January 2012
9 posts
10 Rules of Networking for Startups
Networking is essential for startups: in order to build trust and credibility in your business you need to be visible and to make personal connections. Whether you want to recruit, attract funding, or win clients, it’s the personal touch that will win people over.
You almost certainly need to build new contacts as you get your startup off the ground and, if you’re innovating a brand new field,...
Build Communities Not Content - Paulina Bozek at...
Paulina Bozek is the co-founder of social entertainment startup INENSU. In this talk she shares the insights that she’s learned from her years in social gaming.
Paulina spoke about the virtue of building communities before content in her early (9:05 AM) talk, opening the program for the Saturday of HackFwd’s Build 0.8 event.
INENSU are focusing on two platforms that cover two...
Fantasy Shopper $3.3M round announced
As reported first by TechCrunch Europe, Fantasy Shopper has recently closed a financing round worth $3.3M, led by Accel Partners and New Entreprise Associates. Fantasy Shopper joined HackFwd at the end of 2010, and developed (in stealth) and launched the incredibly addictive social shopping game in October in the UK. They also cleaned awards tables in the UK and the US, most notably first prize at...
Roberto Bonanzinga: Do VCs help or hurt? A talk...
In this lively talk, Roberto Bonanzinga from Balderton Capital asks whether VCs help or hurt entrepreneurs and offers some answers – some of which might come as a surprise.
According to Roberto, there are lots of ways in which a VC can damage or even kill a startup. This might be a message from an unexpected quarter, but he knows what it is to sit on both sides of the negotiating table. “[At...
Fab.com: from zero to hero in 9 months - Talk from...
Jason Goldberg, founder and CEO of Fab.com is passionate about design, and he made the decision to shutdown a prior startup and retooled to follow his passion in Fab.com. In this talk he explains why this bold move was the path to success. Fab.com recently raised a $40 million venture round.
Jason spent 2010 building his latest startup, Fabulous. By early 2011 he realised it wasn’t getting the...
betashop: Behind the Scenes: How Fab Raised $40... →
Jason Goldberg’s super-insightful blog post on how Fab.com raised their recent round. Jason’s talk at Build 0.8 is following up in the next post.
betashop:
Let’s face it, fundraising can be a real pain in the ass for the entrepreneur.
It takes up a ton of time that can be otherwise spent managing the business.
Sure, it’s a necessary evil, but it’s also typically a big...
Marco Börries: Leadership in startups - Talk from...
Marco Börries has built three successful startups, including StarOffice (later known as OpenOffice). He shares his experience on how founders can be better leaders, and what he is doing differently now that he is running his fourth startup.
Here are summaries of the three of Marco’s six insights. If you are a founder, or want to be a better leader, watch this video.
“You are...
Pitch in Berlin v3 now accepting applications
Pitch in Berlin is a pitch contest organized in connection with our Build events in Berlin. The next one takes place March 10th, and the applications are now open. The audience consists of top investors, startup veterans, future stars and members of the press.
Application window remains open until 10. February, 23.59 pm GMT. Check out the TechCrunch TV coverage from the previous event,...
How to Create a Hit iPhone Game - Torsten Reil
Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion, spoke at HackFwd’s Build 0.8 event on how to create a hit iPhone game.
NaturalMotion Games started out as a game technology company, and their Euphoria-technology has been used from Grand Theft Auto IV to Pepsi TV ads (check out the Pepsi ad 3:00 into the talk). With the introduction of the iPhone, Natural Motion moved into creating new types of mobile...
December 2011
3 posts
Delta Strike: Santa Release
Delta Strike has been busy over the last days of the year, pushing their latest Santa release two days ago. The new release sees the introduction of two new characters, Commander Kozel and Sergant Noemi, who will guide the players through the new missions. In the end, the player may face the ultimate Shar’dal boss adversary, and upon triumph, receive a pretty special item.
The game also...
Filmaster released for Android
Filmaster has just released an Android version of the smart movie recommendation and schedule app and updated the iPhone version to include TV showtimes too, better serving the selection available to movielovers.
They are also adding local film festival support, serving the needs of film buffs on a local level. At launch, Filmaster is the official app for ten festivals in the UK and Poland, where...
Tom Hulme: Is Entrepreneurship Mad Science?
Tom Hulme, IDEO Design Director and HackFwd Referrer, talks about entrepreneurship being a form of mad science. There is much chaos and uncertainty, but there are also great formulas for succeeding.
We have more computing power in our smartphones than NASA had when they put a man on the moon, “so you have to start feeling guilty about using that to fire little birds at pigs”, Tom...
