitches! The STARTeurope team was amazed at the quality of the pitches, ideas and people – you guys blew our minds.

It IS hard to describe yourself, the problem you address, your solution and all in 90 secs, but these guys were good. More than half the pitches led to teams forming and then people got to work.

The result: 16 pitches were delivered on sunday evening! WOW! Usually some give up, but these guys and gals had that amazing “feature” called persistency.

Some developed prototypes, others rethought their concepts, several used the business model canvas seminar which STARTeurope gave to get to know their strengths, business and potential pitfalls.

Mentor Driven

During the weekend, mentors and experts came by and supported the teams – founders, investors, consultants, designers, techies, biz people, incubators…
Among them:

Thanks to our sponsors and supporters

Industriellenvereinigung

microsoft

freewave

incrediblEurope Summit 2010

Expert Rated

During the end presentations and most of Sunday evening, the experts-panel stayed on to feedback and talk to the participants and guests.

On the experts panel of STARTup Live Vienna #3 were
Anthony Warren
Professor and Director,
Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship,
Smeal College of Business

Tilo Bonow
CEO, PR- und Social Media Agentur piâbo
http://www.piabo.net/

Amy Hoy
Co-Founder, letsfreckle.com
http://www.letsfreckle.com

Markus Wagner
Co-Founder, i5invest
http://www.i5invest.com

Bernhard Thalhammer
Senior Associate, First Love Capital
http://www.firstlovecapital.com/

Klaus Matzka
Founder & Managing Partner, Gamma Capital Partners
http://www.gamma-capital.com/

Companies and Ideas

And now, please welcome the teams and their ideas!

qriously.com WINNER

letsannotate.com

  • Pitcher:
    Martin Schürrer
  • Tagline:
    Easy Collaborative Review
  • Description:
    Upload your pdf, annotate and share it. Kept simple.

dislikedit.com

  • Pitcher:
    Wolfgang Fuchs
  • Tagline:
    Complain, share, change
  • Description:
    Dislikedit.com is about giving consumer a new online voice and to fight against annoying, bad and unsustainable products, brands and services. The idea for Dislikedit.com was born out of the obvious lack of the “dislike” button on Facebook, is currently at concept stage, seeking for developers and investors.

Life Missions

  • Pitcher:
    Benedikt Glatzl
  • Tagline:
    Start Playing. Start living.
  • Description:
    Using the reward-system of computergames for getting more active and real life and do good for yourself and society.

Genius Loci

  • Pitcher:
    Sebastian Olesko
  • Tagline:
    Smart office environment
  • Description:
    Furniture from new wooden material – wood injection in shapes.

Play.fm goes HD-TV
play.fm

  • Pitcher:
    Thomas Buchstätter
  • Tagline:
    See title ;)
  • Description:
    Listen to more than 21.000 DJ mixes on your HD-TV using open source media center Boxee (www.boxee.tv).

Dr. Ederl <<– the moviepitch

  • Pitcher:
    Markus Ederl
  • Tagline:
    Ads suck.
  • Description:
    I-net show doing crazy funny and exciting stuff with products, events, software, creative advertising for companies, great entertainment for the rest!

On the fly buy

  • Pitcher:
    Clemens Mensik
  • Tagline:
    Intuitive Interaction
  • Description:
    Transforming the point-of-advertising into a point-of-sale by combining all the tools needed (payment interfaces, mobile website and mobile tag creation) to do so into one easy to use solution.

cookd

  • Pitcher:
    Nik Graaf, cookd team
  • Tagline:
    Online restaurant guide
  • Description:
    Discover culinary highlights in Vienna’s most accurate restaurant guide.

