Jordi, one of the betahaus | BCN founder picked me up in his Mini at the airport and gave me a nice drive through the sunny streets of Barcelona. After half an hour we arrived in Graciá, Vlilafranca 7 1km from the center of Barcelona. A well known neigborhood for the creative dudes and hipstars, the Gaudí-designed Parc Güell is around the corner.
Andre Ottlik, is a consultant, coach and trainer for entrepreneurs, self-employed persons, and small and medium-sized enterprises. Since 2005, he has been interested in vision and determination appeal, goals and management, as well as the topics of corporate communications and marketing. Since 2011, he has been teaching social and methodological skills at the HWR Berlin School of Economics and Law as a visiting lecturer. Andre is trained in business computing, and previously worked at IBM; where he worked in sales, marketing and business networking as well. He has acquired several years of extensive sales knowledge – from door-to-door to business-partner sales. Andre has been a member of betahaus since September 2009. Continue reading
Vassilios P. Bartzokas is an innovator and entrepreneur. He likes discovering business ideas and leading them to success. He was the CEO of CARTECO in Greece a company awarded as one of the 10 best in Europe at the European Business Awards, together with companies like Air Berlin, Deutche Telecom and others. He founded The Archive, a design library for young designers and creatives, and started a design collective called 39.22, which promotes and develops ideas into products for the creative community. He launched a Greek e-magazine for architecture and design called Archisearch.gr. in 2011 which is also available as a free app at app store. Vassilios is also the founder and Chairman of the non-profit organization Brainlab, which organized the Green Design Festival in Athens. He also organized the Athens Architecture Workshop in 2009, which was attended by 100 students from European Universities. In February 2012 he organize ESW [eso ] Conference for Interior Design at the Onassis Cultural Centre. Now he is based in Berlin, and is running his startup, DESIGNLOBBY.ASIA, a platform promoting talented designers and people from the creative sector in Asia. He has been a member of betahaus since the middle of February.
Interview by Mateja Plaskan
Anna Bojic, is an inventor, and is the founder and CEO of Merisier. She studied art at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin, and also Cultural Studies at the Freie Universität, Berlin. She is interested in culture and communications, and for her, gift-giving is one of the oldest forms of communication.
Merisier presents a new and fair direction for idea-creation as an online shop for stylish and sustainable gifts. Fair trade and sustainability play a central role in the selection of their products, because they believe that they can change the world with many small decisions. Merisier helps customers choose a handsome, elegant and original gift to give straight from the heart.
Robert Rudnick is one of three co-founders of Coffee Circle, a provider of high quality and socially-conscious coffee across Germany. Uniting the principles of social responsibility and fair trade with a passion for high-quality coffee, Coffee Circle sells coffee sourced from Ethiopian farms, as well as brewing equipment and other accessories, and donates a portion of profits towards various development projects in Ethiopian coffee-farming communities.
The winning startup team of betapitch Berlin 2012 will receive coffee cups from Coffee Circle, as well as 1 kg of Germany’s best coffee.
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The winning team of the next betapitch not only gets to move into betahaus | Berlin and become a part of the betahaus community, but will also get a package of services and products to help them develop their business further. The package is solely put together by people from inside the betahaus community. In this series we want to introduce some of these friends that will help you pull yourself up ‘by your own bootstraps’. First in line is Anna-Lena Schiller.
Anna-Lena Schiller describes herself as an “information architect” and “visual sense-maker”. Having noticed the importance of clear visual communication in the success of a business, Anna-Lena – a freelance consultant on visual thinking – works with clients to help simplify their often-complex ideas into simpler ones, while adding an eye-catching visual element into the mix. As part of this year’s bootstrapping package, Anna-Lena will be offering the winning startup team a consultation on visual thinking.
Interview by Mateja Plaskan
Julio Santos is a software engineer with a Master in Informatics and Computing Engineering. His main interests are web and mobile development, interaction design, and building Facebook applications. He is based in betahaus Berlin as lead developer and founder of the Facebook application, Gruvi. Gruvi is a platform that helps entertainment brands build and manage their communities by allowing users to give and receive movie recommendations within a network.
On the jury this year will be Swedish entrepreneur and business leader Joakim Barneus. In 2001, Mr. Barneus co-founded the European branch of Monster, and served as European COO until 2002. He is also the founder of the student staffing company, Komet, which employs over 5,000 students, and helped develop the business-oriented personality test Validero.
By now, you and your startup team may already be underway with your one-pagers, soon to be sent to our betapitch jury, and you may be wondering just how you can improve your chances of making it into the top-10 and, eventually, the winning spot.
Our jury will soon be swamped with one-pagers from all sorts of startups. From this mess of papers, 10 of the best will be chosen to pitch at betapitch on May 3rd.
Your applications will be evaluated on 4 criteria: your business model, your team, the purpose of your startup, and, finally, your originality and innovativeness. Continue reading
Interview by Mateja Plaskan
Samsarah Lilja is the head of Lilja Design, and specialises in corporate graphic and web design. She offers a wide range of services, such as logo development, logo optimisation for various types of media, vectorisation of image files, and business cards. She has developed an overall design and utilisation concept which integrates many elements into her work.
Samsarah has had over 10 years experience in the fields of web design, programming, structure, and marketing and has gained substantial know-how through working at the Department of Architectural Theory alongside Prof. Fritz Neumever at TU Berlin, as well as completing an internship at the well-known international architecture office of Prof. Hans Kollhoff in Rotterdam. She is also the founder of archinoah.de; an internet platform for architects, and tektorum.de; an affiliated discussion board.
Samsarah has been a member of betahaus for over a year and a half.