November 2011
8 posts
YieldKit wins WebFuture award
Last night YieldKit was awarded the WebFuture first prize in Hamburg. Selected from among 10 finalists, the judges valued YieldKit’s innovativeness, execution and marketing prowess in their appraisal. YieldKit took home 10,000 euros in prize money and another valuable milestone. You can read more about the event here (in German).
YieldKit recently launched YieldWord, a semantic page...
Time to Market - Talk from Build 0.7
For startups, time to market is the time from having an idea to having that idea out in the market making money. In this talk Stephan Schmidt imparts his experience in this key product development concept.
“If a feature is worth developing, it is worth getting to market sooner”, Stephan posits. Short time to market is a huge lever that you can employ to the benefit of your bottom...
Future of 3D game technologies - Talk from Build...
Jonas Echterhoff works on the Mac browser plugin of the Unity 3D game engine, and in this talk he outlines what he thinks is the future of 3D games technology.
Unity 3D allows developers to develop a game on one framework and port that to multiple platforms quickly. Jonas discussed the future of 3D gaming in the browsers from a technical and platform perspective and gives an appraisal of the...
Delta Strike launches in-game item shop
In tune with their roadmap, team at Delta Strike has just released an in-game shop for decking out those starfighters. Keeping with the high visual standards, the items look awesome and surely those hard-earned credits will go into good use. We’re definitely grabbing a few droids to go on the side.
Read the team’s detailed blog post on the milestone here.
YieldKit launches YieldWord
HackFwd alumni YieldKit has just launched a powerful addition to the website monetization arsenal. YieldWord converts keywords on page into affiliate links – fully automatically and cleanly, while giving the publishers control over the category and even exact matching of products. You can take a look at the various examples in this blog post introducing the demo.
With YieldWord, YieldKit has a...
Fantasy Shopper takes Gold
Fantasy Shopper has won first prize in Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge held in San Jose, CA last night. The winners are taking home prizes of $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS credits, Gold support, technical mentoring, and a golden hammer. They are also the first non-US startup to win the contest which has been run since 2007. HackFwd is very proud of the well-deserved achievement of the...
Pitch in Berlin v2 - apply now!
Have a startup? Want to have a startup? HackFwd announces Pitch in Berlin v2!
At our previous Build event in Berlin, we ran a pitching contest called Pitch in Berlin. The event was so successful and the pitches and startups of such high quality that we want to do it again. You can read about the some of the contestants in this TechCrunch article or on the HackFwd blog. If you want to know more...
The Story of AroundMe - Talk from Build 0.7
AroundMe is a location-aware search iPhone app, and one of the biggest ones. Marco Pifferi is the man behind the hugely popular app, and in this video he shares his learnings from building and releasing an app that has been downloaded over 30 million times with 5 million monthly unique users who have 6-8 monthly engagements on average. Apple also used AroundMe in their TV ads, which certainly...
October 2011
9 posts
Launch news: Delta Strike
User testimonials: “Amazing graphics and visual effects” “What? This is a Flash Game, are you kidding?” “The Trailer video is so awesome, I tried out the beta right away!”
Delta Strike is a scifi action RPG that takes a console game experience and makes it playable on Facebook. The game launched at the Adobe MAX Conference and is the first available 3D action...
Launch news: Fantasy Shopper
User testimonials: “It’s amazing and addictive and my new favourite thing.” (link) “I actually LOVE Fantasy Shopper.” (link) “Hi, my name is Rachel and I’m a Fantasy Shopper addict.” (link) “I think fantasyshopper.com might be similar to what happens in very good dreams.” (link)
Fantasy Shopper is a social shopping game and a fashion discovery...
Seven HackFwd Startups in The Europas!
We are pleased to have a strong representation in The Europas, as already mentioned above in some places. The Europas are the main European Awards for early stage Internet and Mobile technology startups. Seven of our portfolio companies are nominated in their categories! The Europas is shaping up to be a promising event (here’s the event registration, only a few tickets left at the time of...
Launch news: Reign of Steel
User testimonials from Facebook: “Fun Fun Fun!! Perfect!! Thanks for this great game!” “Best browsergame ever ;D”
Reign of Steel is a 3D tank multiplayer game, in your browser. It has yesterday seen a complete relaunch and is already getting a lot of love from the players. The game is relaunched primarily on Facebook and Bigpoint. In addition to the new maps, new tanks...
Launch News: Watchlater v2.1
User testimonial: “I’m totally in love with this app. Every time I go on a trip, and there have been quite a lot recently, I load all kinds of crap on my iPad, to keep myself entertained while I’m jammed into an economy class seat in 30.000 feet.” (link)
Watchlater has since their launch been called “Instapaper for video”, but with the new version, the comparison...
