Cool Cat in a café at the Khan El-Khalili Market – with the entrepreneurs in the mirror.

Back in Denmark after an unforgettable trip to Cairo where I attended the event – Next Generation of Egyptian Entrepreneurs 2011, as a mentor from June 28th to July 1st. This was my trip and [...]]]>

Cool Cat in a café at the Khan El-Khalili Market – with the entrepreneurs in the mirror.

Back in Denmark after an unforgettable trip to Cairo where I attended the event – Next Generation of Egyptian Entrepreneurs 2011, as a mentor from June 28th to July 1st. This was my trip and my impressions.

Day 1. Tuesday 28th. 2011.

In the spring of 2011 the Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen met with President Barack Obama at the White House. The Arab Spring was in action and supporting initiatives were discussed by the two leaders.
In Denmark the startup accelerator program StartupBootcamp has tremendous success, not only in Denmark but across Europe, where they are expanding their accelerator program. The Danish Foreign Ministry reached out to StartupBootcamp to get inspiration from their program, and to utilize their mentors. The result was the 5 day NextGen2011 bootcamp, where mentors from Denmark and the US were invited to Cairo, to contribute with their experience and support these young entrepreneurs move forward with their business.

Yesterday I kissed my son goodbye on his birthday to head for Cairo, I had the privilege of being one of the Danish mentors. I explained to my son that I was going to a country fighting for freedom and that I was meeting some of the young people that overruled their dictator, and now have the opportunity to rebuild their country and future.

I looked so much forward to give, learn and to get another perspective of Egypt, through the eyes of the future generation. A generation that will be responsible for rebuilding their country, where one of the key solutions might very well be entrepreneurship.

Despite the language and cultural differences between Denmark and Egypt, what united us in Cairo was our entrepreneurial culture based on creativity, passion and the will to utilize opportunities in the Golden Age of Technology.

The delegates from Denmark and the US in front of the pyramids at 6 am Wednesday morning.

Day 2 – Next Generation 2011 in Action.

Wednesday I met the teams for the first time, although they started Monday. I was so excited to finally meet the young entrepreneurs, hear their pitches, and had no idea what to expect.

I was blown away, together with the rest of the Danish and US delegation. We faced  young passionate minds, who took their business very seriously. A lot of them were already far, had amazing user traction and were using focus groups to understand their target groups better. Despite the language barrier for some, they all did an amazing job communicating their ideas and visions. We spend the day giving feedback to every startup, during panel sessions and one to one sessions with the teams. I was mentoring the outstanding ladies from SuperMama and Inkezny the “tourist feel safe” app.

Out of 38 participants, 6 were women which was a surprising ration, that’s more or less what you can expect at startup events in Denmark. The girls were amazing, but had different views on their role as entrepreneurs. Some said they were privileged since financially supported by their families or hubbies, that didn’t expect anything from them – a perfect bootstrapping state. Others felt they had to be very persistent to proof to their families that what they are doing is important, not only to them but as role models for other women and for their country.

After an intense day, we were invited to visit the Danish ambassador Christian Hoppe. All the teams gave excellent 1 minute pitches, directly to the ambassador and his 60 guests. They improved their performance so rapidly, and the fact that they were able to give short, precise pitches after only two days of training and mentoring – was outstanding.

At 11 pm we were heading back to the Marriott Hotel, ready to be tourists, but due to riads at Tahrir Square, where 1200 people got injured – we were advised to stay at the hotel. That said it is perfectly safe to be in Cairo and with 30 degrees celsius and a calm breeze, the climate is perfect.

The SuperMama team - Zeinab Samir and Yasmine ElMehairy.

Day 3 – The Final.

The teams were as ready as they could get, after working non-stop for 3 days. At the end of the day, culminating the event, 4  teams would be chosen, two of the teams would get an internship at EyeContact in the US, and two teams would go to Denmark for 3 months, to be a part of the StartupBootcamp accelerator program.

5 hours later we had the winners and they were announced in front of the Danish Ambassador, Egyptian representatives, the press – counting New York Times, Arab newspapers and the rest of the NextGen2011 team. The winners were in alphabetical order:

18 Days in Egypt – Crowdit is a social media storytelling platform inspired by the revolution.

Bey2ollak – A mobile traffic alert service, already counting 15.000 users.

Inkezny – A mobile app keeping tourists safe in developing countries by giving easy access to emergency assistance.

SuperMama – a social community providing women in Arab countries quality information about motherhood.

