Heard at meetups

After 3-minute presentation of an application that also includes some dating options, the presenter was asked the following innocent question: 'Are you single?'

Start-up culture in the bike parking space of TU

Apps and IT news from Berlin

The active social life of startups and entrepreneurs in Berlin brings me very often in contact with creative smart people sharing their ideas and e-innovations. Following, there are the latest discoveries of the last 5 days.

1. Tame will help anyone interested to do specialized social media research. It helps you to organize your Twitter account up to the latest news and top Tweets on specific topics. You don't need to do your own regular search every hour, but you have all the results in one single search. The results will be organized up to the hashtag, in a way similar to Storify, without the creative part. 

2. Eyequest is a relatively new app, downloadable for free and available - by now - only in German. Do you want to know what is going on in your favorite bar or if it is worth to go late in the night to a party? Check the app and you have access to the latest social updates about it. The power of the masses is on your side and will help you to enjoy life at its fullest. There are many developments to be added, but this will be equally a great tool for companies keen to advertise with them.

3. Myracloud is the product that any private person or corporate will like to use it for increasing the DDoS protection. It improves the level of protection of your computer and helps you to optimize the content. It fights efficiently the attacks without operating any changes to your website. The category of prices are personalized. 

The Startup-nation

Food for thought when it comes to real start-ups!

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/israel-a-tech-hub-for-startups-CaQo3lwGQfua0XjNK8r53Q.html

Startup mindset

A couple of days ago, I was asked at a gathering of startups for how long I do work for my current company. I said that for around two months, I heard the following observation: 'Quite a lot of time for the startup style'. 

On a sidenote: I am living in Berlin, Germany, a country where you need a lot of effort and inner strength if you want to achieve professional success. In the last three years, I've heard a lot of stories from people that arrived in Germany (capitalist version) in their late 30s and it took them around 30 years to be considered: fluent German speakers, mature enough and relevant enough for being a successful story. Most of them did not change their job in the last two decades, as the stability of the workplace is part of the profile of a stable career.

However, it seems that the startups - not all of them created by German entrepreneurs - are here to claim a different narrative. It is not the time spent at the same desk that matters, but your achievements, and if you are smart enough to get the best professional and financial exposure in your late 20s, you can retire honorably and tour the world in your early 40s. A job interview do not start with an investigation about what your aims for the next 5 years are, but rather with a question about where do you see yourself in the next 30 days.

I am not one of those highly enthusted persons that will pledge the cause of the startups and I am decent enough to consider the financial risks of changing the job every 3 months. But, on the other hand, I felt very often that it is a big distance between the corporate mentalities here and the reality and such disparities will discourage innovation and creativity and on the medium and long term will endanger development. The startup booms could be understood somehow as the solution that the young generation of entrepreneurs living in Germany found for catching up with the latest trends in technology and creative thinking while enjoying the stability of the German economy. 

On the long term, I am optimistic and wish I am one of those startup minds too. 

Basic networking rules

As I was very busy lately doing a lot of research and networking, I tried to sum up with a couple of basic rules that one may follow for reaching high efficiency in terms of expanding the number of business contacts and opportunities of further branding. 

There are a couple of my personal insights:

- Do not forget to have enough business cards in your wallet. If the list of participants is open, try to have at least enough cards for each member of the audience. In general, you should have an average of around 20 business cards. If you are out of it, send your details to those that gave their business cards.

- Food and drinks are always part of the networking events, but be sure that you are not too hungry for spending all your time running from a plate to another. It is not extremely polite to talk business with your mouth full. And anyway, try to keep yourself as sober as possible.

- Be fast! Do not spend a lot of time with the same person. Remember that you are there to network and thus, try to get as many contacts as possible. Try to plan beforehand what are your objectives and what do you intend to achieve - how many contacts, what people may be of interest for a next meeting etc. 

- Be short but efficient. If you are not a good speaker, do a short rehearsal before the event. You should not lecture, but to have enough humour for introducing your company and services. Try to find point of connection with the other members and to make the conversation pleasant yet useful. 

