Filed under Entrepreneurship

memberYou already has 1000 members!

My friends at memberYou (see my first coverage) already have 1000 members – 48 days after the launch. Congratulations!

Last week I had lunch with co-founder Jonas Zeier.

My learnings from the lunch:
# The great majority of all members comes from Basel. That means that the regional strategy is very important for this leisure community
# Very soon, they will organize a soccer event with Marco Streller (Swiss national soccer team member) – this means that you can actually play soccer with Marco Streller. Isn’t that cool?
# Monetization of the platform will be tricky. The first goal is to attract as many members as possible
# It will be tricky to go from regional to national and from national to international. You need evangelists in every region. First goal has to be to build a strong home base in Basel

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Great speech: Jyri Engeström (Co-Founder of Jaiku) about Microblogging

I heard this speach of Jyri the first time at Reboot9, and now I watched it a second time after Loic pointed me to it again:

[flash]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8660680426020413852[/flash]

My Learnings:
# Social Networks that are just "Social Networks" will fail (= Butterfly effect)
# Every service needs social objects (Flickr = fotos; Amazon = books; MySpace = music; etc.)
# Define your verbs (eBay = buying & selling; MySpace = play; Dogster = add a dog)
# Make the objects sharable (have permalinks, widgets etc.)
# Turn invitations into gifts (PayPal: Free 10$ for your friends; YouTube: Free laugh; Skype: Two free headsets)
# Charge the publishers not the spectators (Habbo hotel: Buy virtual furnature) –> Freemium business model
# Next Big Thing in participatory media? Can anything disrupt blogs? Blogs seemed perfect. There is problem: Bloggers have the feeling that they don’t blog enough.
# Preconditions of a disruptive innovation: 1) Simpler or 2) Cheaper or 3) Free from need to go to inconvenient place
# Question 1: Can we imagine anything that can be simpler than a blog? Yes: Microblogging (see my Twitter-page)
# Question 2: Blogs are already free. How can you be less expensive than free? Microblogging can, because you can use almost every technology for input or output (web, mobile phone, rss, API, instant messanger, widgets etc.) which costs much less time and increases availability
# Question 3: Does microblogging frees you from going to an inconvenient place? Again, yes! You can only blog from your blog, and for this you have to be online and you need a computer. With microblogging, you can do it on your mobile phone.
# Mass-Starbuckization: Social objects "to go"
# The value of a microblogpost diminishes radically over time, much faster than the value of a blog post
# Blog posts: 1 per week; Photos: 1 per day; Jaiku/Twitter: 1 per hour
# In case of (natural) catastrophes phone networks are usually down; but SMS still goes through!

Thats exactly why i LOVE microblogging and thats exactly why I LOVE using twitter and why I believe that microblogging will not be a butterfly but will sustain for a long time.

Remember: If you visit my blog and find no new blog posts, don’t forget to check out my twitter widget to read my latest microposts.

PS: Mashable recently compared 9 microblogging services (link via Themenblog)

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Exsila found investor and incorporated Exsila AG

As Exsila announced recently, Beat Schillig (Managing Director of "Institut für Jungunternehmen") invested 200’000 CHF (according to SF Start-up) in the company. As a result, Exsila incorporated Exsila AG on 11th June 2007 (funny thing, Exsila AG is only one day older than trigami AG :-).

In the meantime, Exsila achieved some
other major milestones:
# They now have over 10’000 members
# Their member-base grows 20% each month (i.e. 2000 members per month)
# They have over 70’000 dvds, cds, games and books in their system
# They started an attractive Affiliate program at Tradedoubler.ch

And, I have to admit that I am a HUGE fan and HEAVY user of Exsila (I have already 41 positive ratings :-). I love the style, I like the founders and I certainly like the free market system. Long live the trading idea!

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Trip to Berlin & Hasso Plattner Institute

Last week I took a 2-day trip to Berlin, visiting an event at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam and visiting some friends in Berlin.

(Morten Lund in a panel – read my twit & Iavor’s Jaiku)

(The trigami dog enjoyed the good food and networking)

(Very interesting presentation of an extreme alpinist. See my twit. Note to myself: Remember the shadow on the wall, i.e. don’t forget your vision!)

(Visiting CBS from Ecato in their offices at Jägerstrasse in Berlin-Mitte. See also the recent interview from Sebastian with CBS)

Other Twitter-Messages
Read my other twitter-messages of my berlin-trip

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John Buckman about Usability and User Centric Design

"Users just want to listen to music – they don’t want an account, they don’t want to explore, they just want to listen! We respect that." John Buckman (magnatune) at LIFT07 (Panel: Creative work in a free world)

John’s results at magnatune:
# Average visiting length 2 hours 40 minutes
# Every 40th user pays money (conversion rate = 1/40)

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First Kiva-loan repaid, reinvested in Africa

Four months after my first Kiva-investments, my first loan was paid back 100%.

I reinvested the money in Togo (Africa) to a female entrepreneur who runs a general store.

Meanwhile, over $7 million has been invested through Kiva from 70’000 people. Most interestingly, 99.76% of all the money has been paid back 100% – isn’t this just AWSOME? You can help entrepreneurs generale wealth, get the money back 100%, help some other entrepreneur generate wealth, get the money back 100%, …, etc.

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I finally started to use Plazes

Registered at LIFT2007 on the 8th February 2007, I finally started using the service today (i.e. I needed almost half a year to adapt, even though Plazes was a trigami customer ;-). I installed the Plazer 2.0 and I installed the widget (see the sidebar). So far I like the user interface very much.

Lets plaze it!

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Next Venture Cocktail on 28th June

The last Venture Cocktail (my first one!) was GREAT (read my according twitter-message after the event).

Next Venture Cocktail will take place on Thursday, 28th June from 7pm at Pier West.

Important Links:
# Venture Cocktail website
# Event-details on XING

See you there!

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Sunday trip to Munich

Yesterday I did a short one-day trip to Munich. I went to visit Amiando.com (they have apparantly a 7-day week) in their new headquarters (headcount is 16 people now – wow!). I also met the founders of MyMuesli.de, and Jochen Krisch (Exciting Commerce).

First I took a very nice walk downtown:

But it was so hot that I had to cool myself:

I of course did a short video (with Usgang.ch founder Marc P. Bernegger and Felix Haas, CEO of amiando):

Link: sevenload.com

Lukasz Gadowski was also there. It was very nice getting to know him better – since I am an official Gründerszene.de team member now :-).

Now you know how I spend my sundays – it was fun and VERY sunny :-).

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California, here we come…

Loic Le Meur is moving to San Francisco. Why he is doing that he explains in his newest Podcast:

[flash]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY7BcnkIfoc[/flash]

Actually, over the last year I decided that I will move to California, too. Maybe not tomorrow, but most probably in 3-7 years. My reasons are:

#1: THE WEATHER!!! I cannot stand it being depressed for 6 months.
#2: THE ADVENTURE!!! You have to risk things in life.
#3: THE BUSINESS!!! Silicon Valley, what more can I say…
#4: THE LIFESTYLE!!! I love the American way of life.
#5: THE PEOPLE!!! Best people in the world

Go for it, Loic!

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