We redesigned the whole StorageRoom interface and taught StorageRoom how to speak German.
Archive for the 'Entrepreneurship' Category
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.
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.
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 9 months ago we had the idea of a social placemarking tool. Today we lauched it, Tagcrumbs is online. We had a lot of fun developing it and hope you will have even more fun using it.
Mark places of your interest, share them, recommend them to your friends. Tagcrumbs is the delicious for places. You can leave small crumbs where you have been, just like Hansel and Gretel did it. But they are digital, persistent and easier to organize. And nobody will eat them :).
Take a look at the slides for more details and start marking places now on www.tagcrumbs.com.
More and more people ask us what Tagcrumbs is about. We are about placemarks – personal places that you would like to remember and share.
Let’s look at two use cases to illuminate our point:
Lisa, a young professional, is doing a variety of business trips to beautiful cities like Paris, Berlin or London. She uses Tagcrumbs to remember the location and the services offered in her favorite coffee shops – the ones with a cozy atmosphere and free wifi. As she loves Thai food (it shouldn’t be too expensive though) she remembers those places and goes for a quick walk after lunch visiting a sight-seeing spot close to where she is. By following co-workers doing similar trips, Lisa sees the city through their eyes at the same time. She’s already looking forward to her next trip.
Edoardo moved to San Francisco recently and you are planning to visit him soon. You know that by then he’ll know the coolest places in town, amazing spots to take pictures (he’s a photographer), the best outdoor events (he loves rock-climbing) and the club where the crowd rocks longest. He created a collection of placemarks organized by tags and places, to share with you and his other visitors.
It’s your turn now. Get creative, think about different places you feel connected to (place of your first kiss, best hostel in the world, an amazing view at a hiking trip, … ), what they mean to you and how you would best remember and share them – and let us know about it!
So, to sum it up (for you web folks): it’s like social bookmarking (ah, del.icio.us, oh, tagging) but for places. We like to call it social placemarking – storing, organizing and sharing of personal places enriched with your memories and messages.
You can follow our progress on our startup blog.
I am still working heavily on the internet startup and the product I wrote about earlier. We are getting closer and closer to the launch.
We created a separate blog to keep you up to date. Check out our blog at:
It has been over a month since the last post and I have a bad conscience for not posting any news on the blog. Plenty of things have changed for me in the last months.
I quit my job at Hewlett-Packard in Germany and will leave the company end of June. Besides still being at HP in the daytime, I am working in a small but awesome team on a mobile-focused startup in my spare time. This is why there have been no frequent updates to the blog. After leaving HP I will fully concentrate on this new challenge. Be prepared for the upcoming launch of our startup this summer! Until then the amount of posts on the blog will probably stay low.
While creating our startup we encounter a lot of useful information on mobile that’s worth to check out. We will post reports, infos and general shorter thoughts in our new Public Skype Chat. Everybody is invited to join the discussion around mobility!
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...