Ideas come from curiosity, and concrete actions shape the innovation - Product Development Days Conference

On October 19-20, Park Inn by Radisson in Krakow is going to become filled with people, who wouldn’t exist without products and probably wouldn’t be the same without them. Doesn’t matter if you are a product owner, developer, agile coach, or UX designer - this is the place for you. On top of that, you will have the opportunity to share your knowledge and contacts with each every professional in those sectors.

Wait, so what this is all about?

Product Management is currently an archipelago of good practices and innovations. In order to change it and tie them together, this conference was initiated - and it has a chance to become the biggest knowledge sharing platform of its kind.

The whole event circles around three main areas, each playing a major role in product lifecycle:

Product itself - Specialists will share their knowledge in every aspect of product development, starting from product management to marketing and promoting it.

Experience - We’re going to learn how massive is the influence of User Experience on reception and usability of the product, and which aspects make a good user interface.

Team - Experts in personal development will help by breaking down into details where the difficulties in communication and team management originate, and how it affects the outcome of the final production.

Are you curious about the secrets of HR Directors in major IT companies? Get to know one of the top 100 most influential people in the field of wearable tech? Or maybe learn the route that Alior Bank took to succeed? The conference is going to bring the participats closer to key players in business. They are running such companies as Alior Bank, Ocado, BBH, Samsung, and Allegro.

All of the above is just a sneak peek of the event happening in fastest growing capital of innovation and technology in Central Eastern Europe - Krakow. In the last few years, Krakow has become a city of incredibly dynamic growth, especially in the IT sector - it doesn’t surprise, that the Malopolska voidvoship became a strategic partner of the conference.

The event is organized by the Change Leaders foundation, supporting and inspiring people to reach the maximum of their business potential. It’s a dynamically developing educational and networking-focused NGO gathering the business community. Change Leaders works to support entrepreneurship, cooperating with organizations working locally and nationally.

Event: Product Development Days Conference

Location: Park Inn by Radisson in Krakow

Date: October 19-20, 2015

Facebook Link: www.facebook.com/productdevelopmentdays/

Twitter: @ProductDevDays

Thank you for reading another one of my posts done for you!  If you liked what you read please share it by using one of the buttons below and check out other posts in this blog.  I don’t want you to miss out on future posts so please follow me on Twitter @Eurodude23.  If you haven’t done it already, please like my Facebook fan page by clicking here!  And if you like the content you have read, and are looking for a content writer for your team please go to www.contentfarm.org for details. See you next time!

Polish President visits Startups in Krakow to inspire national Innovation

Paul Chen

On October 1, 2015, the Polish President Andrzej Duda made a visit to the Krakow office of Estimote to have a talk with some of the most innovative startups in the Krakow community. During the election, innovative entrepreneurship had been one of his main objectives. He would like to give Polish entrepreneurs the support they need to bring innovative services and products to the market.

He congratulated the startups for their international success. Recently, Base CRM had finalized their latest round of funding where they raised $30 Million.

Duda would like the Polish government to be more aware of the activities of domestic startups and to implement their solutions in the effort to bring the country into the future. He pledged support for a legislation which will support innovation and help entrepreneurs.

The Polish President praised the startups for their efforts to modernize the Polish market and to put Poland on the map in the international arena. He felt inspired by what he saw during the meeting as well as his visits to the local universities including Jagiellonian University and AGH University of Science and Technology.

The Polish startup founders felt quite encouraged by the recognition and praise that a major state politician are giving them. They feel that this is just the start of a long term relationship between the community and the state government. The founders of the Krakowian startups hope that other startup ecosystems such as Warsaw, Poznan, Wroclaw, and others will be able to benefit from this meeting as well.

Recently, Startup Poland, a foundation formed to lobby government support for startups, had successfully pushed a bill through the Parliament to encourage R&D by eliminating some of the taxation associated with it as well as simplifying the taxation structure.

The president made a comment about this new legislation that was discussed in the Parliament and declared that although the law is not perfect it is an important step to support innovation in Poland and it is significant

“It's another milestone for Polish startup community! The president was referring to the tech sector with superlatives saying that young entrepreneurs in Poland  are hard-working, talented, well-educated, and confident and that he is grateful that they didn't emigrate.” -  Eliza Kruczkowska CEO of Startup Poland foundation.

The startups on display were:

Base  - CRM with $53 Million in investments and thousands of customers

Silvaire (Seed Labs) - Provider of IoT solutions

Estimote  - Provider of Apple and Eddystone beacon solutions

inFakt  - Accounting services

KoalaMetrics -  Mobile analytics

VoicePIN. Com - Voice biometrics

DrOmnibus -  detection and therapy of disorders in children (eg. Autism)

Sher.ly  - SME data security

VormLab -  Industrial design consultant

RoboCore  - A heart for your robot

Sandmade -  Laser Sintering 3D printers

Bartek Josefowski contributed to the reporting.

Thank you for reading another one of my posts done for you!  If you liked what you read please share it by using one of the buttons below and check out other posts in this blog.  I don’t want you to miss out on future posts so please follow me on Twitter @Eurodude23.  If you haven’t done it already, please like my Facebook fan page by clicking here!  And if you like the content you have read, and are looking for a content writer for your team please go to www.contentfarm.org for details. See you next time!