Improve Your Event's Visibility and Attendee...
This is a cross-post from sharypic’s blog. sharypic gives you a single place to add, share and organize everyone’s photos from an event.
Pulling off a great event is a lot of work.
Two of the challenges for event organizers are attendee engagement and increasing visibility. After all the promotional work and logistical organization, the event is finally happening and the attendees...
The Things of the Future - Talk from Build 0.7
Cennydd Bowles is a freelance digital product designer based in the UK. You can read his blog here.
Do you contribute to the digital landfill? Are we creating products that really add genuine value, both to the users and businesses involved? At the 2011 CES, about 20,000 consumer electronics products were launched. Helen Walters, whom, Cennydd Bowles quotes in the start of his talk, remarked:...
Fantasy Shopper UK Launch
Fantasy Shopper has today launched in the UK, opening its doors after a meticulous private beta period. GigaOm’s Bobbie Johnson wrote an in-depth story about the product, and the first users pouring in the door are very enthusiastic. Some Fantasy Shoppers are already happy to admit their addiction to the new social shopping game.
Fantasy Shopper has many things going for it. It is a game,...
Werner Vogels: Amazon and the Lean Cloud
We were honoured to have Werner Vogels, Amazon.com CTO, give a talk at HackFwd’s Build 0.7 event in Berlin on the how and the why of Amazon’s cloud business. In the talk, Vogels covers Amazon’s history, design principles and learnings from building a world-changing cloud services business. Watch the video for the entirety of the superb talk.
“Amazon is a technology...
September 2011
9 posts
Project Management, Guaranteed Fun and No...
This is guest blog post by Stefan Richter on behalf of TheDeadline, a HackFwd alumnus.
People love our project management tool TheDeadline: Create tasks, share them with your co-workers and TheDeadline will keep you up-to-date on all important status changes and events. You save a lot of time because you don’t have to ask for all the information anymore.
We built TheDeadline for ourselves. My...
HackNow Winner: Luis Iván Cuende
HackNow is a contest we ran over the summer, challenging the young developers in Europe to come up with innovative, useful and novel applications or hacks. We received around 300 applications from the under-18 year old technical talent in Europe and the quality was superb.
The winner was clear. The 15-year old Luis Iván Cuende from Spain, with his distributed web-tech based desktop, Asturix On,...
HackFwd Build 07 in Berlin
We held Build 07 in Berlin over the weekend. From Thursday night to Sunday, the city was host to a crowd of geeks bent on changing the world. Friday was an internal day of presentations and workshops, and on Saturday we opened our doors to external invitees, friends, potential startups and world-class speakers. Our Build events are designed around providing our startups with the best mentoring,...
Chris Boos on Build 06
With Build 07 soon underway in Berlin, Chris Boos’s field report on the highlights of Build 06 is a nice read. In his post Chris lists his favourite presentations (with videos) and why they in particular stood out. Read his post here or catch the highlights below.
Let’s start with my favourite four presenters and their presentations here. I will list them in alphabetical order so...
Social by Design - Video from Build 06
Gareth Morris is a Partner Engineer on Facebook’s Platform Engineering team.
What does it mean to develop a product that is social by design? Gareth Morris from the Platform Engineering team at Facebook goes through the basics of using the Open Graph Protocol for including products and pages in the social graph and for tracking the performance of social plugins across sites, apps and...
Watchlater for iPhone released
Want a handy way to cache web videos for your iPhone and iPad? The much-awaited iPhone-supporting 2.0 version of the Watchlater app has just been released on the App Store, and it is free! It comes with 60 minutes of caching, so you can get a good amount of video onto your iPhone immediately.
Watchlater now supports over 40 different platforms, and has been called the “Instapaper for...
API's Whole - Video from Build 06
Josep Pujol of 3scale gave an expert talk about APIs at the Build 06 event. Josep is the latest addition to HackFwd Referrers, and as attested by the great talk below, a superb asset to the HackFwd pool of expertise. We are very happy to welcome him on board!
API extends programmatic access to your product and enables others to build on your applications. But API is about connectedness, Josep...
The Music of Delta Strike
Music is an important part of a gaming experience. While often playing second fiddle to other elements in a game, sometimes the music of a game adds a new dimension and even transcends the game.
The team at Pro3Games, the HackFwd startup behind Delta Strike, places a huge emphasis on the gaming experience. With the team overachieving themselves constantly it comes almost as no surprise to see...
The Art of the Pitch - Video from Build 06
Pierre Morsa trains presentation skills in France with Ideas on Stage and shares his experiences on startups pitching for investment.