We celebrated by sailing and dining up the River Nile, eating exquisite cuisine while entertained with Arab music and belly dance. We ended the day at Tahrir Square where people were protesting again, for three days in a row. The SuperMama team drove us safely to the hectic city market Khan El-Khalili – which isn’t a matter of course in Cairo. Families were gathered in the square, and kids running around enjoying their summer holiday. After extensive shopping and bargaining we ended the day drinking strong coffee and mint tea in a narrow alley, where locals smoked water pipes and played music, being magnified by mirrors on the surrounding buildings.

After getting close to these brilliant entrepreneurs, we had an emotional farewell. But it will hopefully not be a past memory, but a relationship that will continue with some of the teams in the future.

Back in Denmark I miss the warm courtesy of the Egyptian people, the sound of drums at the market and the warm breeze – in the city that never sleeps.

More impressions from NextGen2011:
My pictures.
Excellent blog post by Alex Farcet from StartupBootcamp.

Once in a while and so far in every edition, I have the privilege of contributing with articles and digital trends to the price winning Danish magazine Scenario. In the spring I suggested that they should interview� Lane Becker, a brilliant mind and a wonderful character. Lane is a serial entrepreneur and [...]]]>

Once in a while and so far in every edition, I have the privilege of contributing with articles and digital trends to the price winning Danish magazine Scenario. In the spring I suggested that they should interview� Lane Becker, a brilliant mind and a wonderful character. Lane is a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of several successful companies hereunder, Adaptive Path and Get Satisfaction. That suggestions ended with me doing the article and the result can now be read in the latest edition of the Scenario Magazine.

Appetizer:
Lane Becker studied art history and dreamed of a professorship, but became a web pioneer in Silicon Valley. He has resided in this epicentre for communication technology since 1994. It was he and others around him who defined the “blog”, and were behind the development of Google Analytics, Adaptive Path and AJAX (JavaScript), which generates the simultaneous suggestions we get when we put things into Google’s search box. SCENARIO’s Natasha Friis Saxberg met Becker for a talk about Silicon Valley’s wholly unique entrepreneurship ethos, which he now sees spreading to the rest of the world….

Read the rest of the appetizer article at� Scenario Magazine.

Facebook experiences a loss of users in primarily the US, Canada and Russia, this news has hit the headlines of international media including the Danish.

Tuesday I gave my take to DR News – the Danish television station, on why Facebook experiences a decrease of users in specific countries. The pattern [...]]]>

Facebook experiences a loss of users in primarily the US, Canada and Russia, this news has hit the headlines of international media including the Danish.

Tuesday I gave my take to DR News – the Danish television station, on why Facebook experiences a decrease of users in specific countries. The pattern shows that once they reach half the population, their market limit is reached. It is also the countries Facebook first penetrated that are now experiencing a loss of users, a fact Facebook denies. Countries that were entered later as Mexico and Brazil is still in high growth.

What Facebook experiences now, is the case for many successful companies, they have traveled the J curve journey, and now they are meeting their market limit, which for Facebook is an impressive 50 percent of a country population. Reaching 700 m. users, we are now spending more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook per month. With a reign of 10 percent of the world population, they are indeed conquering the world, in a way Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan and the rest of the world conqueror club, would never have dreamt of.

With 2.5 m. websites connected to Facebook, there is still a great commercial opportunity. Very few companies knows as much about their users as Facebook, so we should expect further commercial cultivation, or to use a buzz word – f-commerce.
I look forward to the day where I have to explain why Gignal has experienced a slight decrease in our 700 million users – a problem to love indeed!

The big problem with Twitter is that it takes a significant while before you find a group of skilled people that represent the [...]]]> Twitter came first with their social network structure, based on thematic relations rather than the ones we know from LinkedIn, Facebook amongst others, which take-off on first or second level physical relations.

The big problem with Twitter is that it takes a significant while before you find a group of skilled people that represent the topics you are interested in following. And to get value from Twitter you also need followers to establish a dialogue. This is also why so many people abandon Twitter before their second tweet, they just don’t get this new networking structure. Creating a new thematic network takes a lot of time, but when established, they can in many ways become more valuable than traditional relations – or even be so.

What I love about Quora is that it offers dynamic thematic relations, making the various networks so accessible, allowing you to jump directly into the stream of knowledge you need. You instantly get access to the entire crowd of topic specialists and questions, which could take months or years to establish on Twitter. Quora takes us from our social graph to a dynamic interest graph i.e. our relationship might only last a question.

This new thematic network structure will allow us to focus on the quality of our network, rather than the quantity of people we follow or have as “friends”. Value comes from a qualitative focus and design, which I hope and believe will be the future digital network structure.

Another beautiful feature is that you can follow and ask questions directly to a crowd of specialist, that are following a specific topic. In the good old online days (before Quora) that would have taken a lot of effort to achieve.

