//INTERVIEW: Edial Dekker / Steve Jang// — We just kicked off a new series over at global City Guide Unlike, where founders give us the inside scoop on their local hangouts. First up is Edial Dekker, Co-Founder and CEO of Gidsy. Originally from Amsterdam, the ex-cook takes us through the hidden gems of tulip fields and locally produced food across his current home-base of Berlin.
A couple of weeks ago we bumped into Edial in London when interviewing Steve Jang, CEO of SF-based Soundtracking. Turns out, the 2 are friends from Edial’s Amsterdam days at The Next Web Conference. So we asked the two: “What would be the best ever local experiences in San Francisco and Amsterdam?” — Hint: It includes Surfing, Snowboarding, Food, Red Light Districts and Skateboards. (Sorry for the busy background noise.)
// EyeEm x Gidsy // — This is a perfect example of 2 Berlin start-ups joining forces: popular mobile photo app EyeEm offered a street-photography masterclass on Gidsy and these are the picturesque footprints across Berlin.
——-
Street art + photography have been at the very core of EyeEm and it brings back memories of my first EyeEm encounter: a mobile photo exhibit in Berlin. As we learned during a recent visit to the EyeEm studio, this was actually the result of a lucky accident…
Back in 2009, CEO Florian Meissner had lost his camera on the very first day of a new job at a photo magazine in New York and was forced to surrender to an iPhone as his one and only lens. He got hooked on mobile photography, published a book and “the rest is history”.
VISUAL DISCOVERY
EyeEm’s point of difference has always been a combination of deep routed passion for photography, mixed with great engineering talent. CTO Ramzi Rizk - dubbed by the team as ‘the best coding photographer’ - is the mastermind behind EyeEm’s data cube, which brings method to the picture madness. With mobile images sky-rocketing, the biggest issue for mobile photography is discovery and consumption. “How do I find images of places, topics and events that I really care about and that have an impact on my day-to-day decision making”, summarizes Florian the problem EyeEm wants to solve. EyeEm’s rigorous tagging system allows clustering of topics and locations and puts real relevance to mobile photo sharing. One can only imagine how valuable this ‘strictness’ will become in the future.
Instagram might have the masses, but the discovery process was always either silo’ed (friends and followers) or random (most popular). Whereas when you fire up EyeEm in a city, you automatically see a picture story of what’s happening around you. You can also follow albums from street-art, music, architecture, fashion and food to portraits and black/white photography. Ultimately, you are visually connecting with people around the globe who share the same interests. And it works: I have met like-minded ‘mobile photo maniacs’ in Toronto, Copenhagen, Barcelona and New York — just through images. — Lights, Camera, Action.
//CHURCHKEY CAN CO. IS THE BEST FLAT-TOP EVER// — This must have been a first even for TC Disrupt standards, but there was a live beer tasting happening at 10am in the morning. With a reason. The founders of ChurchKeyCan Co. took to the stage with CrunchFund’s MG Siegler (also an investor in the company) to talk about disrupting the beer business by bringing back the old-style flat-top beer cans from 50 years ago that you can only open with a ChurchKey.
The new founder darlings of the investor scene (TC words, not ours) include Entourage’s Adrian Grenier who over dinner with Ryan Soward decided that a quality beer experience - with the extra ChurchKey effort - was best suited to “pause and take time with other humans”.
So far, the beer is only available in Seattle and Portland but demand is high and the company is expanding quickly - but carefully to keep the quality high. A San Francisco launch is imminent, with Austin, Los Angeles and New York on the plan. We can already imaging artfully designed limited edition ChurchKey’s that fit the high quality retro-style steel cans. Cheers!
//SPOTTED: gTar at TC Disrupt NYC// — In the end, Ueberconference might have won the Judges Vote and taken home the Disrupt Cup, but gTar was a clear audience choice even before re-entering the Battlefield for the final pitch round. The Incident Technologies team around founder Idan Beck had already struck a cord with the Kickstarter audience and raised a phenomenal $120k in less than 24 hours.
