May 2012
6 posts
Tech Open Air Berlin: Update: What TOA Berlin has... →
toaberlin:
Dear TOA Berliners,
Sorry for going MIA for a while. We haven’t forgotten about you, we have just been very busy over the last couple of weeks. So today’s post is a milestone to update you on what we have been up to and what is about to happen.
We would also like to…
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TWIST BERLIN vs. London
After an electrifying TWIST Berlin show at Ahoy! Berlin in February the show hosts reached out to organize a special London vs. Berlin episode. This time three startups from London will compete with three startups from Berlin and Jason Calacanis and his sidekick Tyler Crowley will pick the best 3. Let’s see which startup hub has more to offer!
If you missed the TWIST Berlin show at the...
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Heureka! Conference Berlin
Fellow Berlin based blogs Gründerszene and VentureVillage have teamed up to host the Heureka Conference during Berlin Web Week today. The conference focus is to emphasize the strength of innovative ideas. More than 30 speakers will talk about nine topics: Founding, Investing, Incubators, Mobile, e-Commerce, Internationalization, Corporate, Social and Games. Everything is being filmed, so i guess...
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Awesome Vid of animated GIFs
As a follow-up to the Loopc.am post, here an awesome video that conveys the magical nature and history of animated GIFs. If the video does not open, click here.
by Nikolas Woischnik
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April 2012
4 posts
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SPOTIFY TechTalk at Ahoy! Berlin
Spotify, the uber-cool music streaming service is coming to town to host an event as part of the Berlin Web Week this Thursday at Ahoy! Berlin. This is your chance to meet the people behind the rapidly growing Swedish startup. Engineers from backend, platform, desktop and web development will explain the technologies behind the product and answer your questions. Needless to say, there will be...
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20 Books Berlin Entrepreneurs recommend you to...
These are the books Berlin startup entrepreneurs recommend. The poll was done amongst Berlin founders in the “Berlin Startup Group” on Facebook. You can find a visualization of all these books here:
Managing Oneself (by Peter F. Drucker)
Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition (by Jay Abraham)
...
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TOA Berlin: Meetup 3 at EyeEm
On Wednesday we had our third TOA Berlin meetup. This time EyeEm was so kind to host us. Just hours before a new release of the neat photo discovery and sharing app, Founders Florian Meissner and Ramzi Rizk took the time to join the session and EyeEm is now committed to supporting the organization of the event. Thanks for that guys!
We decided to have weekly meetups with changing locations,...
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March 2012
7 posts
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DJ Lowrider playing the Blues
Holy Moly, what a set! Our dear friend and Ahoy! Berlin resident :-) DJ Lowrider, a.k.a. Daddy Hemingway recorded a Sweat Lodge radio show at Maria Peligro this week. Please do yourself a favor and listen to this legendary session below, I am sure you can find some time for it this weekend. If you want to book DJ Lowrider, please get in touch with us and we will forward you the contact...
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Tech Open Air Berlin 2012 a.ka. Working with the...
I am sure you do not need another reason to believe that Berlin is the best place to start up in Europe. Media around the world have been proclaiming just that. Yes, it is a cultural hub with cheap rent, a central location and access to great talent from Eastern Europe. All true. But it is the little anecdotes that really infest the startup bug with whoever is open to it. And as always, it is...
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True Story: The Samwer Brothers are now Cloning...
Please find updates at the end of the article:
Oops, they did it again. TechBerlin found out that the notorious Samwer brothers just launched a new site in Southeast Asia called Lazada. According to a TechBerlin source the company is headquartered in Singapore and geared towards countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan. Amazon currently has no presence in...
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The TechBerlin City Guide
Every now and then i get an email with people asking me about Berlin tips. So i thought it would be a good idea to curate the best restaurants, cafés, bars, clubs, shopping and ToDos and make them accessible via Google Docs.
You can find a preliminary version of that list here or simply click on the link in the left column under “Pages”. A spreadsheet is hopefully not the final...
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Oh yes, Tweek Goes Live!