Quora now has to proof that the questions asked get answered rather fast, and that the quality is high. So a top priority for their community managers is to attract specialist to cultivate valuable conversations around the world of themes.

Previous post on gaining online quality rather than quantity.
Can real time web bring real world change?

We basically aggregate data from a specific location or tag – [...]]]>
Geo-location has undoubtedly been the tech darling of 2010, and we have probably only seen the beginning, many more “must have” geo-location services will rise in the years to come. And we intend to provide one of them – with Gignal.

We basically aggregate data from a specific location or tag – to show what people are talking about at events. There is no difference from creating an opinion in a physical environment to an online. You scan what people are talking about, you chose conversations to follow or participate in. And by tapping into to those conversations you get other peoples perspective from an event. You also have the chance to connect with the people you dig and thereby expand your network. In many ways you can get the exact same value from an event online as offline, since we communicate online even if we sit next to each other at a conference. The barrier for talking is some how lower online.

Now that was the simple version from a user perspective. From a conference organizer perspective we want to help reinvent conferences, by extending them with an online platform, that can strengthen, prolong and cultivate the event for participants before, under and after the physical event, making it a whole year experience a – conference 365.

We would love to hear your thoughts, ideas or needs on how a conference can become more valuable with Gignal, whether you are a organizer or conference participant.

Gignal in action.
TEDxCopenhagen
New Media Days
Danish Media Conference

This was an excellent case to launch since we had the opportunity to present and aggregate from more locations, all the social services that we [...]]]>
We launched Gignal in closed Beta at New Media Days on November 9-10, 2010. 800 participants, 2 days, 3 locations – all around and about New Media.

This was an excellent case to launch since we had the opportunity to present and aggregate from more locations, all the social services that we support, on physical screens at the event, on Gignal’s site and through our widget on New Media Days website with their custom design.

New Media Days Testimonial.

For New Media Days Gignal was far the best way of visualizing a
combination of social media services. It was an easy way to keep track
on how the audience felt about the speakers, the food, the venue – and
prevent problems, making sure our audience had a great time. At
the same time our audience and people watching from home, could
stay on top of the information flow – knowing what the fuzz was about
at every single stage.
- Didde Elnif, Head of New Media Days.

Gignal event analytics.

New Media Days online stream, featuring check-ins, tweets, photos and video.

We have come far in [...]]]>
Happy New Year wishes to everyone that supported us in 2010! Our first customers trusting our product. Savvy people sharing their thoughts and feedback to our vision. Event end users for expressing the value they experienced. All together motivating, challenging and driving us to where we are today.

We have come far in 2010, from an idea in January 2010 to our launch today, but we are still at the beginning of our journey. We look forward to experience where and how far 2011 will take us – hope you will join us.

All the best New Year wishes!
Team Gignal.

In January [...]]]>
We are about to kiss 2010 goodbye, which is always a bit sad since time flies to rapidly, but it is also exciting to see what the new year will bring. For us 2010 has been a journey with detours, ups and downs, frustrations and thrills – a typical startup experience.

In January 2010 we made the first version of Gignal, because we needed it at NordicMeetup, which we co-organize. It actually looked very similar to the interface we have today, but not as stable and with less services. We took a heavy and costly detour by focusing on music events, but choose to trust our gut feeling and turned our effort back into tech conferences, where networking, sharing, dialogue and gadgets are key. In November we had our first conference launch at the New Media Days conference, followed by a Journalist Festival and TEDxCopenhagen. It was a much needed thrill to see 9 months of work in action, and to get positive feedback – a true energy boost.

In December we took Gignal back into the lab to focus on the lessons learned in November, adding more core value to our product, for conference organizers and participants. But the hardest part was to decide when enough is enough, and focus on wrapping Gignal up, with what we have for now. And from a developer perspective enough is never enough.

So though we are not close to provide our final vision with Gignal, we are very close to launch our first public version. We can now provide a generic tool, so you can create, aggregate and present your event, from geo-tags and tags, on Gignal’s site or your website and on physical screens. You can integrate our widget on your website, with your own custom design. And if that is not enough you can access our API and do your thing from there. We also offer event analytics, so organizers can learn and optimize their event based on online user behavior.

And due to the Christmas spirit we are wrapping Gignal up, by baking a new design, which we expect to take out the owen very very soon. But what we look most forward to experience in 2011, is going from a garage bootstrapping mode into a company state of mind, selling our service, being sustainable, and thereby continue to proof that we support a need, and that we actually make a difference to our stakeholders.

So that’s it for now folks – we look forward to feed you with much more event candy in 2011.

All the best New Year wishes from team Gignal!