For the 4th time, the Alpine High Tech Venture Forum is coming back to Lausanne. 30 startups will present their project and compete to qualify for the European Venture Summit which will take place at the end of 2015. Startups come mostly from Switzerland, with an addition of 4 Italian startups and one from France. The conference is open ot anyone upon registration. And you can grab a 20% discount to AVHF by using this code startupolic15 INFORMATION & COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY BestMile, Lausanne: shaping robots into public transport systems Digit Arena, Martigny (Switzerland): Imagine watching Google TV 3.0 and having access to live sports of any major event or series in the world. Formerly unaffordable broadcasting rights are turned into enhanced revenue fed by local in-video tailored banner advertisement. ELSE, Geneva: ELSE stands for ELegant Systems Engineering. Gait Up, Lausanne: …
If my kids become entrepreneurs… by Laurent Haug
Some weeks ago, Laurent Haug hold a presentation at an entrepreneurship school on what he learned during his 20 years as an entrepreneur. Laurent is a Swiss entrepreneur, who notably sold his startup (CoComment) to Swisscom in 2006 and started the famous Lift Conference (#1 innovation conference in Switzerland) 10 years ago. His motto is to “help people find ideas, and ideas find people”. He’s current active as a Venture Partner at Anthemis (a VC specialised in fintech) and Partner at MKS Alternative Investment (a seed investment company based in Switzerland). I first met Laurent back in 2009 and we collaborated for the organization of the 2nd and 3rd “Venture Night” at Lift (I convinced the boss of the technology park I was working for to sponsor the night…). He’s an inspiring and friendly guy and a very sharp business …
5 European Tech Conferences
Spring is really busy with interesting tech events and many new ones are also popping up almost everywhere in a continuous way (is there a tech event bubble?). As an entrepreneur, you could spend almost 100% of your time in tech conferences… but that would be wrong of course. As well as you sometimes (often, depending on the quality of the conference) make great business contacts that will maybe convert in the coming months, you’d better select carefully the events you go to to maximize the Return On Investment! So here are 5 interesting tech conferences that you should consider attending (depending on your current focus and your industry): Pioneers Festival, Vienna – 28-29th of May 2015: Pioneers Festival is one big Europe conference, and probably one of the must attend conference for every entrepreneur of the DACH region (Deutschland, …
12 startup learnings and advice
On May 7th, I had the pleasure to be invited by IFJ/venturelab (Institute für Jungunternehmen, based in St-Gallen), the oldest and renowned entrepreneurs training in Switzerland, to share my journey so far to students from the Berner Fachshochschule in Biel/Bienne (very close to my home city village). To my big surprise, there were only German-speaking attendees (Biel/Bienne is the only true bilingual city in Switzerland (65-70% German-speaking, 30-35% French speaking) and only one woman present. The latter point doesn’t surprise me that much, however. Tech startups are mostly (and unfortunately) a “man-thing”. It’s the reality, even though I had the pleasure to organize a pitching event on May 11th (SICTIC Investor Day Lausanne) with 5 (out of 8!) female entrepreneurs pitching. Probably the exception confirming the rule (…). But back to my presentation. The first speaker was Matthias Hell, an …
Meet 8 promising Swiss startups on May 11th
For the 5th time, the SICTIC Investor Day is taking place in Lausanne (15 of such events already happened in Zürich). The jury, comprised of Pierre Bordry (Capital Proximité), Alexandre Peyraud (aleCent), Pierre-Jean Wipff (Innovaud) and Sal Matteis (entrepreneur and investor), had a hard time selecting the best 8 startups that will have the opportunity to pitch. 22 high qualitative startups from Western Switzerland (and Zürich) applied for the event taking place on May 11th in Lausanne. Here are the 8 selected startups: PodioBox, Lausanne Interactive conference system revolutionizing the way to deploy presentations STHar, Lausanne Predicting human behavior for smart geomarketing myDNA, Geneva Making personalized healthcare a reality with genetic diagnostics solutions Xsensio, Lausanne Next-generation wearable devices that track biochemical information non-invasively Obviz, Lausanne Increase user retention and engagement for media producers using artificial …
5 Startup Events To Attend In Switzerland
Seven weeks ago, I’ve launched the new version of my blog (which was a must-must-must-DO). I’ve added a new section to the blog called My Events Selection, where I suggest some events that I find interesting and that you should consider attending if you’re in the startup/digital world. Switzerland is that tiny that I don’t focus on a specific location (you can reach almost every place in 2 hours, you know it), so you’ll find events taking place in Zürich, Lausanne or Basel. But I also select international events happening in the major European startup hotspots. Moreover, I do my best to get discounts for you, my beloved, addicted readers ;-). So if you weren’t aware of this page, come visit it regularly! Here are 5 events taking place in the next 2 months, that you should consider attending: Überall …
Apply to ICC: The International Create Challenge
For the 4th year, The International Create Challenge is back. This (free) 3 weeks intensive and immersive technology accelerator program will take place from 25th of August to 15th of September in Martigny. Started by the Idiap Research Institute and the Association for Interactive Multimodal Information Management, now also supported by Polytech Ventures, the challenge is like an extended Startup Weekend (so you have to be fit and ready to last this marathon!): you work within a team of 3-4 people (people and projects have to apply until May 4th) on your project, get access to high technologies developed by the Idiap and are extensively coached to build a Mininum Viable Product and a credible and promising business case.The 3 winners will be get a CHF 10’000.- award each and get a potential investment, as well as additional subsidies and …
The Importance of Startup Board Members
When you start developing your startup, you are often 2, sometimes 3 co-founders. You may have seen more than 3 co-founders, but experience shows that it is not sustainable to be more than 3 (because everybody has less ownership for instance… but also because it becomes difficult to take decisions move forward quickly). The ideal composition of an internet/software startup is to have one UX/UI designer, a software engineer and a businessman/-woman. The 2 first members are the ones who will actually develop the product and the last one, the one who cares of everything else (administrative tasks, product management, marketing, business development, financials, fundraising, recruiting, etc.). You need to understand and to respect each other really well to make it working. As the businessman/-woman of the team, you need to be on the field, going to meet as many …