The team of personal video guide Tweek just announced on stage at the London Web Summit that they launched their long-awaited iPad app in the Apple App Store today. Tweek had previously only been accessible to a few thousand beta testers.
The app is super slick, so give it a try and download it here.
If you want to hear more about the vision of Tweek, have a look at the TechBerlin...
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Gartner study predicts 95% growth for SaaS market
Guest post by Lukas Pfeiffer, co-founder and marketing manager of swabr.com
In former times, workplace systems were build to resist for years. These times are gone, since every (young) company is in the essential need of flexibility.
Today it is much easier to outsource systems and programs into the “cloud”. The “cloud” or cloud computing basically is the sum of all virtual...
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Program-Publish-Prove
An emerging post-agile paradigm in software development
Guest post by Kristian Rother, Science Trainer in Berlin.
Over the last 10 years, Agile methodologies have been constantly growing in popularity. Today, many developers use Agile best practices on an everyday basis: User Stories, Test- Driven-Development, and frameworks like Scrum.
Now, leading developers claim that Agile methodologies...
February 2012
10 posts
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Paging Mister Mayor
Berlin startups have recently started discussing the need to have an open exchange with Berlin government officials. High on a wish list that is still being formulated by various startup representatives are periodic roundtable discussions with representatives of both the startup and government worlds as well as faster Visa approval for non EU-residents.
When Christian Reber (Founder and CEO of...
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TWIST Berlin: The Complete Recap
(Note: You can find the complete video recording of the TWiST Berlin show below)
What an awesome TWIST Berlin show at Ahoy! Berlin on Friday! It had all the right ingredients to become a Berlin classic! Interesting pitches by passionate entrepreneurs? Check! An audience that supported the Berlin startups like a force? Check! A rant by Jason Calacanis against the Samwer brothers and German copy...
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Meet Christoph Räthke, Organizer of "Battle of the...
He is the “gute Seele” (“good soul”) of the Berlin startup ecosystem. A man who has “been there and done that.” A startup warrior who seems to have seen it all! Christoph likes to refer to the time before the bubble burst in 2001 as “before the war”. Who knows, maybe that was not even the first tech bubble he experienced :-).
A passionate...
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WatchInterview with TWIST Berlin organizer Radek Rybicki
Radek’s story on how he ended up as CTO at a chemical company with a fascinating product outside Berlin is intriguing and we will have a more detailed interview about that soon. In this short interview Radek talks briefly about his background and how he managed to get TWIST to do a show in Berlin, which Radek organizes together with Lutz...
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TWIST & Shout! SHOWCASING BERLIN STARTUPS ON "THIS...
For those of you who do not know “This Week in Startup (TWIST)”: it is the biggest live video show about startups on the planet. It was founded by Jason Calacanis and it streams every week live from LA. Next Friday, a live feed will be integrated into the show from Berlin, with local startups pitching their products to an international audience.
The show will be streamed from the...
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Yuri Milner passes on Samwer investment due to...
It seems that the reputation of the Samwer brothers is not just crumbling among their staff or being subjected to bitter satire these days. Big international players are also starting to turn their back on the trio that is said to leave ethics off the table when doing business. Focus, one of the leading magazines in Germany reported that Russian Billionaire investor Yuri Milner (Twitter,...
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WatchSkype a Founder #11: Marcel Duee, Tweek
Ok, this one is very dear to TechBerlin’s heart since Tweek and TechBerlin started out at around the same time! In fact, this is already the second interview I did with Tweek co-founder Marcel. The first one was actually the very first interview i ever did for TechBerlin!
Why did our ways cross so early? At the time I was working as Venture Partner...
January 2012
8 posts
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Twitter Developer Teatime Berlin
Twitter, the communication juggernaut that is said to hit 500M accounts by February took to the streets of Berlin last week for its first Developer Teatime event in Germany. The turnout was great with more than 200 developers, entrepreneurs and product managers attending the event at Mobile Suite in Prenzlauer Berg.
Twitter was impressed with the developer community in Berlin! In fact, a...
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Questions for the Interview with the founder of...
