A Perspective on Location Services, Mobile Entrepreneurship & Startup Life

The good news first, I finished my studies of Business Information Technology at the University of Mannheim in June 2009 after an interesting stay abroad at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute in Galway, Ireland. The bad news, at least for this blog, I completely focused on working on Tagcrumbs, a Internet and mobile startup I co-founded during my studies. From time to time there will be some articles here but better follow our startup blog or our Facebook fan page.

The best news, we just released our exciting location-aware iPhone application. Tagcrumbs is now mobile, the way it has to be:

With Tagcrumbs you can remember and share your discoveries with your friends and the world. It’s about those locations that you enjoy visiting, where you spend some time, experience something special and that you would readily recommend to others. This can be a beach or diving spot you discovered during a holiday, a museum or park that you visited or the café on the corner with the best espresso.

Join the Tagcrumbs community and let me know what you think of it and how we can improve it. Feedback appreciated! Thanks!

And here is Ben explaining what’s behind Tagcrumbs, on top of the house where I live in Berlin.

A great article “Tech Entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky: You Can Build Your Start-up Without Venture Capital.” at Informilo. Some snippets worth reading:

“In Spain,  examples of these kind of businesses include  Meneame and Panoramio, now part of Google Earth.  In the U.S., recent examples are Digg, Friendfeed and Techmeme. Actually some of the world’s most successful technology companies were started without any early stage venture funding, including the likes of Microsoft, Dell, Cisco, Oracle and eBay.”

“With little money to run on you’ll need to solve problems and inefficiencies as they appear and this will build a valuable frugality and efficiency culture into your company.”

“All these trends push towards a world in which VCs could lose much of their relevance, at least for what concerns early stage financing of Internet and software start-ups. These startups will require little or no money to start, capital that can be provided by “friends and family”.  Angel investors can get in later to help grow the business, and funding from VCs, if ever needed, will help scaling the operation at a later stage.”

This article can somewhat be seen as guideline or description of what we followed at Tagcrumbs, founding team 2 developers one business person, Amazon Web Services (virtual Internet company), Open Source (Rails, PostgreSQL, PostGIS,…), external APIs, product first,  internationalization,… Bootstrapping for the sake of having more time without external pressure and trying to focus on the perfect placemarking experience, especially in a mobile context.

I already wrote in my last posts that I am working on a startup project. Over the last months we developed silently a big part of the application and set up Tagcrumbs Limited. I co-founded the company with Sascha (IT) and Ben (Business). A cool team with all core competencies on board so we can exactly design and build the product we love and that is framed in our minds. So far working on this project was fun and I am looking forward to the next months.

From now on you can read more about Tagcrumbs, the startup experience or our mobile lifestyle under blog.tagcrumbs.com. Feel free to contact us if there are any questions related to Tagcrumbs.