October 2011
9 posts
Improve Your Event's Visibility and Attendee...
This is a cross-post from sharypic’s blog. sharypic gives you a single place to add, share and organize everyone’s photos from an event.
Pulling off a great event is a lot of work.
Two of the challenges for event organizers are attendee engagement and increasing visibility. After all the promotional work and logistical organization, the event is finally happening and the attendees...
The Things of the Future - Talk from Build 0.7
Cennydd Bowles is a freelance digital product designer based in the UK. You can read his blog here.
Do you contribute to the digital landfill? Are we creating products that really add genuine value, both to the users and businesses involved? At the 2011 CES, about 20,000 consumer electronics products were launched. Helen Walters, whom, Cennydd Bowles quotes in the start of his talk, remarked:...
Fantasy Shopper UK Launch
Fantasy Shopper has today launched in the UK, opening its doors after a meticulous private beta period. GigaOm’s Bobbie Johnson wrote an in-depth story about the product, and the first users pouring in the door are very enthusiastic. Some Fantasy Shoppers are already happy to admit their addiction to the new social shopping game.
Fantasy Shopper has many things going for it. It is a game,...
Werner Vogels: Amazon and the Lean Cloud
We were honoured to have Werner Vogels, Amazon.com CTO, give a talk at HackFwd’s Build 0.7 event in Berlin on the how and the why of Amazon’s cloud business. In the talk, Vogels covers Amazon’s history, design principles and learnings from building a world-changing cloud services business. Watch the video for the entirety of the superb talk.
“Amazon is a technology...
September 2011
9 posts
Project Management, Guaranteed Fun and No...
This is guest blog post by Stefan Richter on behalf of TheDeadline, a HackFwd alumnus.
People love our project management tool TheDeadline: Create tasks, share them with your co-workers and TheDeadline will keep you up-to-date on all important status changes and events. You save a lot of time because you don’t have to ask for all the information anymore.
We built TheDeadline for ourselves. My...
HackNow Winner: Luis Iván Cuende
HackNow is a contest we ran over the summer, challenging the young developers in Europe to come up with innovative, useful and novel applications or hacks. We received around 300 applications from the under-18 year old technical talent in Europe and the quality was superb.
The winner was clear. The 15-year old Luis Iván Cuende from Spain, with his distributed web-tech based desktop, Asturix On,...
HackFwd Build 07 in Berlin
We held Build 07 in Berlin over the weekend. From Thursday night to Sunday, the city was host to a crowd of geeks bent on changing the world. Friday was an internal day of presentations and workshops, and on Saturday we opened our doors to external invitees, friends, potential startups and world-class speakers. Our Build events are designed around providing our startups with the best mentoring,...
Chris Boos on Build 06
With Build 07 soon underway in Berlin, Chris Boos’s field report on the highlights of Build 06 is a nice read. In his post Chris lists his favourite presentations (with videos) and why they in particular stood out. Read his post here or catch the highlights below.
Let’s start with my favourite four presenters and their presentations here. I will list them in alphabetical order so...
Social by Design - Video from Build 06
Gareth Morris is a Partner Engineer on Facebook’s Platform Engineering team.
What does it mean to develop a product that is social by design? Gareth Morris from the Platform Engineering team at Facebook goes through the basics of using the Open Graph Protocol for including products and pages in the social graph and for tracking the performance of social plugins across sites, apps and...
Watchlater for iPhone released
Want a handy way to cache web videos for your iPhone and iPad? The much-awaited iPhone-supporting 2.0 version of the Watchlater app has just been released on the App Store, and it is free! It comes with 60 minutes of caching, so you can get a good amount of video onto your iPhone immediately.
Watchlater now supports over 40 different platforms, and has been called the “Instapaper for...
API's Whole - Video from Build 06
Josep Pujol of 3scale gave an expert talk about APIs at the Build 06 event. Josep is the latest addition to HackFwd Referrers, and as attested by the great talk below, a superb asset to the HackFwd pool of expertise. We are very happy to welcome him on board!
API extends programmatic access to your product and enables others to build on your applications. But API is about connectedness, Josep...
The Music of Delta Strike
Music is an important part of a gaming experience. While often playing second fiddle to other elements in a game, sometimes the music of a game adds a new dimension and even transcends the game.
The team at Pro3Games, the HackFwd startup behind Delta Strike, places a huge emphasis on the gaming experience. With the team overachieving themselves constantly it comes almost as no surprise to see...
The Art of the Pitch - Video from Build 06
Pierre Morsa trains presentation skills in France with Ideas on Stage and shares his experiences on startups pitching for investment.
In this talk, the basics of presenting a pitch to investors are covered by building a template for the contents of the pitch. The first tip: start with the product: unfortunately, after many pitches the first question is “so what do you do exactly?”....
August 2011
10 posts
How Wooga cares for its monsters - Video from...
We are happy to introduce Stephanie Kaiser as HackFwd’s latest referrer. Stephanie brings with her stellar knowledge in the area of social games and product management, and we were very honored to have her give a talk at our last Build event.
Stephanie presented learnings from Wooga’s hit game Monster World, where adorable monsters grow weird and wonderful plants for fun and...
Chris Boos: Passion Drives Business - Two...
The following was originally posted by Chris Boos, HackFwd Referrer and legendary geek, at his blog Chris Boos on Automation. We have the pleasure of cross-posting it here.
Now let me talk about the HackBoxes – the term for HackFwd companies.
Let me start out with a company I put into the dead pool only 9 months ago. Delta Strike a company producing a universe as a platform for many games and...
Announcing BeamApp
We are happy to announce BeamApp as the latest addition to HackFwd’s startups. BeamApp aims to bring you seamless action across your devices. With BeamApp, you can pass your current context from one device to another to continue an ongoing task with the gadget that fits best. You can sign up to be notified of the launch, or read about how to participate in a private beta, at the BeamApp...
7 Product Tips for Startups - Video from Build 06
Charles Wiles is the Managing Director of the web startup Imagini and a HackFwd referrer from London.
In his talk Charles Wiles gives 7 product tips to geeky startups. We’ll summarize the first three to get you started: “Prove It!”, “You Don’t Have to Build it to Sell It”, and “It’s About the User, Stupid”.
First, Charles covers what the...
To-do for the Weekend: Manage Twitter Friends and...
Getting into the groove of following the same people day after day can mean that you keep getting information that you don’t actually even want, but have just conditioned yourself into receiving it. It may take a fresh perspective to realize that the account that bombards you with irrelevant stuff is just that, irrelevant.
FlockOfBirds is a tool for the iPhone for managing your Twitter...
Filmaster: Building the best way to discover...
This is a post from Borys Musielak, the founder and CEO of Filmaster, HackFwd’s first startup from Poland.
It’s an honor for me to introduce my startup, Filmaster.com, a movie discovery service and mobile app which knows what you should watch tonight.
The Team
As I’m a geek and movie buff myself, I always wanted to build a service related to film. I started Filmaster in 2010...
B2C Customer Development, part 3 of 3: Testing...
Cracking the signup page for a closed beta has become something of a holy grail to many budding startups. Fueled by success stories from the likes of Hipster, who gathered up tens of thousands of emails without even telling people what they do, and the simple platforms like LaunchRock or MyBetalist for constructing signup pages, it may seem like that’s all you need to build a user base.
Why...