In this talk, the basics of presenting a pitch to investors are covered by building a template for the contents of the pitch. The first tip: start with the product: unfortunately, after many pitches the first question is “so what do you do exactly?”....
August 2011
10 posts
How Wooga cares for its monsters - Video from...
We are happy to introduce Stephanie Kaiser as HackFwd’s latest referrer. Stephanie brings with her stellar knowledge in the area of social games and product management, and we were very honored to have her give a talk at our last Build event.
Stephanie presented learnings from Wooga’s hit game Monster World, where adorable monsters grow weird and wonderful plants for fun and...
Chris Boos: Passion Drives Business - Two...
The following was originally posted by Chris Boos, HackFwd Referrer and legendary geek, at his blog Chris Boos on Automation. We have the pleasure of cross-posting it here.
Now let me talk about the HackBoxes – the term for HackFwd companies.
Let me start out with a company I put into the dead pool only 9 months ago. Delta Strike a company producing a universe as a platform for many games and...
Announcing BeamApp
We are happy to announce BeamApp as the latest addition to HackFwd’s startups. BeamApp aims to bring you seamless action across your devices. With BeamApp, you can pass your current context from one device to another to continue an ongoing task with the gadget that fits best. You can sign up to be notified of the launch, or read about how to participate in a private beta, at the BeamApp...
7 Product Tips for Startups - Video from Build 06
Charles Wiles is the Managing Director of the web startup Imagini and a HackFwd referrer from London.
In his talk Charles Wiles gives 7 product tips to geeky startups. We’ll summarize the first three to get you started: “Prove It!”, “You Don’t Have to Build it to Sell It”, and “It’s About the User, Stupid”.
First, Charles covers what the...
To-do for the Weekend: Manage Twitter Friends and...
Getting into the groove of following the same people day after day can mean that you keep getting information that you don’t actually even want, but have just conditioned yourself into receiving it. It may take a fresh perspective to realize that the account that bombards you with irrelevant stuff is just that, irrelevant.
FlockOfBirds is a tool for the iPhone for managing your Twitter...
Filmaster: Building the best way to discover...
This is a post from Borys Musielak, the founder and CEO of Filmaster, HackFwd’s first startup from Poland.
It’s an honor for me to introduce my startup, Filmaster.com, a movie discovery service and mobile app which knows what you should watch tonight.
The Team
As I’m a geek and movie buff myself, I always wanted to build a service related to film. I started Filmaster in 2010...
B2C Customer Development, part 3 of 3: Testing...
Cracking the signup page for a closed beta has become something of a holy grail to many budding startups. Fueled by success stories from the likes of Hipster, who gathered up tens of thousands of emails without even telling people what they do, and the simple platforms like LaunchRock or MyBetalist for constructing signup pages, it may seem like that’s all you need to build a user base.
Why...
B2C Customer Development, part 2 of 3: Finding...
You have a B2C product. You may have a specific target audience in mind, or you may be building something that you think will have mass appeal. Nonetheless, for testing purposes, you need to define a target audience – and then aim slightly wide.
Even if your product will be mainstream and have mass appeal, you will need to find the early adopters first. An early adopter is not a fixed personality...
Mike Butcher: How To Deal With The Tech Press -...
At our Build 06 event in Mallorca, TechCrunch EU Editor Mike Butcher gave an excellent talk on how to talk to the press – and with pretty hilarious examples, how not to talk to the press (or to anyone, really).
The key take-aways for startups:
1) Startups shouldn’t think in terms of PR. Startups should think in terms of news. News is different, interesting and uncommon. Be a purple...
B2C Customer Development, part 1 of 3: Prototyping
Customer development is one of the buzzwords you cannot avoid if you are involved with startups today. In short, it means developing your product in cooperation with your customers, making sure you understand their needs and develop a product that meets them. This mini-series of blog posts assumes that you are familiar with the basics of customer development (if you want to catch up, read first...
July 2011
5 posts
15 Years of Founding and Hacking - Video from...
The talk from Frank Thelen starts our series of of expert talks – Sparks – from Build 06. Frank recounts his experiences from 15 years of founding and hacking, including what to avoid, what to do, what to read and how to hire, for example. Watch the video to get ideas for how to build and lead your organization, your company and your resources. You can also read more about Frank here, and...
Announcing Filmaster and Wrapping Up Build 06
Build 06 wrapped up Sunday morning with a pitch workshop and breakfasts with experts, both of which were very well attended – especially given the Sunday night’s party on the beach of Es Trenc. As the photo attests, the theme was White Night.
On Saturday, we signed the contracts with our first Polish startup, Filmaster. The news were already broken in Poland on Friday as the tweets from...