I have been silent on this blog for a couple of months, because I have been working on my start-up…

The name of the company is wooga: www.wooga.net

wooga creates games for social networks like Facebook or MySpace - because it is more fun to play with your friends than alone or with strangers.

wooga logo with the 2 main characters of our first game

Our first game will launch in spring 2009 on Facebook. If you want to be informed as it launches, become a fan of the wooga page on Facebook.

We are based in Berlin, Germany. If you are interested in joining the company visit us at www.wooga.net/jobs

I will update this blog as soon as we can disclose a little bit more.

Since I left Jamba/Jamster/Fox Mobile I spent a couple of weeks looking at various start-up ideas and made my call: I am currently founding a start-up in Berlin in the casual games sector. In the first place it will be web flash games, not mobile as many of you supposed.

The market for web-based casual games (i.e. games with low entry barriers that appeal to a broad target group and can be played in instances of 5-10 minutes) is extremely crowded, but I think I found an interesting niche to start in.

I will self-finance the first couple of months, go live and get some traction. Depending on traction, I will then look for business angel/ VC funding. Until then I will likely not make permanent hires, but instead work with freelancers and interns.

I am currently looking for:

• Interns working on research, game concepts, further competitive analysis and doing beta testing: They get the unique opportunity to experience the very early stage of a web start-up.
• Freelancers for Flash game-development and PHP site development
• A great, extremely creative game designer that is interested to join my start-up (on a permanent basis, not as a freelancer)

If you are interested in the opportunities above or you know a potential candidate please contact me via Facebook, LinkedIn or Xing.

100 days ago Apple released the iPhone 3G and iPhone firmware 2.0. I love my iPhone , but it’s not perfect.

I have wishes for the next-gen iPhone (bigger battery, faster CPU, better camera, Adobe Flash support etc.), yet these improvements will not be easy and will take time.

But Apple has already made big steps forward through software. However Apple could significantly improve the iPhone by very quick and easy fixes. I am not talking about bigger software issues (like MMS, Flash or copy&paste; all of these would be a lot of work to work properly, potentially require stronger hardware or require Apple to adapt the user interface). Instead I think of trivial and easy quick fixes that one developer could change within a few days.

These is my “Top 10 quick-wins needed” list:

1) Make iTunes store work via 3G:
I download music via 3G since almost four years (on other phones). But Apple still requires us to be connected via WiFi to use iTunes. Why??? Apple, this is ridiculous! Why did you build a 3G phone after all?
Shazam is one of the greatest iPhone Apps, but if you are on the go and you want that song, you just can’t download it today.

2) Allow to disable auto-correction (or make it optional):

This is how iPhone Auto-Correct should work

The auto-correction feature of the iPhone keyboard drives me crazy. Over 20,000 people have signed the petition please-let-us-disable-autocorrection-steve.com and there are rumors this will come with firmware 2.2 in a couple of weeks/months.
Hopefully!

Nonetheless I would love auto-correction to be optional:
When you type and the auto-correction finds an “improvement” it should be shown in the list (as today). But today you have to touch “x” if you don’t want it – and if you forget to type “x” you have to re-type the whole word. Instead you should be able to touch “✓” only if you want it. Auto-correction should then also learn words you type: For example when I start to type “j” it would suggest “Jens” and on “b” suggest “Begemann” etc.

3) Support landscape mode for mail:
Many HTML newsletters I receive are formatted for wider screens:
Either you can’t read the small type or you need to scroll to read a line of text. Therefore mail should support landscape mode for reading mail (like in Safari).
Btw: Mail already supports landscape for reading attachments.

4) Support landscape mode for virtual keyboard in all apps:

TouchType allows to write in landscape mode

The virtual keyboard only works in portrait mode so far – except in Safari. Try typing in Safari-landscape mode with both thumbs: It’s a huge speed gain compared to portrait mode (even if your hands are smaller than mine…).
External apps allow you to type mails in landscape mode and show the potential – but they are not smoothly integrated due to the limitations of the iPhone SDK.

5) Don’t reload page on “back” in Safari:
If you touch “back” in Safari the iPhone will usually re-load/re-render the previous page. This can take several seconds and makes the browsing experience worse. Try Opera Mini on other phones to see how amazing an immeditate “back” can be.

6) Allow listening to iPod while playing games:
When you listen to your music via the iPod feature and you start a game the music stops as soon as the game plays any sound. This is annoying – I’d like to play puzzle games while listening to my music. The iPhone should simply mix the Game sounds and my music (like on the XBOX 360).