Lexmarket

  • Pitcher:
    Octavian
  • Tagline:
    Matching lawyers with people
    Matching law firms with businesses

echo
echo

  • Pitcher:
    Allan Berger
  • Description:
    Echo is an online service where you can monitor response-, up- and downtime of your website(s). If either responsetime is too long or your website is down you instantly get notified via Text and/or Email. The performance of your website(s) is very important, as it affects the Google Pagerank since April 2010. Furthermore late downtime recognition could end up in high unnecessary financial loss. To prevent such discomfort a service like echo is a must to every webhost who is running one website and even more essential if running multiple websites.

Varieté Melange

  • Pitcher:
    Marion Knotzer
  • Tagline: A stage for everyone
  • Description:
    This event is the chance for unexperienced artists from different artbranches to be famous for 15minutes! For guests its a great way to experience a variety of art in one evening! The next one will be on the 9th July, 2010, at 8:30PM at the legendary Badeschiff in Vienna.

Analogy Problem Solving

  • Pitcher:
    Dan Dimitriou
  • Tagline: A new concept of problem solving
  • Description:
    If we know the natural, unchangeable rules that govern one domain, for instance music, we can use them in another one where apparently no rules govern, for instance economics, in order to optimize the latter. I have made that statement being sure (from own observations in research) that things happen and evolve following the same patterns… Even if the shape (domain) is different, the essence (rule, development) remains the same.
    Everything is connected to everything, therefore problems that occur in a domain that is not very well known, can be solved using data from another field where things can be clearly proved.
    In order to confirm this theory I have been talking to lots of specialists from my country (engineers, artists, mathematicians….) but I do not want it to remain a bare theory, being more interested in a practical use.

KnowledgeYatra (facebook)

  • Pitcher:
    Julia Hüpfl
  • Tagline: Travel to learn
  • Description:
    Connecting young people in Europe and India over culture, travel, learning and substantial issues
    Whenever we travel the most significant things are people we meet & experiences we share, these are the memories that stay forever. Our organization KnowledgeYatra creates these experiences by taking you on a Journey that make you travel, learn, interact and get a peek into the cultures of the destinations you go to. As our name already suggests (Yatra is the hindi word for Journey) we provide knowledge & learning based travel experiences.
    With a focus on India as destination we want to develop cultural and developmental understanding, by organizing 2-4 week Intercultural & Developmental Study tours. These study tours have a shared focus on getting to know the country and its culture through many interactions with locals and topics of social development. We would like to provide the participants a chance to explore the deep and vibrant cultures of India and Europe, offering more than just superficial tourist programs.

MORE TO COME
there were sixteen of’m for gods sake!! ;)

STARTup Lounge Vienna #1 Roundup

May 5 2010 no comments

On April 23, we gathered with about 60 people at The Hub Vienna to talk about ideas and starting up.

This time, the Lounge consisted of a STARTup Hours and a live streaming of the awesome Startup Lessons Learned conference in San Francisco!

STARTup Hours

  • Participants: 42
  • Pitches: 10
  • Groups formed: 7
  • End Presentations: 7

Sponsors of the event

gentics

Supporters of the event

innocent fruit smoothiesThe Hub Vienna

Results

  • leads to strategic partners for a few projects
  • a few new customers
  • attention
  • teams found
  • inspiration to take new projects to the next level

Startup Lessons Learned Streaming

  • Attendees: ~40
  • Devoured Pizzas: ~30
  • Devoured Red Bulls: ~70
  • Devoured Innocent smoothies: ~170
  • Devoured Beers: ~90

[foldup title="STARTup Hours"]

Pitches

Firefox Extension

Highlighting of words in texts using rules for finding the interesting words – link them up, as in add links to amazon, google, bing, wikipedia…
How can we make money?

Kids Paper

A magazine by and for kids.
How can we distribute it in a smart fashion?

OpenIdeas

Using a workflow to promote and get feedback on your ideas. You have hundreds of them, but where do they all go? http://www.openideas.eu is where they should go!
How can we improve?

CO2 Badges

A system for labeling goods with their carbon footprint.
How can we do it?

