We redesigned the whole StorageRoom interface and taught StorageRoom how to speak German.
Author Archive for Sascha Konietzke
After having issues for month with the integration of the our recurring billing provider and merchant account we now finally have a working payment system. This was the only piece of the puzzle that was missing for us to go live.
Since today StorageRoom is online and available to the world. Agencies, freelancers and mobile application owners can now manage their content in a flexible and easy-to-use interface and query our cloud-based CMS from their mobile applications.
Please check out the video and the website.
I tried hard but over time I couldn’t resist… there are just too many exciting opportunities for new startups! What is my new startup all about?
In all the mobile application projects I often encountered the same problem: it was not easy and quick enough to include dynamically-loaded content into an app. Content like a tip of the day, store locations of a retail chain or cocktail recipes for a cocktail app.
This was always way too much effort. I either had to create a small web application myself to manage and serve the content in JSON or XML or configure a large open source CMS to do this (which is a pain). And I had to host and maintain those systems, which cost time and money.
The solution I created is the StorageRoom CMS. It is cheap, flexible and allows developers to configure many different data sets. Editors can manage the content for these data sets and developers can then easily load that content into their mobile apps with JSON.
Currently the first tests are running with beta users. If you are interested in joining the other testers shoot me an email.
Follow @thriventures on Twitter to get updates about this project.
I am in Tokyo for one week now. Everything is great so far, getting around is no problem as all the metro signs are also displayed in English. In almost all other places there is no English translation, Japanese only, and I feel like an illiterate. But this what makes any trip very interesting :).
I decided to visit a Japanese exhibition on mobile technologies called Wireless Japan yesterday that took place at Tokyo Big Sight. English was barely spoken but it was an exciting and informative event, even without understanding Japanese, as I was able to look at many new electronic gadgets and mobile services.
Challenge for next week: Try Japanese coworking.
It was never planned but a friend of mine with a corporate job at a big German car manufacturer is sent to Japan for a couple of months to improve some processes at a Japanese subsidiary.
I will take that opportunity and make a 6-week trip to visit him in Tokyo from July to middle of August. I will live with him in his paid apartment (thanks!), work on different projects during the daytime and in the evenings and on the weekends we will discover Tokyo and Japan.
It will be an awesome experience to discover Japan. Please get in contact with me if you have any tips for events happening at that time that are mobile, web or startup related.
さようなら
I was very busy while working on our former startup Tagcrumbs and almost never updated the blog. The development of the platform, the iPhone application and other work left me hardly any time. So in this post I want to provide a short wrap-up about some of the things I should have blogged about.
Mobile World Congress Barcelona
Thanks to Ewan from Mobile Industry Review and Blackberry I was able to go to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona for the third time as I received an invitation to attend the event without any costs. 600 Euro for a ticket would have been too much for our startup budget.
The event was – as in the previous years – very exciting. It had a hall that was completely dedicated to mobile application development on many different platforms (“App Planet”). I was able to attend many great talks on mobile development from Blackberry, Sony, Vodafone, Motorola and Google. The WIP Jam on the last day made a perfect end of the App Planet.
Besides the main event I attended many other great meetups in the evenings, such as the final of the Navteq Challenge 2010, Mobile Sunday, the Mobile Premier Awards, GoMo News Blender, Swedish Beer Party and Fring & FON’s Late Night Party.
BW Goes Mobile
The iPhone application I created for Tagcrumbs received a “Mobile Talent Award” in a competition called “BW Goes Mobile” that was held by the local government. Unfortunately I had an important meeting in Berlin so I was not able to attend the event where the winners were announced.
Deutsche Startups
Quite some industry blogs asked us to contribute guest posts on mobile development and marketing of mobile applications. I wrote a German article for a major German Blog called “Deutsche Startups”. The article covered the basics on what time, knowledge and resources are required to create an iPhone application for your own startup.
Many people rambled in the comments why I suggested to not use 3rd party tools like MonoTouch, DragonFire or Adobe Flash CS 5 to create your applications, as Apple could block them at any time. My advice seemed to be correct, just about 2 months later Apple changed its iPhone Developer Program License Agreement and prohibited the use of any such third party tools.
The Tagcrumbs time is over and I had to decide what to do next. I am still very interested in founding my own company but was kind of burned out after working day and night for Tagcrumbs, so I wanted to take a step back for some time and not work my ass off for a similar project, even if I am having many good ideas.
