March 2012
14 posts
Get early access to TankWars on Facebook today
TankWars is the new game being launched soon by the team behind Reign of Steel, and this afternoon at 6PM CET, you are able to get early access to the game on Facebook. Head over to the TankWars Facebook page. Here’s a video trailer of the battle ahead.
HackNow winner launches HolaIO
Last summer HackFwd created HackNow, a coding contest for under 18-year olds in Europe. The contest’s inaugural winner was Luis Iván Cuende García. Then at the age of 15, Luis Iván entered the contest with Asturix On, a distributed web-tech based desktop that promises to be a challenger in distributed personal computing. You can read the awesome Knowledge@Wharton interview with Luis Iván...
Early-stage investing in Europe - Talk at Build...
Nikolaj Nyholm, General Partner at Sunstone Capital, has been a serial entrepreneur and is now a VC. In this talk he unlocks the secrets from the other side of the investment equation.
Nikolaj has had a broad and successful career with startups, beginning with a domain name registration company and ending with facial recognition software that he sold on to Apple. Since 2010 he’s been working with...
Accidental SEO - Talk from Build 0.9
Sebastian Deutsch from Watchlater, one of the HackFwd startups, shared his experiences of SEO that any startup can benefit from.
There are three options for your growth. The first is ‘blitzkrieg’ style where you push your product out into the market with heavy machinery. The second is having the Facebook-gene that naturally translates into a hockey stick. First option takes lots of...
"Easier to train a geek how to do business than a...
The quote by Lars Hinrichs, tweeted by Heather Russell, was the most retweeted tweet in the London Web Summit which took place this week. This is what we believe at HackFwd and what we have geared our program towards. We look for and support Europe’s most talented, passionate geeks, and with our network of experienced entrepreneurs and professionals, supply them with both business and tech...
8 Habits of Highly Motivated Startups
Startups are tough. You’re out there carving a path that no-one else has carved before. You have no idea whether you’ll succeed or fail. You encounter well-meaning worriers and envious doom-sayers. And on top of that you have to get a business off the ground. How do you keep going?
If your motivation has failed you and you feel like giving up, here are eight steps that will help to get you back on...
Fail Better
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett, Westward Ho
Hackers break things. Sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately but we always break things. The joy of breaking things doesn’t come from destruction, it comes from learning how to put things back together more elegantly and stronger than before.
To non-hackers this can seem like a risky,...
The Minimum Viable Deal - Talk from Build 0.9
Michael Jackson is partner with Mangrove Capital and a HackFwd board member. This is the first talk from Build 0.9 that took place in Berlin March 8-10th.
In this talk Michael reduces ‘business development’ down to three categories: buying, selling, and bullshit.
Programmers often don’t like business development, for a good reason. It is a convoluted field with a lot of...
Delta Strike iPad Prototype – Export 3D Flash...
This is a guest blog post by Michael Plank (@Michael_Plank), CTO of Pro3Games, the startup behind Delta Strike.
I’m sure you’ve heard people saying: “Flash doesn’t work on iOS” or “Flash is dead“…
I would say: “Flash is currently the best cross platfom technology for developing games for both desktop and mobile devices!”
Read about how we got the Delta Strike prototype running on the iPad in...
Pitch in Berlin v3: Startups & The Winners
Pitch in Berlin is a pitch contest that we at HackFwd run in conjunction with our Build events in Berlin. Pitch in Berlin, already in v3, took place on Saturday. The following 12 startups from seven European countries presented their product to an audience of investors, press, tech experts and other startups from all over Europe. We received nearly 90 applications so just getting invited to pitch...
Build 0.9 kicking off in Berlin
HackFwd’s Build 0.9 started today with updates from the HackBoxes, from new to alumni. The startups all came in with plenty of news of progress. A few good examples are Equilibrium’s 130,000 organic downloads on Android, 2.3m unique views for Infogr.am (that’s before product launch) and the impressive monetization power of YieldKit’s YieldWord.
The first talk was given...
How to find the right domain name - a talk from...
Michael Marcovici is one of the co-founders of the Domain Developers Fund – an investment fund that develops and trades domain names. In this talk, Michael shares his insights into domain name investment. He also gives examples of the value of owning a category-killer name. Watch the video to learn how to find the right domain name for your startup.
While Michael started out as a collector of...
Meetings considered harmful: debug your groups
“You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well,” according to Read Montague, a senior researcher at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. Their neuroscientific research showed that people drop a few IQ points when they’re asked to perform in “social” settings like meetings. Not only...
Fantasy Shopper in The Economist
Fantasy Shopper gets a great treatment in this article in The Economist, The Buying Game: Can play shopping transform the real thing. Chris Prescott, Fantasy Shopper CEO, introduces the key ideas behind the startup, why it is both appealing to its key users, and why “pre-purchase validation” can be a game-changer in retail.