7) Support Bluetooth-Stereo audio (A2DP):
Apple heavily promotes WiFi to replace network cables, but you still need to plug-in your headphone/car-stereo system. Apple should simply support the bluetooth stereo-audio profile A2DP (virtually all new Nokia phones do…). Many high-end cars now support A2DP and if you have ever experienced it, you know this is the future how to listen to MP3s: Simply press play on your phone and the car stereo automatically switches to AUX and plays the music.

8) Allow to invite others via calendar:
The functionality of Microsoft Exchange is great: All of your contacts, calendar and E-Mail is always (automatically & immediately) in sync with your PC (I use Skyfillers Hosted Exchange Premium for my personal mail account).
The iPhone allows you to set up a meeting and it will appear on your server/PC immediately, but it is not possible to invite others: Therefore you have to add a second reminder to later invite the other people to the meeting when you are back in the office.

9) Synchronize photos of contacts via Exchange:
Assigning photos to contacts is easy and of great help to rember people (esp. if you have hundreds of contacts), but I stopped using it, because it doesn’t sync with my server/PC via Microsoft Exchange: On the PC there are simply no photos assigned to the contacts (and it also does not work the other way).

10) ??? What is your missing feature ???
Please add your favorite missing feature in the comments section. But please remember: It should be something very easy to fix via software. - There are enough lists with hardware or big software wishes.

Thanks,
Jens Begemann

P.S.: If the iPhone software was more open, these things would have been fixed already.

Yammer CEO David Sacks receives the first prize by TechCrunch's Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis

The 5 jury winners and overall winner: Amosphir, fitbit, GrockIt, GoodGuide, Swype and Yammer (left to right)

This year’s TechCrunch50 is over and the winners have been announced:

The overall winner of this year’s TechCrunch50 is Yammer. The announcement was done American-Idol style and GoodGuide (the site tells you which products contain unhealthy substances; it was my favorite) placed second.

Yammer is twitter for companies. I like Yammer, but it was not my favorite.
Don’t get me wrong: I am sure they will get a lot of registrations from employees of many organizations and it will spread viral. I am sure many employees will find it cool and use it.

Their distribution model is also very smart: Anybody can register (no pre-approval by their company necessary) and people are grouped according to their work E-Mail addresses (like Facebook did with colleges in the early days). If companies want to claim their network to manage and administrate it, they have to pay.

Therefore I think it’s likely that Yammer will be a commercial success - esp. given the traction they now get from being a TechCrunch50 winner. - However I am not sure if this will actually increase productivity or distract employees even more (in addition to E-Mail, work phone, cellphone, instant messaging, intranet, surfing the web and of course meetings). In the end we all still need time where we actually do work - instead of only communicating about it.

In addition to overall winner Yammer, there are five more companies that won a “jury selection” (one of them is runner-up GoodGuide). The full list or jury selection winners is:

• Atmosphir (jump’n'run game, but with user-generated levels)
• fitbit ($99 gadget you attach to your cloth; calculates calorie consumption based on that and makes health sugestions)
• GrockIt (Massively Multi-Player Online Learning Game)
• GoodGuide (web site with information on bad ingredients in products and most healthy alternatives)
• Swype (new input method for touch screens: “draw” the word on the virtual keyboard in one continuous motion from letter to letter; the application will then recognize the word)

Here is my overall conclusion of the three days:

Quality of the organization

I’ve said something similar already on day 1: The overall organization was good, but not excellent (measured by the expectations one may have for such a high profile conference). Most attendees I spoke to expressed a similar opinion.

But I should also praise the TechCrunch team for two reasons:
First of all the video recording of all speeches and the possibility to watch the recordings in the archive is excellent.
Secondly the organizers were very flexible to adopt a new jury format that was proposed by judge Yossi Vardi. TechCrunch reacted by letting the audience decide and changed immediately: The jury from then on did not do a joint Q&A with all of the start-ups of one session as one big group, but instead do the Q&A immediately after the presentation just with this company. The judges were also on-stage all the time and not just for the Q&A. I liked the new format better.

Therefore my criticism to the organization is only valid, if you apply very high standards as the benchmark (which I did). But the key thing of such a conference is the content – and that was very good.

Quality of the start-ups

I’ve been amazed by some of the 52 start-ups, but I have also been critical with some of them in my reports.

