A Perspective on Entrepreneurship, Technology & Locative Dynamics

A new service called Mogulus allows everyone to create their own broadcast station in a really simple and easy way. You just have to install a webcam and create a Mogulus account. They offer a simple studio interface which guides you in creating interesting broadcast channels, including the possibility to mix in existing video content. A great service that goes against the convention that broadcasting is a complex and expensive thing. It will be interesting to see how they progress and how the citizen journalism will adapt to these new methods. Definitely one step closer to media transparency and the risk that privacy concerns will increase.

They have a well-done Mogulus introduction video on their site that explains the service in an exemplary way.

Maybe in some months/years you can use their service with your mobile phone which increases mobility and makes it mass market capable.

P.S. I am writing my exams in the next three weeks, this means studying, studying, studying. This means Middleware, Internet Technologies, Web-based Information Systems, System Dynamics, Strategic Management, Outsourcing and E-Business. I will see, if this works out as planned.

The last weekend I attended the IdeaLab 2007, which is organized by students of the WHU Vallendar, one of the leading German private business schools. They invited young entrepreneurs and those interested in startups and entrepreneurship. The agenda was filled with several presentations of well-known speakers, from the venture capitalist to the successful serial entrepreneur. There were also many interesting startup presentations. I will add some links at the end of this post for those interested.

The headline of the event was “Founders wave?!” (German: Gründerwelle?!) and thus there has been a panel discussion if we have a new bubble in the Internet sector in Germany. The answer was mainly that there is no bubble but in some sectors there are too many startups jumping on exactly the same business ideas, e.g. social networks for athletes or any other niche community. The consensus was, as long as not all of these companies get high fundings there won’t be serious economical problems. Inspired by the success and the successful exits of companies like StudiVZ (the German Facebook), or Xing (a LinkedIn competitor) the Internet is still in the interest of many young tech savvy people and thus the growth in the number of startups in this sector was naturally but is nothing concerning in comparison to New Economy times. The number of newly founded companies (relative to last year) is only growing in the Internet sector in Germany, unfortunately.

Some of the speakers:

Lukasz Gadowski Stefan Rizor Mountain Partners Michael Schwetje Oliver Jung (Adinvest) Oliver Samwer Holtzbrinck High Tech Gründerfonds Wellington PayPal Christian Vollmann (Magic Internet) Ehssan Dariani Founderslink Partech

Presented Startups:

• Rudi Rockt! The best way to socialize while cooking and eating.
• Amiando Event invitations, management and ticketing.
• NetMoms Mother community
• TripMonkey Service to share private accommodations
• Brainsparent A platform for socially and environmentally friendly clothing companies.
• Doktus Online document management
• Jobleads Employee search through personal recommendations.
• Smava Private credits between users.
• Esanum Closed doctor community
• Weblin 3D community avatars
• netzathleten Community for athletes

Thanks to the students of the WHU Vallendar for this great event and the perfect organization and the tasty food. Some advice for the next time, maybe reduce the number of presentations and leave more space for questions and open discussions after each talk.

In the next days or better weeks I will write some more posts about this event and with a focus on more specific presentations and topics. For example, impressions about the venture capital market and the background story of StudiVZ. The founder of StudiVZ, Ehssan Dariani, gave an enjoyable presentation that is worth writing about.

I just saw on the German site DocInsider that they are having a link called “Hide the Community”. By clicking it you can hide all the user profile pictures, doctor ratings and user questions. Actually afterwards the start page is empty and it is just a search engine. What is it supposed to be? Why should you allow users to disable the core features of the application? Maybe they know that social networks and communities are getting more and more a commodity and thus it is a nice to have that belongs to every site. In my opinion this is just crazy and a bad positioning in the market. Normal users, especially in the health field, don’t want to customize their site in such a complex way.

Bye the way, there is also a DocInsider.com that offers a doctor search for the US market. Without having done some research on IP issues, I would say this is a risky thing.

My 2cents,

Cornelius.

P.S. A recap from the IdeaLab at the WHU Vallendar will follow in the next days.