An option I considered was going back to university to get a master’s degree. But when I look back at my time at university while studying Business Computer Science I have mixed feelings. It was very good to have a formal education on accounting, economics and the like, but many classes were just a waste of my time. The lecturers were often boring and didn’t enjoy their job, so sometimes I could listen the whole day and not learn anything new.
Except for extraordinary good lecturers I felt that I could have learned much more if I would have taken the same time and studied books myself. And this is how I already taught myself most things. Only a very minor part of the knowledge and skills that were required to do the work for Tagcrumbs came from university.
I feel that I don’t need any more formal education on computer science, up to today I was able to solve every problem I had myself and my next venture will most definitely not be a pipe flow analysis in a CAD/CAM system. Additionally, many startup veterans speak against MBAs at startups, as they teach you almost exclusively skills that are needed in large companies, so this was not an option either.
I basically faced the same decision before founding Tagcrumbs, as I was also thinking of going to university after quitting my job at HP. I don’t regret doing Tagcrumbs at all, as it was an immense learning experience and I probably spent way less money for much more education than if I would have gone back to university. So again, I decided against university, but what should I do next? Go work at a big company? Currently, this is not an option either.
There was a friendly freelancer in my local Cocoaheads group (a Mac and iPhone developer meetup) so I asked him questions about freelance work… and it all sounded very interesting. I would still be independent, work on many different projects and finally earn some money again to cover my expenses. This was the way to go, so I am now working as a freelance software engineer for iPhone and Ruby on Rails projects. In the future, I might extend those services and also offer general consulting for web and mobile projects. Working as a freelancer gives me the advantage that I can still work on my own projects if I want to and that I can slowly shift from selling my time to selling a product. And while freelancing, I can still self-study many topics in my spare time.
I am currently quite busy with current and follow-up projects, but if you want to hire me you can take a look at my recent work. Maybe we can find a way to work together in the future.
You might have read it already on the Tagcrumbs blog: we decided to close Tagcrumbs. A hard decision but we felt we had to move on.
It was a fun ride with many ups and downs. In the end, the problem was that it was too hard to make a living with the service. Of course we thought about alternative ways of making money besides an ad-based revenue model. But further bootstrapping was not an option, as we were running out of money, so we decided to write a business plan based on the most promising alternative we saw in making money in the mobile LBS space that allowed us to leverage as much of our previous work as possible. We were not able to raise enough money to execute our plan. Was the plan based on a bad idea? The founders too young and inexperienced in the mind of the investors? Was it bad to try a split between consumer and business services? Were we too impatient or at the wrong place of the earth? We don’t know and we will probably never find out.
Nevertheless, it was a great experience to bootstrap a company ourselves and I learned so much in the process, that I don’t regret doing it at all. Some might consider this a “failure”, for me it was just a large experiment and a huge learning experience. I am pretty sure the day will come where I will found another company. And that next time, I will know many things already that will improve chances of financial success.
It will take some time until the next startup is due. I need to shift to a lower gear first for some time to recharge myself and my bank account. Working so hard and long on Tagcrumbs every day hurt my personal health and fitness. That’s why I will work as a freelancer for some months or maybe even years before committing to anything else. I have the startup fiver, but freelancing as a technology consultant or software engineer will be a good replacement drug, as I really value being independent. I will write more about my future plans in upcoming posts.
Finally, I want to say thank you. First of all a big thanks goes to Ben and Cornelius for founding the company with me, sharing all the ups and downs, and for the many sessions we had on all kinds of different topics. The next thank you goes to all our partners that supported us during the time. Last but not least I want to thank all of our users and other supporters.
Long time no hear… I have been so busy developing our iPhone application for Tagcrumbs that I had absolutely no time to blog.
But it was worth all the hard work, as our Tagcrumbs iPhone application is now available for download from the App Store at http://www.tagcrumbs.com/go/iphone.
You can find more information on the Tagcrumbs Blog.
We have been selected to present Tagcrumbs at the start-up track of the next conference in Hamburg. The next conference put on by SinnerSchrader is one of the most important networking and trend conferences within the European web industry.
Share Economy is this year’s theme of next09. This term is shaped by the economy theorist Martin Weitzman. His basic idea: The more we share our success with others, the more we profit ourselves.
We think this term fits perfectly for Tagcrumbs, due the collective creation of places and our openness.
I will be in Hamburg on May 5-6th, contact me on twitter (@sashthebash) if you want to meet. About
Hi. I'm Sascha Konietzke and this is my blog. I write about mobility, the Web and startups.
I have my own startup, StorageRoom, a CMS for Mobile Applications. In addition, I am working as a freelance consultant and software engineer. more...