With the fully digital gTar “you simply dock your iPhone in the body, load up the gTar app, and an array of interactive LEDs along the fretboard show you how to play”. Originally developed as a solution for computer musicians, gTar started out in 2009 with Idan Beck hacking away in the garage of his parents’ house in Cupertino, CA. Incident has since grown into a team of 5 and the product has evolved into an instrument that can be played by someone with no musical background. Infact, the mission is to make guitar playing as easy and intuitive as possible — you “just follow the lights”.
This is yet another example how Kickstarter is supporting the current DIY hardware maker movement. Besides raising money, one big advantage of the Kickstarter campaign is also to get actual market feedback on demand and potential scale. “Through Kickstarter, we know how many people are really interested in getting a gTar, even before we turn the switch on,” said Idan Beck. The team has lined up production in China with a potential daily output of 5000 gTars, so the demand for the much oversubscribed campaign should be fulfilled. Originally 20-30 sings will be bundled with the app with more songs currently being cleared which will eventually be available through a content store. Awesome product, smart business. Rock On!
//NEXT12 — Interview RjDj// - I remember the first time when playing with RjDj, the ingenious music app that puts you literally inside the music by responding to your movements and mixing sounds from the environment into the music you are listening to. Yes, it’s trippy. RjDj are also the studio behind the award-winning “Inception: The App”, a collaboration with the movie’s screenwriter Christopher Nolan, that reached 4 million downloads, as well as augmented sound adventure game ‘Dimension’. RjDj “don’t do apps” - they “craft sonic experiences” - and their technology was always a little bit ahead of their time. However, RjDj’s newest release Project NOW focuses very much on the ‘Hier und Jetzt’. We sit down with RjDj’s creator and CEO Michael Breidenbrücker to get a first look of Project NOW (and bump into a seemingly impressed Mike Butcher). The app (currently in private beta) detects your current situation and delivers the perfect soundtrack from your iTunes library. You can tune the emerging “situation graph” by giving song suggestions a #fail or #win. When first firing up the app, it matched Bowie’s German Version ‘Helden’ to my situation ‘Home in Berlin’. That’s a #Win.
//NEXT12 - BERLIN START-UPS// In one of the best Next panels, TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher invites Berlin’s Startup darlings Gidsy, Amen and SoundCloud on stage. But before Edial Dekker, Felix Petersen and David Noel take their seats, Butcher walks the talk in this session about the “friendship econonmy” and makes the whole audience stand up to connect with their neighbours.
//NEXT12 Arena - Books, TV and Music// — Readmill’s Henrik Berggren enters a crowded NEXT arena to talk about the big (sharable) future of books. Tweek CEO Marcel Duee and wahwah.fm Founder/CEO Philipp Eibach join us after their arena sessions for a (very entertaining) lunch interview.
//NEXT12 Music Talk// — We sit down with Ex-DJ turned investor icon Stefan Glaenzer from Passion Capital and Conrad Fritzsch, CEO of tape.tv to talk music, publishing, packaging, trials and tribulations of international expansions - and casting the perfect European A-Team for a Startup.
//NEXT12 - NEXT100// Berlin’s leading angel investor Christophe Maire, Earlybird’s Ciaran O’Leary and MyTaxi founder Sven Külper discuss what nobs to turn to kick-start the growth of a flourishing start-up ecosystem, example case: Berlin. SoundCloud Co-Founder and CEO Alexander Ljung is officially crowned THE #1 NEXT100. But as he couldn’t pick up his award in person and we saw some fashionable historic images from Alex’ early days - glasses and hairdo, check!
//NEXT12 Interaction Tools // — “Tweet with your brow, bro.” — This panel was definitely on the geniusly bizarre side. Media Artist Kyle McDonald first took to the keynote stage, showcasing some of his latest open-source *slash* arts-engineering projects. Kyle’s camera-based artworks and super powerful live video processing enabled him to continue his talk alternatively as Brad Pitt or his Japanese research partner from Tokyo.