I spoke to a couple of attendees reg. the quality of the start-ups we saw since Monday. Some of them were disappointed as they expected to be blown away even more by the 50 best start-ups out of more than 1,000. I share that to some degree, but I even more agree to what Don Dodge said on stage after the last start-up presented:

“If you saw Google when they were 6 months old, you would have said they are lame”. He said in his opinion the start-ups this year were very good and far more polished than last year.

He asked for our imagination reg. what these start-ups could achieve. I think he is right. After all that’s why it’s called venture capital. If success and failure were obvious at early stage, banks would fund them.

Worth the trip?

If you just want to know what new trends there are in the start-up scene, you can also lock yourself in a room and watch the TechCrunch50 live stream.

For me it was definitely worth the flight, because almost everybody from the world-wide start-up scene was here and I met great people.

This trip will help me to finally decide on my start-up idea in the next couple of weeks.

GoodGuide uses Apple-style slides - and CEO Dara O’Rourke (not pictured) presents Steve-like

Winner prediction:
My favorite start-up was GoodGuide. I think the jury thinks alike and I assume it will win this years TechCrunch50. - We will know more in a couple of minutes…

My favorite start-ups of Day 3:

• Session 9 – Rich Media: VideoSurf
  VideoSurf has a cool technology to search video visually. I doubt they would become big as a stand alone company, but their software should be a good candidate to be acquired by an existing video company.
• Session 10 – Games : Atmosphir
  Atmosphir is a classic jump’n’run game, but enhanced by the possibility for the users to create and share their own levels. It is similar to Little Big Planet for Playstation 3 and it does not look as polished as the Sony product, but it is at least a very interesting concept.
• Session 11 – Vertical Social Networking: CauseCast
  CauseCast is a social network to inspire people & companies to do good – e.g. help to cure cancer.
  There is also real business behind it: Sean Parker made a true statement by saying that social concious projects are a big part of the American economy and “it seems this sector is just late to the party”. I agree that fund raising etc. are not yet big on the web – it seems there is a clear need to improve.
• Session 12 – Research & Recommendation: GoodGuide
  GoodGuide is a web site that shows you if certain products you use contain bad ingredients (e.g. lead) and which are the most healthy products for a certain need. They apply the same to environmental friendly etc.First of all, their presentation on stage was almost perfect: Superb speech, great charisma of their CEO Dara O’Rourke and everything else was excellent – almost at Steve Jobs level. Btw: Their slides were almost an identical copy of Apple-style: Big white words (only 2-5 per slide) on dark background, switching fast, perfectly synched to the speech of the CEO. But better copy the best than invent something new that is inferior. Watch the video of their presentation to get the idea.

  The judges asked a couple of questions reg. the risk that companies would manipulate ratings to appear better. They claim that most of it is based on scientific data.

  As Sean Parker put it: “Classic data aggregation” and “I like that you are different” (e.g. not classic Web 2.0 crowd sourcing).

  The jury was amazed and I was, too: They solve a big need for many consumers in the western world, they have amazing SEO potential and the capability to generate revenue from directing consumers to e-commerce sites that offer the products for sale.

  If they manage to make their database big enough (60,000 products so far) and keep the cost to aggregate that information low enough, they will do very well.

  In my opinion they will and should win TechCrunch50.
  Note: Dara O’Rourke said that it is a “for benefit company that has a social mission” - therefore it might not be a great investment opportunity for a VC, but I still think they owe to win TechCrunch50

Two founders from Japanese company tonchidot demoed their product “Sekai Camera” (World Camera in Japanese). The idea: You hold up your camera phone and the application will superimpose useful and smart symbols/tags on the camera image.

For example: You point your phone’s camera at a restaurant, the application recognizes the restaurant and shows a symbol to automatically access the menu, opening hours, reservations etc.

tochnidot used the following video to demo their product:

This is how they presented their video on stage (thanks to drurin for the video):

After the demo the most hilarious Q&A session of the whole conference took place. tochnidot, you made my day! I did my best to record this Q&A:

Do you have imagination? Do you believe? Will you join?

Tuesday-morning of TechCrunch50 also started with the star-spangled-banner. I captured the second half of the performance with my camera:

This time the anthem was sung by blogger Meghan.

My appreciation of day 2

Judges are excited by the start-ups from the two morning sessions

Showcasing the $99 fitbit device

Demo of Swype (touch-screen text input)

I found the two start-up morning sessions quite disappointing – and I believe that was not just because everybody was paying a lot of attention to the live-blogging of the Apple event today at the time. The two afternoon sessions on Mobile and Tools were much better.

At least the internet was mostly working fine, because they put ethernet cables on most tables and this also took away load from WiFi.

