First Startup Weekend Jura will take place on 11th to 13th May in Saignelégier. This event will be the first of this kind to take place outside of a city, at least in Switzerland. The concept of the event is dead simple: from Friday to Sunday night you’ll have the opportunity to work on an innovative idea in small teams composed of other dynamic people. Experienced mentors will provide advices, feedback and constructive but sometimes hard feedback (everything an entrepreneur needs!). Startup Weekend always take place in a relax, creative and energizing atmosphere… But don’t expect to be totally relaxed: you’ll working hard, because you have a fixed deadline on Sunday evening when all teams pitch to a jury and to the public (open to anyone)! Event will take place in a brand new wellness center (Centre de Loisirs) and …
Unique (swiss) opportunity to pitch VC’s
A wonderful opportunity for swiss tech startups will take place on Wednesday 23rd May 2012 in Lausanne: the Swiss Venture Forum (SVF) The event will allow the most promising Life Sciences, Clean Technology and Information Communication Technology entrepreneurs from Switzerland to meet and pitch active international investors and corporations. 30-40 early stage companies from Switzerland will be selected to present at the Forum to the panel of international experts/investors who will asses them on the basis of their business potential, technology merit, competitive position, investment interest and team experience. Furthermore, the best 10 companies of the SVF in Lausanne will be invited to attend the Annual European Finale in tech hotspot Berlin in December 2012 (150 investors + 150 companies, the largest VC event in Europe). Event will take place close to the EPFL’s Innovation Square, at Starling Hotel, and …
The Founder Institute is finally coming to Switzerland – WELCOME!
As another proof that Switzerland is a strong (ICT) entrepreneurial scene, The Founder Institute is opening its program in May 2012. 3 years after launch, this global accelerator for founders by founders is opening its 32nd location in Bern (Europe has 7 other locations like THE tech hot spot Berlin). During 15 weeks, wannabe entrepreneurs will be helped by experienced serial entrepreneurs from Switzerland and abroad to launch their business. FI is really close to the excellent venture challenge workshop powered by venturelab: main differences are that it is open to non students, is only mentored by entrepreneurs and has – a little – cost. Bootcamp will take place on March 28th 2012, from 19:00 to 21:30, at Swisscom’s BrainGym in Berne. After a presentation of the workshops concept, Amir Suissa (Founder & CEO of DeinDeal.ch) will present his journey …
How a little Switzerland-based startup is beating Flipboard
Did you remember the startup sobees, which orginally built a better social desktop aggregator than trend follower Seesmic or Tweetdeck? sobees was also the first company in the world to launch a Facebook iPad application back in May 2010, with huge buzz. Gathering all their worldclass social media knowledge (how many players can show 4 years experience in building cutting edge social media applications in Europe?) and strong ability to deliver, they’re now back to the hot space with their latest version of social magazine NewsMix. The application (available on iPhone, iPad, Facebook and web) lets you easily gather news from real people via their Twitter and Facebook account… Great advantage is that you don’t have to follow or like (you’re even don’t need a Twitter/Facebook account!) specific people to get their news: you just subscribe to news channels (or …
Meet a serial investor & entrepreneur from Zürich
Martin Saidler, serial entrepreneur and investor, is back to Switzerland for around 2 years and is one of the rare investor in the region who will only invest in internet startups (or at least, who is publicly claiming it). Mr. Saidler was successful in Berlin and then in Eastern Europe, where he had up to 150 (!) participations at the same time. He also was one of the first investor in b-to-v, famous family office and seed fund in German speaking Switzerland. Now, Saidler is focusing his efforts on building an incubator called Centralway, which is actually a web agency with 38 employees, where new venture can be boosted. He build 4 pillars to provide a real booster to startups: Centralway Factory: using Centralway’s available resources in marketing and software development. Key assumption is to motivate own employees to launch …
Lausanne’s startup scene is heating up!
Startup Weekend Lausanne took place for a second time this week-end at the inspiring Rolex Learning Center at EPFL. 120 creative guys worked together during 54 hours to pitch their project to the jury (which I was a part of) on Sunday evening. 55 projects were pitched on Friday night and the 18 “best ones” (or the ones who convinced enough people to vote for them!) were selected. I’m pretty impressed by the quality of the projects and to see how many new guys are entering the swiss startup scene. But stop the blabla, here they are (with a little personal impression)! Third Life: people are getting older but still want to have fun and do – fun – activities. Recognizing it, Third Life want to become the G.O. (“Gentil Organisateur”) for old people… “because we are not dead yet!” …
7 (+1) startups presenting at The Hub Zurich
On Monday, I attended the 5th ICT Investor Day in coworking space The Hub Zürich, organized by Swiss ICT. First, an institutional investor can present its company and this time, it was c-crowd, a crowdfunding platform started in 2011 in Zürich. Concept is to leverage internet to get a plenty of private investors, who can invest as little as CHF 1’000.- in startups they have poor chances to meet otherwise. The concept is not brand new, but an interesting alternative way to get funded when you have a B2C focus and a financial need up to CHF 750’000.- (according to Philipp Steinmann, the CEO). To get attention, you have to work seriously on your business model to make it dead simple to understand. To deal with all the paperwork, c-crowd provides you a models (shareholder agreement, certificate of subscription, etc.). …
Venture Night @Lift Conference: 8 startup pitching!
AlpICT Venture Night took place Thursday evening at Lift Conference in Geneva. Successful entrepreneur Christian Wanner, founder and CEO of online supermarket LeShop, pitched quickly about the journey of his venture. He started in the web early days, in 1997, at 27. He and his team experienced the entrepreneurial rollercoaster so extremely that he was just 20 hours away of closing the business late 2002. His investors decided to close the business a couple of weeks before, but Christian decided to fight for staying alive. And that worked out: they’ve raised CHF 10 millions and turned the opportunity (acquiring their biggest competitor 12 months after) in a real success (CHF 150mios turnover & 220 employees in 2012). Christian then illustrated the journey of an entrepreneur with the South Pole expedition Ernest Schackleton in 1914. This description sticks to startup’s journey. …