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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Shopping for furniture, clothing, and other things we need in our daily lives, can be costly, time-consuming, and, above all, creates waste and supports wasteful industrial practices.

Enter Le Van Bo; architect, designer, and initiator of the Hartz IV Möbel project. Named after the national welfare system, Hartz IV Möbel is a DIY movement, centred around a series of basic, practical furniture pieces that are both simple and affordable to construct, making use of commonly-available, low-cost materials.

Le has recently published a book, the Hartz-IV Möbel-Buch, which not only contains instructions for all the furniture projects, but also provides tips on cost-effective living in small spaces, as well as features on prominent members of the DIY community in Berlin.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, what is the Hartz-IV Möbel project all about? 

Hartz-IV Möbel is a social design movement, and I am its initiator. The basic idea is that I try to create construction plans for furniture inspired by classic Bauhaus-era pieces, which are normally very expensive. For instance, a chair, which would typically cost around four or five thousand Euros, can be made, using one of my designs, for 24 Euros, in just 24 hours. I call it the ’24-Euro Chair’, and you can even find one in the betahaus café – just look for the green “Build Me!” sticker.

What inspired you, as a trained architect, to start such a ‘social-design movement’?

It started out as a bit of a coincidence – I had constructed a chair for myself for the first time after attending a basic carpentry course at the local Volkshochschule (community centre). I had been designing wooden furniture, yet despite that, I had never even held a saw in my hand before – I had, as you might say, two left hands. So of course, this made me really proud. I then blogged about this chair, and told all my friends about how I built it. That was the beginning of the movement – I was so inspired by just how easy it was to build something so useful, and so were others.

DIY lamp, found at Open Design City

I am neither a product designer nor a carpenter – I had never even held a saw in my hand before making my first 24-Euro chair, and I’m still a complete amateur even today. When I created the 24-Euro chair project, I wanted to inspire those who are not only not designers, but who may not have enough money to buy all of their furniture, to simply create their own instead.
The name and its reference to the welfare system is a deliberate provocation; to make it clear that this is not a project about design, form, or materials. For me, chairs and other basic pieces of furniture are a social issue, and not one of design, because the way in which one furnishes their home defines their wealth in a way. This project is intended for those who may be short on money, but who have good taste which they wish to express.

Has the Hartz-IV Möbel project been applied, or attempted, in any other cities, besides Berlin? Do you see this becoming a movement worldwide – somewhat in line with other “DIY-revival” trends (e.g. sewing, gardening, etc.)?

I know that there is definitely an increasing number of DIY projects like this one happening throughout the industrialised world. A lot of people are simply fed up with capitalism, and are starting to reconsider the actual value of products we normally buy at large-scale stores like Ikea or H&M – questioning why everything is so cheap. It doesn’t help that many of these companies cannot say just how, where, and by whom their products are made. Nowadays, more and more people are trying to regain power, particularly over what they consume. We see it with the Occupy movement, with guerilla gardening – the conversion of public green spaces into community gardens, and with something I organise called Guerilla Lounging, where unused public spaces are turned into “lounges” for the general public.

Le Van Bo's "Hartz-IV Office", Open Design City

The book is a very special project because it is not carried out in the normal way in which a book is published. Normally, one writes content, finds a publisher, and then publishes the book. What we are doing instead is finding readers, asking them to finance the book through donations on StartNext, collecting their stories, illustrations, and other content they submit, and then finally finding a publisher.

The fun thing about this project is that, because it’s a collaborative effort, everybody can contribute to it in some way. This raises the question of quality control – many people wonder if this method would perhaps result in a patchwork of varying styles and quality. However, what this process revolves around is something called “crowd-storming” – a collective form of brainstorming, in which an idea is displayed to a public forum, and is open to feedback from just about anyone.

As for content; this book will contain not only all of the construction plans, but also some tips and advice on how to organise a small space in the best way possible. There’s one chapter, called ’99 ideas from the 99%’, in which we have collected 99 of the best ideas for various kinds of DIY projects. Another chapter is called the ‘Karma Economy’, where I try to summarize the things I’ve observed at companies who can successfully motivate people to do good with something other than money – something I call the “karma credit”.

We have a small number of copies available, and if you donate to the project on StartNext, you’ll receive one. We’re hoping to find a large-scale publisher soon, though we’ll try not to publish too many copies, as that would create waste – the one thing we’re fighting against.

Le Van Bo will be holding a ’1m² house’ workshop on 31.03 at Open Design City, where you can learn how to build the smallest, fully-functional house imaginable!

With mobile device ownership ever on the rise, an increasing number of companies are now turning to the mobile sector to extend their brands or services through applications. Research2Guidance, a mobile apps research and consultancy company, has specialised in this growing and constantly-evolving market since 2009, and provides companies with guidance for their individual mobile strategy, based on extensive statistical research on the latest trends in the market.

