Tag Archives: technology

Last week one of Bub.blicio.us‘ long-term media partners and friends, Liana Burtsava of Trendy Lime, was a partner at the Startup Week Vienna that welcomed 100 investors, 70 speakers, and over 1,000 guests to beautiful Vienna, the city known as the bridge between Eastern and Central Europe. Thanks to Liana, we are connected to blogger Vukasin Stojekov of Seebhub.me and the unfolding of startup events in Europe.

Contributed by Vukašin Stojkov of SeeHub.me of Serbia:

Morten Lund, investor and entrepreneur from Copenhagen, Denmark

A plethora of keynotes, presentations, panels and workshops participated in last weeks event in Vienna. Oliver Holle and Erik Bovee of Speedinvest held fantastic informational presentations. I have heard a fair share of VC presentations, but these guys really killed it. Not only did you learn a lot, you could enjoy it too due to their great presentation style. The Startup Week Viena is a must for early stage startups, and I hope to hear them in the future, ideally when they come to Belgrade. One of the best motivational keynotes was given by Pascal Finette on Wednesday, when he compared startups to running a marathon and shared his lessons with entrepreneurs in the audience.

TechCrunch day was awesome. A small part was due to Mike Butcher being on the stage where he is a Superstar. He is awesome presenting himself, moderating a panel, having a fireside chat or even presenting an awards ceremony.

A great piece of motivation and inspiration came on Thursday with Facebook’s Christian Hernandez highlighting Serbia’s Nordeus as his favorite European success story. This was an illustration of how close Nordeus and Facebook are which I believe many in this region take as a signal that one can indeed make it BIG on a global scale no matter where one comes from. Our last day on Friday, we had a chance to hear Doug Richard’s amazing story about his biggest mistake and I can not wait to hear from him again.

Mike Butcher of TechCrunch, soaked with champagne by the winners of the Start up competition, MySugr

The Networking was the best part of Startup Week for me. My biggest impression from this event was a who’s who in the CEE startup scene which was a significant upgrade from the traditional circuit of conferences I have attended in the past. I had the chance of meeting and talking with amazing people from Germany, Austria, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia. You name it, they were there. It was a great experience at what is poised to become one the central European startup events. This year’s edition was just a sign of things to come.

More photos from the conference found on Facebook. (photo credit Luis Kentzler)

Newly created hackathon incubator, AngelHack is about to take Silicon Valley by storm. A new idea that has not brings together 20 of silicon valley’s best and brightest together to create 2 new startups!

On November 11, 2011 a private bus will leave San Francisco holding 20 engineers and developers, en route to an exclusive location, to take over a hotel for 3 days and create two accelerated startups. Upon return, the teams will present their final product to a room full of media and investors.

“Angelhack is about 4 things: Collaboration, Entrepreneurship, Technology and Investing,” says AngelHack co-founder Krystyl Baldwin. “We call it AngelHack because we allow a select pool of angel investors the opportunity to invest in our companies in return for helping to sponsor the event.”

AngelHack is currently seeking out 20 bright engineers to put their entrepreneurial skills to the test. Interested parties can submit applications at http://angelhack.com/apply

Starting on October 3rd, product ideas will be crowd-sourced from the larger technology community. The owner of the product idea that gets chosen, will receive a stake in the company’s equity along with being one of the cofounders. The deadline for submissions is Nov 1.

For more information check out http://www.angelhack.com

The Google Code-in is one of the newest contests presented by Google’s Open Source Program. For students who have wanted to get involved with open source, this is a tremendous opportunity to dive in and give it a shot.

Google will team up with a variety of open source organizations to come up with a list of tasks to be performed by contest contestants. Who is eligible, you ask? Any students between the ages of 13 to 18 before the start of the contest are free to participate.

Google isn’t shorting their participants in the incentive department, either. Contestants who successfully complete one task will receive a t-shirt and a certificate. But it gets bigger: For those who complete three tasks, they will receive $100. For every three tasks after the first three, contestants will receive an additional $100, up to a total of $500 for 15 successfully completed tasks.

10 lucky grand prize winners will receive a trip to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, where their accomplishments will be rewarded with an awards ceremony.

The contest is slated to start on November 22, 2010. You can find additional information on the contest at the Google Code-in website.

The Google Code-in looks like a tremendous opportunity for young students to explore, learn and potentially develop a strong interest in programming. It will provide students with a great opportunity to network and work alongside some impressive leaders in the computer programming field.

What are your thoughts on Google’s contest?

(Photo Credit: Google)

By Julie Blaustein

Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter

The Girls in Tech event, TWITTER NATION Fireside Chat with Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter was held at the incubator Kicklabs in San Francisco with over 100 attendees. It was moderated by Claire Cain Miller, reporter for the New York Times. The chat was full of new and interesting information about Twitter and, surprisingly Evans was quite entertaining.

Evan Williams is known for inventing the term blogger and in fact one of his previous companies, Blogger, was acquired by Google. His success is a result of his need to be driven by his passion within. He is a big fan of Napolean Dynamite who he sees as one of the biggest geeks that there is, but so geeky, that he is cool.

Twitter had over 90 million tweets the day of the event and has now more than 145 million users. Evans feels  there has been no real need for PR and Promotion until recently, and that is because they were “lucky” enough not to need it. Twitter shares a great deal of information not surprisingly, on their own Company Blog .

Eric Brown, Sarah Brown, Lisa Phillips and Dana Contreras of Twitter

Did you know that Twitter is hiring! They have grown to over 300 people and are continuing to grow. Williams feels its important to continue having meals together to get to know one another. Perks include not only working in SF but having your gym membership covered, yoga, pilates and of course most of your meals taken care of.

What is it like working at Twitter? The Twitter folks present at the event were more than enthusiastic about being a part of this fast-moving train that the entire world has either joined or is quickly jumping on board.

I’ve heard of fashion being affected by the changing technology. You know, jackets that hold and charge iPods. Hoodies with built in speakers. And I won’t even consider purchasing a purse without an internal pocket designed for holding my cell phone. But the most forward-thinking and innovative trends are often impractical. That’s why you have to go to the modern art museums to see most of the ideas being put forth.

The WTFJeans brand is looking to make technology more reasonably integrated with our current fashion, launching a line of denim pants that have pockets specifically designed for your gadgets. The size of the pockets are cut to fit things like smart phones, iPods, and even USB portable drives. That’s handy. I suppose it makes sense for menswear, as we girls already have those easy-access purse pockets and all.

The pockets in the WTFJeans are also lined with microfiber, so your iPhone screen won’t get any additional damage done from sitting in your pocket all day. Maybe the screen will actually get a little cleaner, as it rests happily in your pants. Additional needs have also been considered, as the WTFJeans hide certain pockets, such as the one created to hold USB drives. You know, in case you’re a spy that just escaped with the files copied from that megacorporation you’re trying to bring down.

Jokes aside, I do like that clothing designers and manufacturers are finding reasonable ways in which to incorporate modern needs into their designs. I won’t be wearing the jeans anytime soon, but I know a few guys that would consider hiding a USB in a specialized pocket. These are also the same guys that would forget to take the USB back out of their specialized pocket before throwing their jeans in the wash, but that’s not really my problem, now, is it.

Necessity is the mother of all invention. Now how about a couple more super-pocketed purses for me?

[source and image via Gizmodo]