Hey everyone, i will be interviewing the founder of Tumblr today and wonder whether you Tumblr users out there have some questions that you want me to ask him. If so, just leave a comment here, tweet me or even better answer the facebook question here:
http://www.facebook.com/questions/370633179619633/?qa_ref=qd
by Nikolas Woischnik
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Following the DLD Conference live
Like many other Berliners, i ventured down South to Munich to attend the DLD conference. And just as i would often overhear at dinner and parties yesterday, i, too believe that DLD is the best conference about the digital space in Europe, period! At least the best i have ever attended. There are many reasons for this and I will write a detailed blog post making the case at the end of the...
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Wunderkit Beta Launch
It is one of the most anticipated softwares to launch in Berlin ever. Yes, we are talking about Wunderkit, the new product by one of Berlin’s hottest startups: 6Wunderkinder. Have a look at what to expect above and tell us what you think!
by Nikolas Woischnik
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"Made in Berlin" Contest Winner
First of all sorry for not announcing the winner of the “Made in Berlin” Badge Contest before X-Mas as promised. The days before the holidays just turned out to be very busy with the opening of Ahoy! Berlin and the soft launch of Jobslike.me, where I am also involved with. So sorry for the delay!
However, both the submission deadline as well as the deadline for voting on...
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Ashton Kutcher invests in Gidsy
Gidsy has a new, prominent investor: Ashton Kutcher! After Amen and Soundcloud, social marketplace Gidsy is already the third investment in a Berlin based startup by the Hollywood actor. In the US, Kutcher has been investing in tech startups for a while and with portfolio jewels such as Flipboard, Airbnb or Path, he seems to be doing a great job picking the right deals.
The round is led...
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Twitter is Coming to Town
The Berlin startup scene is hot at the moment or as Soundcloud Founder Eric Wahlforss said it best: “Berlin has gone totally Bananas, there is so much going on!”
That shouldn’t be big news to anyone anymore, after countless international media reports have proclaimed the city’s growing ecosystem to becoming Europe’s Silicon Valley.
But it is not just media and...
December 2011
7 posts
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The Future of Facebook
The end of the year is not only a time to reflect on what happened but also to look forward. The video below is an interesting short documentary on the future of Facebook. What do you think will it look like? Will Facebook become one big marketplace? Will credits become the dominant online currency?
Up until the point of Facebook announcing the extended Open Graph at f8 this year, i believed...
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WatchSkype a Founder #10: Philip Kamp, Auxmoney
Yes, we all know by now that Berlin is THE startup hub in Germany. But there are great startups in other cities, too. Hence we want to venture off the beaten path from time to time and present companies that are based outside the capital.
In this “Skype a Founder” episode I interview Philip Kamp, the co-founder of peer-to-peer lending...
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Silicon Curry at Springer tonight
Springer is increasingly becoming active in the digital space. Whereas the media juggernaut in the past concentrated its digital efforts on buying well performing “startups” at a fairly late stage (i.e. Zanox, Idealo, KaufDa), it is now reaching out to the startup world via inititiatives such as Media Entrepreneurs or Silicon Curry, the latter taking place today.
Silicon Curry is...
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How to follow LeWeb from Berlin
Just because you are in Berlin does not mean you have to miss out on Le Web in Paris! Here the best resources to follow what is going on at Europe’s biggest tech conference:
Live TV
Live Ustream
Twitter
Follow TechBerlin on Twitter for real-time updates.
TechBerlin created a list of all Berlin startup and tech homies here in Paris. See what our Berliner homies say about the conference...
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TechBerlin is at LeWeb in Paris
Very excited to attend LeWeb for the first time. After arriving yesterday and flavoring some Parisian traffic, I had a great time at the Seedcamp party at Le Camping, rejoining with the guys from the StartupBus Europe. The “buspreneurs” went on to pitch a jury at Seedcamp and it was incredible to see how much the pitches improved since they pitched at I Due Forni at the lunch...
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StartupBus Europe stopping in Berlin Today. Join...
