Today I am attending the Google Travel Summit here at Google Zurich. An interesting mix of Google folks and startups like RouteRank, TouristWay, TripSay, Gekko, YourTour, HouseTrip, TripWolf, GetYouGuide and ourselves.
Funny question of the day: What do you do different than Google Notebook? Answer: Google Notebook is no longer. ;-)
Yesterday (January 23rd) our company just turned 1. Happy birthday Memonic!
For the occasion we went up the Uetliberg for a nice breakfast with partner and kids.
More pictures in our Flickr Group.
Last week we launched memonic.com at the Swiss Innovation Forum in Basel. We went there with no expectations. We haven't been there ever before, so difficult to gauge any potential interest.
We were positively surprised. From 9am to 7pm we were pitching our solution quasi non-stop to dozens of conference visitors. Most surprising was the genuine interest from corporate quarters. The guests at our booth immediately saw the potential of our solution when applied to their everyday humdrum problems when doing research, say in a bank or in a large pharmaceutical company. And that even though our solution still lacks crucial collaboration features.
It goes without saying that we will strive hard to come up with a package that will surpass the expectations.
Booth at the Swiss Innovation Forum.
True in Nektoon colors, but then we had to hand-in
all materials back in August, when the name was
still pending legal clearance.
Since it we had quite a ride. Our quiet launch policy is simply due to the fact that even we ourselves still miss a number of features dearly in the public version. Yet it took off quite heavily: Lot's of tweets on Twitter, and quite a number blog posts and some media stories. See for yourself (Collected press clippings).
Thank you for your warm welcome of memonic.com!
Tomorrow we will unveil memonic, our first product, at a very appropriate place: the Swiss Innovation Forum in Basel.
memonic let's you effortlessly and straightforwardly keep the essential of everything that matters to you.
Why memonic? It the result of journey on a long and winding road. A number issue had to be factored in: Brevity of the name, availability of the .com domain, language traits in different idioms, trademark situation and an assessment of additional parameters, just to name a few. With the name memonic we want to endow our product with a distinctive profile. Together with our friends from Alltag we developed a strong brand identity.
The essential today: Test memonic!
It's simple, it's effortless and straightforward, no software installation required and it's free!
By the way: the company name remains Nektoon.
Next week Patrice will give a presentation on testing at the renowned Internet Briefing Group here in Zurich. He will address a wide variety of testing issue from frameworks, to unit and functional testing and his experiences with testing here at Nektoon and previously at local.ch.
Register directly on the Internet Briefing website (Site and presentation in German)
For people not able to join discusses on his private blog testing in a series of posts covering almost all aspects of web testing.
After a series of successful Barcamps in Zurich and Basel the unconference now goes to Rapperswil at the top end of the Lake Zurich.
Corsin organizes the conference room(s) and infrastructure. Up to us participants to define the program.
All the details on the Barcamp Website.
____
PS: Oh, and we at Nektoon support the Barcamp with some sponsoring. Why? We think it's an idea well worth contributing to.
Last Thursday and Friday Patrice and myself travelled to Munich. And if you travel, you have something to tell (Citation by Matthias Claudius, 1740 - 1815).
We were invited to present Nektoon at the 5th Venture Day of Swiss Technology. Around 6pm we gathered on platform 14 at the Zurich main station. Soon Jean-Pierre Vuilleumier, the managing director of CTI Invest, joined us.
We got ourselves a place in the restaurant coach. It’s a long journey: four and a half hours for roughly 300 km. Luckily the line is about to receive an upgrade after years of neglect. Then again, this would cut short our amiable and enjoyable trip by an hour...
After aperitifs, Dominik Tarolli from Procedural joined us in St.Gallen. I knew his blog – swissstartups.com – before, yet never met him so far. Another plus of our in person get together, I finally got it what their city engine does – amazing stuff!
After some E-Mail back and forth Matthias Sala from Gbanga joined us, too. Gbanga’s wants to create interactive mobile games. They had a first test run this summer with the Zoo Zurich.