- Continue with the networking. Get the advantage of the first impression - the sooner the better - and get the connection at a next level: find your contacts on Xing or LinkedIn or Twitter. Establish as soon as possible a next meeting in order to discuss in detail about your plans. 

What is your recipe of successful networking? Feel free to share your experiences!

Using algorithms for public relations

Anyone with a basic training in the domain of PR knows that the possibilities to predict a big crisis are limited and thus, investing in prevention is the best solution. However, in an era when hundreds of apps are created daily, there should be a cure for unexpected crisis. A startup from Singapore found the solution and here we are: the PR crisis - or honestly speaking, most of them - could be prevented. 

Sounds terribly optimistic, isn't it? Like engineering almost.

The wonders of the Dropbox

If you are a big company working with many freelancers, many of them located very far away, it is normal to try finding a way to quantify the amount of work spent for you. The culture of work is challenged dramatically by the latest work trends but, as usual, the mind patterns did not change over night. 

As I am working as a freelancer for over five years, I was faced more than once with the suspicions of my otherwise nice bosses regarding the way in which I do spent my time. Especially in the case of people not familiar with what exactly does it mean to be a freelancer and somehow envious of your freedom of spending an impressive amount of time home zapping websites and drinking your coffee all day long and having free hot homemade lunch. What for a freelancer this is the golden mine of freedom: the possibility of organizing your time up to your needs, without spending hours commuting and killing time in the company of nice or not so nice colleagues.

Anyway, regardless of how much you will write and say about how wonderful is to be a freelancer, you will always be the target of various suspicions. But in the world of 2.0., there are a lot of tools that will help your reluctant employer to quantify your work. 

Take, for instance, the Dropbox. It is a system that allows employers to share docs, organize and edit information. Either you are in Sydney or Buenos Aires, you will add there your work objectives, your plans and even your financial documents. There are versions available for phone and if you can install it in a matter of minutes on your desktop.

There are three available variants: Free - you can use 2GB, Pro - $9.99/month and a capacity that goes till 500 GB and Business - highly recommended for teams, with a lot of safety features, permanent phone support and unlimited deletion recovery. 

If you want to find out more about it and to get updated with news, you must follow their blog, updated regularly.

Now, your virtual boss will be more happy and you can impress him/her with your speed and the amount of reports produced daily. (Each document uploaded has a date and the mention of the last update).

Good luck Dropboxing!

Tell your Time: How to Manage Your Schedule So You Can Live Free

I am a passionate reader of books about time management, but even more passionate to practice various recipes - personal or borrowed - of how to efficiently use my time. In the middle of writing a new book - about communications and customers service a project I have in mind for at least 5 months, but wasn't a pro manager of my writing time - I decided to have a look in my Kindle for useful resources.

Amy Lynn Andrews' book: Tell your Time: How to Manage Your Schedule So You Can Live Free helped me to better organize the coming weeks of writing when I need to juggle with the housework obligations, a very challenging new job where I need to be very active and an impressive amount of social obligations. Add to this some other equally important spiritual requirements and you have an impressive mosaique of a hectic life. 

My lessons learned from the book:

- planning, planning and planning

- The confirmation of my old feeling I live with since early childhood: 'Any significant change in our lives will require patience and sacrifice'.

- When you have your priorities set, you can enjoy the freedom of organizing the daily and weekly blocks of time in a flexible way. For instance, if today the domestic chores can be finished in 10 minutes, you dedicate the rest of the time assigned for such activities for writing or volunteering. 

- We are always in control of our own time, and we should make the right choices for a balanced time schedule. But in order to achieve this, we should establish what our roles are - wife, mother, businesswoman, consultant, teacher, writer etc. - what are our main objectives in each case and what are our daily tasks. 

- Write down your objectives and set up the Excel/Google doc with your set-up activities: both the negotiable and non-negotiable ones. 

The conclusion: you have a dream? Work for it punctiliously, hard, with a bit of sacrifice but at the end of your journey, most likely it will turn into reality.