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The many individuals we meet on a daily basis often have far more of an impact on our lives than many of us can readily recognise. This was the realisation that lead Ian Kath to start Your Story – a collection of podcasts recorded by people all over the world; each one recounting a certain story that shaped their lives in some way. Since 2007, Ian has been hosting Your Story, and has invited over 65 people to each tell his audience a story central to their lives in some way. He has recently followed up this project with an online guide – Create Your Life Story – to telling one’s life story in an engaging and appealing way, and broadcasting it using various different digital media. Ian recently became a member of betahaus, and hopes to eventually be based in Berlin. (weiterlesen…)

In recent years, Kresten Buch has become a name strongly associated with the emerging mobile-based startup scene in Kenya. The Berlin-based “serial investor” is behind several projects and initiatives designed to support the wealth of young entrepreneurs and innovators in Kenya and the rest of the East African region, mainly through the seed-investment company 88mph, and through the professional social network, HumanIPO, which he co-founded.

Kresten’s latest venture, Startup Garage, is set to open in Nairobi in mid 2012, and will be the largest coworking space in East Africa to date. He also plans to introduce a desk-exchange between coworking spaces in Nairobi and Berlin, in which betahaus will take part.

You initially worked within Denmark and Northern Europe. How did you become interested in Kenya, and what made you eventually change your focus to East Africa?

It all started when I sold a company in 2006 to investors in Eastern Europe. As part of that sale, I had to build a company in Eastern Europe, so that was what first got me out of Denmark. Following that, I decided to take a 14-day business course at Stanford University, and it was there that I then met David Owino, then the COO of Kenya Data Networks Limited. At that time, I was looking to start investing in tech companies, and he told me a lot about what was going on in East Africa: about mobile money and the growth of the mobile industry. Soon afterwards, I decided to spend a week in Kenya to see this for myself, and that’s how eventually started working there.

There’s plenty of talk about mobile business leading the way in regional development, not only in East Africa, but in a lot of developing regions of the world. How widespread throughout the economy and throughout Kenyan society are the benefits of this development – are they limited to only certain economic sectors or certain classes of people?

Mobile technology has really increased its presence in Kenya these days. For instance, the biggest mobile operator in the country, SafariCom, has over 22 million subscribers, and the population of Kenya is 40 million. One thing mobile technology has brought to a lot of rural Kenyans is the ability to have a bank account. SafariCom offers subscribers access to banking services, so they not only get access to a phone – something they may not have had before, but also the opportunity to send or receive money from the cities, or from abroad, with their mobile bank accounts. Phones prices are also much lower these days – you can easily get a perfectly-functional, Chinese-made smartphone running an Android system for about 80 USD.

Despite there being such a promising, talented population, Africa is still unfortunately associated with poverty, corruption, political instability, and the resulting capital flight, which, of course, deters potential investors. Do you believe that, through the growth of the mobile start-up scene – this so-called “mobile revolution” – this stereotype can eventually be overcome in the international community?

That’s definitely one of the more interesting challenges we are trying to face. There needs to be a change in the way people look at Africa – too many people only associate it with poverty, charity work, and so on. Africa also needs to be seen as a land of opportunity that is attractive to investors. We hope that we can eventually create some kind of regional success story through our work which would spread worldwide thanks to social media, ultimately changing everyone’s perceptions of Africa for the better.
One thing I’ve noticed is that, when you’re in Kenya, you feel surrounded by growth – strong population growth, economic growth, and so on. You’re able to take on projects which may not have the same impact on the markets in Europe. For instance, we founded a football website, Futaa.com, which found great success in the Kenyan markets – something that would not have happened as readily in Europe. A lot of people who do show interest in investing in East Africa mainly see the region as a source of cheap labour, and ignore the true potential of the local population and markets.

Will this also change the way in which business is conducted between Europe and Africa, as people become more aware and more respectful of the local population and business culture?

Of course. Obviously, I encourage Europeans to go down to Africa and start something. It’s great for the local population to be able to collaborate with foreigners, exchange skills, experience and expertise, and to eventually start their own companies based on that. I think that all successful economic growth is based on interaction between nationalities. In order for the economies in East Africa to grow, the local population has to be a part of it; and as equal players. I would love to see small companies being formed by a mix of nationalities – that’s one of the reasons why I’ve decided to start a desk-exchange with betahaus and other coworking spaces in Europe.

HumanIPO has just announced a desk-exchange between coworking spaces Berlin and Nairobi, and that betahaus will be participating. What are some of the main differences between the coworking scenes in East Africa and Western Europe, and what could either side learn from this kind of exchange?

When you look at Kenyan startups, you notice that the entrepreneurs there are a lot more hungry and a lot more driven than those in Europe. One of our employees in Kenya, for instance, had his taxi hijacked, and was held hostage all night. The next morning, he went straight to work, as if nothing had happened! Needless to say, many European entrepreneurs can at least be inspired by that level of determination. I also find that, in Africa, people are much friendlier and more passionate. This creates a good contrast when paired with Germans, who are more structured, formal, and reserved.
The space in Nairobi is almost ready for the desk-exchange; so it’s just a matter of enough people from Berlin applying for it. Our newest space, Startup Garage, is about to open, and should be ready in a week. The space has about 120 desks – not quite as big as betahaus, but so far the biggest coworking space in East Africa. Mind you, coworking is still a relatively new trend over there, as many Kenyan companies still hold on to a very traditional, hierarchical office mentality. However, there are more and more young, educated people today who are embracing the concept of coworking – of working openly with others. We’re hoping that, by allowing Kenyans to work in German spaces, and vice versa, we can not only promote coworking in Kenya and in East Africa, but also change the perspective many people in Europe have of Africa, and of doing business there.