Cluug

Semantic ordering of information and documents in your office.
Looking for a CFO! – http://www.cluug.com

Multitouch displays

A scalable technology for creating multitouch surfaces in devices.
Where can we take it from here?

letsannotate.com

Online collaborative review – http://www.letsannotate.com
How can we spread the word?

DiscoSense

Creating nightlife experiences for impaired people – use technology and creativity to enhance the experience for the visually and hearing impaired.
How can we do it?

Mobile SOMA

A mobile discount store purchasing goods from larger retailers and selling them to people on the country side of Romania.
Define and help build it!

[/foldup] [foldup title="Startup Lessons Learned Livestream"]

The Startup Lessons Learned blog is written and maintained by Eric Ries and is focused on the lean startup methodology. This was the first conference gathering lean startups from the area, connecting them and looking at case studies and the theory behind the methodology.
Here you can find a great great writeup on the conference, by Sean Murphy.
During the evening a number of Viennese startups hung out at the Hub talking, watching and learning; among them were garmz, tupalo, qriously, cookd, letsannotate.com, studentlife, soup.io, gnowsis and MySugr.
Here some great material from the conference:
On Pivots: KISSmetrics


Watch live video from Startup Lessons Learned on Justin.tv

On Customer Development: Steve Blank


Watch live video from Startup Lessons Learned on Justin.tv
[/foldup]

STARTup Live Prishtina #1 Roundup

April 19 2010 no comments

Key facts

  • Date: 26 – 28 March 2010
  • Place: American University in Kosovo (AUK), Prishtina
  • Participants: 76
  • Idea pitches: 24
  • Venture teams: 7

Summary:

The first STARTup Live event in the Balkans took place in the Republic of Kosovo, Europe’s youngest state. Upon invitation by the three host organizations, ECIKS, UNI Group and START, 70 students and entrepreneurs from Prishtina met a delegation of European business people and venture experts at the American University in Kosovo for a weekend of intensive idea generation and business planning.

Following the format developed at Vienna’s successful STARTup events, participants pitched as many as 24 ideas from the broadest range of business topics to their peers, followed by a swift team-building process that championed seven concepts to be worked on in detail over the weekend.

Startup Live prishtina

While teams were busy getting their ideas and visions translated into real-world business scenarios, they received support from an interdisciplinary group of coaches. Even during lunch break, Startup Weekend served its participants entrepreneurial brain food: Andreas Klinger, co-founder of garmz.com, enriched the audience at AUK’s terrace with real-life anecdotes in his entertaining luncheon “entrepreneur’s report”.

The teams’ final presentations were held at the closing event Sunday afternoon under the patronage of Prof. Enver Hoxhaj, Minister of Education, Science and Technology of the Republic of Kosovo. Valuable feedback and market insight was provided by our experienced local and international panelists:

Experts Panel

  • Linda Shala – Director Data Project Electronics, Prishtina
  • Shpend Ahmeti – Executive Director GAP Institute , Prishtina
  • Shkumbin Brestovci – General Manager RROTA, Prishtina
  • Kujtim Dobruna – President ECIKS, Vienna
  • Mark Tuttle – biogy.com, USA
  • Nicolai Sawczynski – ARGE Bildungsmanagement, Vienna
  • Bernhard Thalhammer – First Love Capital, Vienna

START and its co-hosts will continue to support this weekend’s entrepreneurs as they move on. To quote one participant’s feedback form, they “are counting the weeks to the follow-up event”.

STARTup Hour #1 Roundup

April 13 2010 no comments

On March 18th a group of about 50 participants gathered at Nelsons, located in the middle of the Tech University of Vienna, to partake in the very first STARTup Hour.

It was the first stop for the participants of the LIFT@Austria conference, exploring enabling spaces and organizations in the region. The attendees were from Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, UK, Hungary, Belgium, US, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Slovenia, Belgium and Ecuador – making it a somewhat international gathering.

