Remo’s Blog

Felix Petersen is a founder of Plazes, a Zurich/Berlin based company which provides geo-location services. Felix agreed that I record his presentation at Red Herring 100 in Cannes:

Link: sevenload.com

Plazes has raised €2.7 mio early this year and is growing very fast. A cool thing about Plazes is that they want to digitize walk-in customers in offline settings and create what Felix calls the "PageRank of the real world". E.g. you can see how many people went to a certain restaurant or checked-in in a certain hotel. This opens cool opportunities for behaviorial targeting or related stuff.

More links:
Techcrunch coverage
Alarm Clock coverage
Peter Schüpbach’s coverage (he’s an investor)

Prof. Dr. Sugih Jamin is co-founder and CTO of the Swiss/American startup Zattoo, which offers free live-television via Internet. He agreed that I record his Red Herring 100 presentation in Cannes:

Link: sevenload.com

I had lunch with Sugih and learned several things:
- Zattoo launched in Switzerland because of the cheap licencing costs and the good coverage of the major Swiss TV-stations
- Zattoo has over 250’000 users only in Switzerland
- Zattoo started as a students-project of one of Jamin’s students
- Development is based in the US; business/marketing is based in Zurich
- The synchronization issues should be fixed soon (the cause of the problem was that Zattoo stopped using QuickTime for synchronization due to realiability issues)
- Zattoo will generate revenue with advertising that is displayed when a new channel is buffering (that takes about 5 seconds)

More Links:
Alarm Clock Euro June 2006
Alarm Clock Euro March 2007

(via Loïc Le Meur)

More to come… (I’ve shot some, too)

Yesterday evening I heard rumors that Red Herring International wants to close down the European offices at Technopark in Zurich.

Alex, please don’t do that!

Some Reasons:
#1: Farley Duvall is doing a great job there
#2: There were 7 Swiss companies among this years Red Herring 100.
#3: There is a good reason why Google is investing a lot of resources in Zurich
#4: Switzerland is a good test market for expanding Red Herring 100 companies
#5: Entrepreneurship is getting rapidly more popular in Switzerland because of initiatives like venturelab (a great partner for Red Herring)
#6: We’re going to organize a regular Red Herring roundtable for Swiss entrepreneurs in Zurich (some Swiss entrepreneurs, Farley and Elizabeth had the idea yesterday evening)

I’m sure there are another GOOD reasons to not close down this office!

Alex, please think about it!

(Sleeping concierge at the hotel late last night. I hope he won’t get fired because of this posting ;-) [PS: It WASN'T at the Carlton Hotel, of course]

(What a wonderful morning –> Remo is really happy :-)

(This beach is AWESOME, and its RIGHT in the city!)

Good thing I have another 6 hours so spend at the beach before I leave to cold Switzerland.