Picture by dselz
Though an interesting crowd, hunger looming I couldn’t fully kick the habit and check my Twitter stream to discover Moritz Adler from Blogwerk tweeting that he sits in that same restaurant coach. Where? Meanwhile the coach became quite crowded with Oktoberfest goers.Ah, there he was.
The six of us represent quite an interesting mix of Swiss ICT startups: Gaming, publishing, 3D rendering, fluid information and Mr. Startup Network. A few startup cock-and-bull stories later (To Dominik: Will do what you requested) we arrived in Munich where some still hit the remains of that Oktoberfest evening.
In the morning we met at the Literaturhaus in the center of Munich. How fitting: The opening speech was by Quillp, a digital book publishing site. Next to the afore mentioned there were a number of other startups from the biotech and life science (BLS) sector present.
To listen to the BLS startups was particularly fascinating. Two things struck me: We in the ICT industry are used to short development cycles. They operate in an environment where time to market is measured in years rather than in months. We may start our next venture on a shoestring; they need heavy investment over consecutive years in people and infrastructure. Obvious if you think about it, but easily forgotten if you labor day in, day out with just your notebook on our Ikea desk.
This morning we hit the road to get to Grübisbalm. It's a nice and quiet spot with a little Eco Hotel above the Lake Lucerne with a view! We hold here our first Nektoominar. For two days we sit together to cycle through all relevant issues developing Nektoon. It's part of a well honed practice of out-of-office meetings to get things done and discuss and decide.
The trip involves a short ride with the Rigi Rack Railway. Quite a steep ride.
More pics in the Nektoon Pool on Flickr.
In sports there are a number of exceptional talents who win big early. Switzerland is proud to have after a number of dire years again ski super stars in the beautiful and gifted Lara Gut or the brilliant Carlo Janka. But the season’s dominators are trusted names such as Aksel Lund Svindal, Didier Cuche, Didier Defago or Benjamin Raich. They’re part of the ski world cup for a number of years already.
This weekend was the Alpine World Cup final in Are. Aksel Svindal won the big crystal globe. It’s Aksel’s second globe after 2007. And he’s a top league skier since at least the 2002 junior World Cup Championships.
The small crystal globe for best Giant Slalom skier went to Didier Cuche. He’s in the World Cup for even longer since his phenomenal win of the Hahnenkamm downhill race in Kitzbühl back in 1998 (he won again in 2008).
Watching the races I was reminded of some comments during the World Championship in Val d’Isère. Time and time again the commentators spoke of the missing championship experience of the younger athletes, implying somehow that this lack of experience is negatively correlated with their chances to win big.
Why?
It might be pressure; knowing this is the World Championships, so Mom, Dad, the family and the entire home town watching, it might be a slightly different race procedure, and so on. And suddenly the cool from previous races is gone, giving way to nervousness. A little glitch here and 10 hundredths of a second are gone, so is a medal rank.
Sure also experienced athletes produce such hiccups. But less. Experience matters.
Experience is not a given. It’s rather something like time times exposure.
E = T*Ex
Experience equals Time multiplied with Exposure (1).
Some say, and I agree, that you need to spend 10’000 hours to become really good at something. Yet, spending 10’000 hours training the Hahnenkamm downhill race will not guarantee you a win, probably not even a rank in the top 10. The race day is something quite different. So there is a second element: Exposure. Exposure to the actual race atmosphere. You need that feel of the heartbeat accelerating, the crowds cheering, the lore of the real thing. Irreplaceable.
The same applies when building a business.
_______
(1) The equation has some particular specifics. The equation is not a one off. It’s the sum of what you’ve done so far. Early exposure will increase your experience and will give you an edge. If you are late to the game you’ll have a hard time unless you manage a lot of exposure in a relatively short time. A lot of exposure to different situations over a (hopefully) compact span of life will prepare you well for your challenge.
(2) (c) & Source: Flickr / Blog sportif française
| More memonic photos |
(2)