Yes, i know. Too many events going on these days. And you are probably still hangover from the Ahoy! Berlin Opening. But trust me: don’t miss these innovative developers, designers and marketeers passing through Berlin for two hours today. Come by for a sponsored lunch and find out why Wired magazine calls the StartupBus “as close to blood sport as Silicon Valley entrepreneurship...
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F@6 at Smeet today
Michael Brehm taking the stage at F@6 today
Busy with the preparing for all the Christmas parties in the start up scene in Berlin? In the next month, which runs effectively from the 1st of December until the 16th we make an extra effort to supply you with some great stuff on the radio. I mean: who is really going to work these last two weeks? So in the first two weeks of December we squeeze out...
November 2011
22 posts
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Friday@6 Live Web Radio Show at Crowdpark
Another fun show with interesting guests and an awesome band.
Guests included:
Crowdpark CPO and chief evangelist Ingo Hinterding who talked about what Crowdpark will use its newly raised $6Million.
Ulf Pralle, a former Accenture consultant who moved to Berlin in March to found his own company Serfinda. He explains why he will never go back to the corporate world again.
Malte Schulze,...
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EVENTS THIS WEEK (28.11.-04.12.)
Another week with meet-ups, conferences and events in Berlin. You can find an up-to-date calendar of all open tech events here. If you want to add an event to the calendar please write to events(at)techberlin.com.
Have a great week everyone!
Eclipse DemoCamp (Mon, 28.11.)
The Eclipse DemoCamps are an opportunity to showcase all of the cool technology being built by the Eclipse community. They...
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TechBerlin Friday@6 Radio Show at CrowdPark
Join us today at at 6pm for show number 15 at the CrowdPark office. This is an open event, so please come along. If you cant make it to the show, you can watch it live on UStream. The theme of the show is “How do Berlin startups build on Facebook”? These are our guests:
Ingo Hinterding (Co-founder Crowdpark, Social Betting on Facebook)
Malte Schulze (Co-founder Stylesclub, Social...
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Top 5: Biggest Financing Rounds of 2011
This is the second post of our newly introduced “Top 5” format. This week we look at the biggest financing rounds of 2011. Even though we expect some more rounds to be announced until year end (Gidsy? Loop.cam), we don’t expect them to impact this list of the Top 5 biggest financing rounds in Berlin this year.
1. Wimdu (EUR 67.600.000*)
2. Wooga (EUR 18.000.000)
...
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TechBerlin Friday@6 Radio Show at wahWah.fm
wahwah.fm led by Philip Eibach announced at the show that it will go live at the beginning of December. wahwah.fm is a mobile music app that allows you to stream your own music and listen to the music around you. TechCrunch described it as the Foursquare for sound. After beta-testing the service in co-operation with Soundcloud this summer, the startup will soon release their new mobile app...
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EVENTS THIS WEEK (21.11.-27.11.)
Another week with meet-ups, conferences and events in Berlin. You can find an up-to-date calendar of all open tech events here. If you want to add an event to the calendar please write to events(at)techberlin.com.
Have a great week everyone!
TEDxBerlin 2011 (Mon, 21.11.)
Business & Beer (Wed, 23.11.)
Open Coffee Club Berlin (Fri, 25.11.)
TechBerlin Friday @6 Radio Show at...
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TechBerlin Friday@6 Radio Show at WahWah.fm today
Tonight from 18.00-19.00 you will find 4 Berlin web entrepreneurs talking business and having fun on the Tech Berlin Friday at Six radio show. You can watch the show live, starting at 6pm here. One of the guests is Philipp Eibach, CEO of music startup WahWahFM which is set to launch very soon. Kiezexplorer will also be at the show, promising some more hipster flair to Neukölln. Third guest on...
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TechBerlin Top 5
Today we introduce a new format to TechBerlin. From now on we will post a Top 5 list every Thursday. Some will be curated like the ones we start out with today. Others will be polls like the one we did last week. If you have recommendations or want to research something specific for you such as (Which Berlin startups employ the most people?) just send us an email at info(at)techberlin.com.
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