My favorite start-ups of today:

• Session 5 – Collaboration: None
  I think there was no company in the first session that was great.
  The worst performance was from IMINDI, but their idea is interesting: Social mind-mapping. Unfortunately their assumptions are weird: Everybody would type everything what’s on their mind into mind maps on the web and then they would merge them with other (also public!) mind maps.
  I see a market for this idea, but executed very differently: As an intranet-based mind-mapping software for big corporations. It would match maps and bring employees together that work on similar projects, who don’t know of each other so far.
• Session 6 - Finance & Statistics: iCharts
  iCharts provides charts on the web – like Excel-chart (bars, pie charts etc.), but interactive.
  Their idea is to create a Flickr/Youtube-like community where people upload their charts and I think they are very wrong (as was the jury). Instead they should license their solution
• Session 7 – Mobile: fitbit
  A couple of interesting companies appeared in Mobile, e.g. mytopia that promises to allow you to write applications for Facebook, MySpace, iPhone, Symbian etc. from one code case.
  Also in this category: The hillarious presentation and Q&A reg. tonchidot “Sekai camera”
  Overall fitbit made the most promising impression: Fitbit is a small $99 attachment to your cloth. It will then estimate your daily calorie consumption, your sleeping hours and make suggestions how to improve.
• Session 8 – Language & Plattform Tools: Swype
  Swype shows a virtual keyboard on a touch screen: Users swipe with their finger/stylus in one constant move over the letters of the word. The algorithm then decides which word to put on the screen.
  The jury was amazed by the solution, tested it and a judge even wrote down “This will win TechCrunch50” (see photo of demo).
  I also like it, but I am not that amazed. To make it useful it has to work extremely well. This is because if it correctly detects 90% of the words – correcting the remaining 10% will take a lot of time.
  Btw: There also is a competing company: ShapeWriter. They were also part of the Android Developer Challenge: The jury, including me, did not vote it into the Top 20. But Swype looks better executed that ShapeWriter.

Live-demo of Swype (the judges test Swype for the first time ever):

Statement of the day:

Mark Cuban said that he often makes investments into companies without ever meeting the founders – or maybe only meeting them once. He said he could see a CEO of a company he is invested in on the street and not recognize him – even though he exchanges a couple of E-Mails every day.

Will update you tomorrow - especially with my opinion on the winner of TechCrunch50,

Jens Begemann

Big audience of 2,000 people

Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington open TechCrunch50

Demo pits and exhibition

OtherInbox on stage with judges

Peter Thiel and Michael Arrington

Audience standing for national anthem

The first day of TechCrunch50 today was great – but not without a couple of hitches

Starting late:

The event started half an hour late with ca. 2,000 people sitting there and waiting – because WiFi was not working for the audience.

First of all it is awkward that TechCrunch did not manage to get WiFi working on such a high-profile tech-conference (TechCrunch likely generates several million dollars from sponsorships and expensive attendance tickets). And it was unclear to me why everybody had to wait – is Michael Arrington really that desperate that everybody blogs and twitters live from the audience? Is this the real point TechCrunch50 exists – to get blogged about?

Professionalism of the organization

The organizers did not manage to get WiFi working through most of the rest of the day. And the overall picture does not become more professional: Mediocre food at lunch, a part-time outage of the power-plugs for the journalists, running out of water bottles in one break and constant audio-problems with the microphones throughout the day.

Mechanics

The concept of TechCrunch50 is simple and I like it :
52 start-ups have been selected out of over 1,000 applications. 4-5 of them are presented as a group (e.g. “Mobile”): Everyone gets 8 minutes on stage to pitch and after that there are a couple of minutes of Q&A with the jury. This is mixed up by a couple of panels, on-stage-interviews and the demo-pit/exhibition.

My favorite start-ups from today:

• Session 1 – Youth & Entertainment: None
  The ideas presented were nice, but I didn’t like one idea enough to point somebody out.
  The video from “Blah Blah Girls” was funny, but I don’t really see the potential for this content-creation company to become huge (plan is 2-3 videos of teen celeb gossip a week + interactivity features). If it wasn’t a company from Ashton Kutcher, I doubt it would have been part of the 50 finalists.
• Session 2 – Memes & News: dotspots
  dotspots allows users to comment any content on the web (via a browser plug-in or server-side script) - and other users can then see your comments (even if the content is syndicated on other sites).
  I agree to Marissa Meyer who said that the project was an ambitious approach, but we would be better off with a standard annotation (and potentially rating) system to move the web forward
• Session 3 – Enterprise: FairSoftware
  FairSoftware allows teams to set-up virtual companies and ease the management of such companies/projects. The solution would then manage virtual shares, spread profits etc.
  The panels favorite was Yammer (Twitter for companies). I liked them too, but I am not sure if a company-internal micro-blogging will increase or decrease productivity.
• Session 4 – Advertising & Commerce: OtherInbox
  OtherInbox allows you to give a different E-Mail-address to every company you interact with (amazon@john.otherinbox.com etc.). You don’t have to set-up those addresses, but you just use all of these addresses and it’s then very easy to manage your E-Mail (e.g. read E-Mail in an aggregated form; block unwanted mails; get summaries of E-Mails you get). The goal is to make sure your main inbox only contains personal E-Mails from real people.
  Btw: I also liked AdRocket: They use the E-Mail address as a unique identifier to deliver ads relevant to the individual user (there is huge potential to deliver very relevant ads with targetted, but anonymous user data across multiple sites and channels).

Quality of the presentations

Putting the quality of the products aside, the quality of the presentation is very important: All presentations were at least OK (none bad), but few were great. A couple of presenters even read from cards, some had learned the whole presentation word-by-word and some missed to mention key facts in their speech – that then only became clear during Q&A.

This is amazing given the fact that many of these start-ups will never again be able to speak in front of such an audience.

Presenter of the day: Joshua Baer from OtherInbox

The best presentation of the day was from OtherInbox: A great presenter, great powerpoint slides (pictures, not bullet points) with perfect timing according to the speech and you could feel the enthusiasm of CEO Joshua Baer for his company.

Statement of the day

Ron Conway said something like “Search- and display-advertising are both multi billion dollar markets. And product placement is a new multi billion dollar market emerging in front of our very eyes at the moment”.

Interview of the day: Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel does not give a lot of interviews. Today he had a very interesting 45-minute conversation with Michael Arrington on stage:

Peter is a very very impressive person that appears to be very smart. Some of his main statements from today:

• The tech-bubble from 2000 set the IT industry back by 10 years (as did the real estate bubble respsectively). The government needs to be proactive not reactive – e.g. SOX should have come in 1998 instead of 2002.
• If there had not been a bubble the achievement from 1993 to 2008 would have been substantially bigger (e.g. many smart people stayed out of technology after 2000)
• Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon etc. are undervalued compared to other stocks.
• On clean energy:
  There should be separate discussions on climate change and running out of conventional energy sources that lead to high prices for oil etc.
  Depending on which of the two you think is the big problem, you need to take very different actions. If you believe both are the problem, you probably have to be very aggressive on nuclear energy.
• His investment hint:
  Invest where few others are investing now, because the area failed in the past, but apply the learning from the failures. When PayPal was founded in 1998, nobody invested in payment systems.
  Now it is time to invest into companies that use artificial intelligence companies: Not trying to make computers smarter than humans, but carefully looking at how to split work – to look at where computers can help humans to produce better results (example: YouNoodle)
• Most important indicator if a start-up will be successful: Payment of the CEO
  More

Part 2 tomorrow will be shorter – promised!
Jens Begemann

P.S.: An international event?

TechCrunch50 is a very international event – if you judge by attendants – but not necessarily by the mindset of some others…

For example event kicked off by making the audience stand up, a singer entering the stage and then the US national anthem! I’ve never seen something like that at a conference.

A couple of judges were also talking as if start-ups could only become successful in Silicon Valley and Ron Conway said founders from outside of the valley should move there to be successful. Yossi Vardi from Israel then asked the audience to raise their hands where they came from: Ca. 3/4 came from outside of Silicon Valley.
Btw: A stars-and-stripes flag was on stage the whole day.

I use the time to verify my start-up idea. I have a couple of concepts in my mind, but one is on top of the list and I want to make a go/no-go decision in the next couple of weeks.

If you happen to be close to San Francisco/LA during the time drop my a mail to meet. Contact me via Facebook, LinkedIn or Xing.

See you there,
Jens Begemann

A couple of weeks ago Google asked me to become one of the seven judges to select the winners of the ten $275,000 awards and the ten $100,000 awards out of the 50 finalists (a total of 1,788 Android applications had originally been submitted). It was an honor for me to be part of the jury.

Google announced the winners last Friday:
List of the award winners and finalist
The 7 judges

Now I look forward to use the first Android phone in practice – will it be the best phone in the world (see my current favorite)?