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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We created a separate blog to keep you up to date. Check out our blog at:

blog.tagcrumbs.com