The innocent souls were put through a blistering hour of pitching, forming teams, working and presenting their own ideas at a rapid pace! Welcome, to STARTup Hour #1!

startuphour#1roundup

Simply put:

  • - You get 60 seconds to pitch
  • - You form a team to work with
  • - You WORK focused for one hour.

Pitches

  • STARTup Jam
  • Meet a Homeless
  • OpenIdeas – http://www.openideas.eu
  • Lowering Corruption
  • eduvent – http://www.eduvent.at
  • DeskSurfing
  • and more…

The pitchers all got tickets for the STARTup Live event in Vienna, June 11-13!

It was a very interesting experience, condensing our startup event to one hour, and we believe that we can use this format for some very focused networking/feedback events in the future.

STARTup Live Vienna #2 Roundup (formerly named STARTup Weekend)

November 10 2009 no comments

Key facts

  • Date: November 2009
  • Place: Microsoft Innovation Center, Vienna
  • Participants: 113
  • Nationalities: 8
  • Idea pitches: 20
  • Venture teams: 9
  • STARTups: 3, 6 still in development phase

The second STARTup Live was held in November 2009.

With the knowledge, expertise and experiences gained at the first STARTup Live, various changes of the concept were implemented in STARTup Live Vienna #2.  Out of twenty presented ideas, nine venture teams were formed resulting in the foundation of one company and one art project, which is described subsequently. The other venture teams are still working on their business ideas, probably resulting in new companies. High quality standards, experts and coaches with different professional backgrounds, a creative and stimulating atmosphere and an interdisciplinary and also a high class expert panel resulted in the successful STARTup Live Vienna #2. The feedback of participants and various experts as well as the outcome resulted in the proof of concept.

Experts Panel

  • Christian Nemeth (Orange, Head of Marketing)
  • Gerold Weisz (Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, Transfer Center)
  • Michael Brehm (Business Angel, Cofounder of StudiVZ)
  • Markus Wagner (i5invest, CEO)
  • Martin Eder (Kapsch, Innovation Management)
  • Helge Fahrnberger (Social Software, Founder of Toursprung and Laafi
  • Bernhard Thalhammer (Senior Associate, First love capital)

Companies and Ideas

„Lange Nacht der Liebe“ is an event of an episodic filmlet. The description of the project is available at: http://www.langenachtderliebe.at/public/ dielangenachtderliebe_dossier.pdf

„Lange Nacht der Liebe“, designed as an art project, was completely developed at STARTup Live and shows the scope of the concept STARTup Live. The team of „Lange Nacht der Liebe“ was able to convince investors and company executives, participating at STARTup Live Vienna #2,  to invest in this project.

Runtastic offers products and services for collecting and managing sport activities to promote sports and connect with like-minded people. Runtastic has set the goal of convincing people to do sports, thereby improving people`s health.

http://www.runtastic.eu/

STARTup Live Vienna #1 Roundup (formerly named STARTup Weekend)

July 1 2009 no comments
  • Key facts
  • Date: June 2009
  • Place: Microsoft Innovation Center, Vienna
  • Participants: 60
  • Nationalities: 5
  • Idea pitches: 15
  • Venture teams: 6
  • STARTups: 1

Summary:

The first STARTup Live (formerly named STARTup Weekend) project was held in June 2009. This project can be seen as a prototype of the STARTup Live concept. It was important to gain experience in designing and implementing STARTup Live. Fifteen ideas were pitched. Nine ideas were not able to assure participants of their potential. As a consequence, six interdisciplinary venture teams were formed. This can be seen as a first selection of ideas.

Eduvent was formed at the first Startup Weekend in June 2009 in Vienna. The name eduvent is composed of the words education and event. The main goal of eduvent is to provide information about educational events in Austria.

Only two team members already knew each other before joining the SUL. Throughout the following months eduvent developed their website and went online at the end of summer 2009. They currently have several thousand regular users. At the present they are working on improving their number of users and intending to further develop a sustainable business model.

http://www.eduvent.at/

Contact

Fillgradergasse 7
1060 Vienna