// MADE IN BROOKLYN: MAKERBOT // — The Maker Movement is making Hardware seriously cool again — and Brooklyn-based MakerBot’s are the “leaders of the pack” with their famed 3D Printer which let’s you print/build pretty much anything you want from your digital product designs. Whereas it started to be very much a thing for hackers and developers, the growing audience now is mum’s and dad’s because 1) this gives you some serious cred with your kids 2) it really prepares them for the future. We earlier recorded a little maker session with another one of our current favourite toys - loopc.am, and here it is:
//Startup Weekend Berlin// — In this 3rd Berlin edition of the Startup Weekend more than a hundred developers, designers and marketers battled it out for 54 hours. Initially, 52 ideas were pitched from which 15 were chosen. And the Winner is: SeniorPhone. A great idea and a good one. Kids or grand kids can update their ‘last season’ Android phones to a simpler, more user-friendly version that can then be handed to their senior family members - and everybody gets connected. Most Innovative Idea goes to MoRally, an Online Game that (buzz-word alert) gamifies Social Responsibility, whereby sponsors incentivise players when reaching certain goals. Aldes.co deservedly took home the Best Pitch Award. Their presentation showed the very entertaining and educating lessons learned that led to their decision of laying their food-truck on demand idea to rest in peace. Their research had shown that there wasn’t actually a big enough problem in their target markets UK and US (but rather with parking). A bold move from Aldes.co and also a clear sign that the gourmet food truck trend has really hit the streets - and we should expect more taco, ramen and crème brûlée deliciousness popping up at a street near you very soon.
What stood out from the pitches at Startup Weekend Berlin was a great variety of ideas attacking pain points from taxes to KITA shortage - rather than the gazillionst ‘SoLoMo App.’ Hopeful signs for the upcoming Seedcamp and Startupbootcamp Berlin. The prime time pitch season has only just begun.
//INTERVIEW - Beverly Jackson// - At New York’s ACE Hotel, I meet for breakfast with fellow Mlover Beverly Jackson, the Director Marketing/Social Media for The Grammy’s. This year’s show famously broke records with social media and mobile programs playing a major role to see audience numbers soar to over 39 million people. (The second most watched Grammy telecast since 1984 when 51.67 million people watched Jackson take home eight trophies. The following year’s telecast pulled in 37 million and the last time the Grammys even topped 30 million was 1988.) In our interview, we dive deeper in the mechanics of orchestrating the full ‘transmedia campaign’ leading up to the event, how much 6-times Grammy winner Adele drove conversations online and how the Academy dealt with the tragic death of Whitney Houston on the day before the show.
//AdAge Digital NYC// — One core themes at AdAge - and reflecting a current trend in the industry - was the increasingly closer collaboration between brands and startups. We sit down with Lucas Herscovici, Global Director Strategic Innovation and Marketing at Anheuser-Busch InBev, to talk about the company’s strategy, process and selection criteria for investments in startups. Anheuser-Busch also sponsored the Brandhack with a brief for Budweiser, which saw 6 companies battle it out for a partnership deal worth $25k . Social-planning app Wendr emerged as the winner with a more than passionate and convincing presentation by CEO Sam Zises. Even notoriously sceptic judge Ben Leerer ended up wearing a Wendr hat on stage.
// ad:tech SFO // - We speak with HasOffer’s Partner/CMO Peter Hamilton about the latest trends in Affiliate Marketing and how the Seattle-based company has developed into one of the major players in that field. HasOffers’ disruptive tracking technology allows businesses to track and manage their own affiliate programs and has gained an incredible adoption over 7,000 affiliate networks. One of our favourite stage session was the closing music panel “Digital Killed the Radio Star” diving into “How Pandora, Spotify, Turntable.fm & TastemakerX are Shaping the Future of Advertising” - with respective executives from all companies on stage.