4 benefits from Huge Thing that keep Paying Off

This really was a huge thing for both me personally and Whalla.

Because before Whalla Labs became what it is today – a software development agency with a focus on mobile – there was this other thing called ‘ Whalla’.

But it all started out even earlier.

I joined Huge Thing with an idea wrote down on a piece of paper and a hope someone will help me to make it real. I was solo back then – no team, nor that much of experience.

Here are 4 things about participating in Huge Thing I find most beneficial.

Although, there are many, many more, these 4 keep paying off every day.

They changed my life.

Benefit #1: Motivation

After just a few initial days I soaked in completely. Literally, mentors persuaded me into startups.

At the time, I worked for SiePomaga.pl, a startup and a nice place to work in. But launching a venture of my own, that’s another cup of tea – at first it seemed a little scary, but once I’ve had a few conversations with mentors it changed 180 degrees.

We’ve spent long hours talking about running a company: risks and hard work, and excitement and all the fun parts.

To cut it short, I was so pumped up that I decided to quit my job and take a leap of faith into building a business.

In a week-time I’ve made my mind to change whole course of my life.

I credit this entrepreneurial choice to Huge Thing.

It was totally worth it.

Benefit #2: People and Pivots

My initial idea was to build analytics for offline retail.

It was cool enough to get me into the program, but I wasn’t really capable of building it. At the time, I hadn’t figured it out too well, and I lacked a team to make it all happen.

So, after few weeks I dropped the ball on this one.

This is yet another thing I’ve learned at HT – don’t stick to your idea too much.

If you happen to lose faith in your project or learn that it doesn’t really make sense, just leave it.

This didn’t end my journey, though.

I was lucky to meet Wojtek Hołysz at the time (today he runs a brilliant video marketing agency, Filmpoint).

Wojtek, like everyone else at HT, had an idea, too. This time, it was a mobile app.

I liked it and I was into mobile already, so we teamed up.

Instagram was a big thing back then in 2012 and there still was a lot of hype around social media, experience sharing, being connected and stuff like this.

So we decided to follow the crowd and build something to piggyback on the trends – quite clever, right?

We did some ‘market research’ and it seemed like we got it!

It was supposed to be a photo app for sharing experiences from various events.

That’s how I met a co-founder and pivoted from B2B analytics software to B2C mobile app.

It would be much, much harder without Huge Thing. Maybe I would’ve even passed on entrepreneurship altogether.

Benefit #3: Network

I managed to build a website myself, but to keep progressing on a fast pace we needed more firepower. The developers – lifeblood of every tech business.

But how’d you do that?

Enter networking.

There’s a fair chance that as a startup newbie your network is pretty much nonexistent. And I bet that you have no idea about recruiting or sales, or marketing whatsoever (at least I didn’t).

Here come the mentors. I found them helpful so many times, you wouldn’t believe.

One of the best things about them, aside of their will to help and operational knowledge they share, is their network.

Just ask them to help and out of the sudden you’re getting dozens of intro emails. This is exactly how we recruited three developers to finish the project.

Afterwards, we received massive amount of how-to tips regarding team building, managing software engineering and acquiring our first customers.

Moreover, we learned how to use our network, how to build a team and how to manage processes to actually build and ship your product.

I mean, how cool is that?

You can literally outsource networking with mentors and get them to introduce you to potential co-founders, employees and of course customers.

Plus, one can simply learn ‘from the trenches’ kind of stuff directly from them.

Pretty powerful, isn’t?

Benefit #4: Real Business

We did it! We’ve built and launched ‘Whalla’ the photo app!

But again…

The market wasn’t as much enthusiastic about our idea, as we were. The app didn’t make much money and we’ve learned that mobile business is not that easy the hard way.

It was pretty much a failure.

After that I didn’t gave up on building apps.

I put all this experience and work we did at Huge Thing to create what now is Whalla Labs.

Thanks to connections I made there and lessons I learned, we were able to get in touch with LubimyCzytać.pl and start working with them.

And from then on, we kept doing even better.

Today I work with a great team of 25 dedicated and awesome people. We did lots of web and mobile projects for brands from Poland and from abroad such as Qpony, Microsoft, Agora and Wirtualna Polska.

The time I spent with Huge Thing and what it taught me, and connections I made there, are something valuable and worth spreading.

I can’t stress it enough: Huge Thing was a life changer for me.

It’s a gift that keeps on giving. No book can teach you this stuff.

—

Piotr Biegun, CEO Whalla Labs

Huge Thing is a 3 week (6th to 23rd October) pre-acclereation program in Poznan, Poland. This year they are in cooperation with 500 Startups and is implemented under the patronage of  the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development. 

Thank you for reading another post for you!  If you liked what you read please share it by using one of the buttons below and check out other posts in this blog.  I don’t want you to miss out on future posts so please follow me on Twitter @Eurodude23.  If you haven’t done it already, please like my Facebook fan page by clicking here!  And if you like the content you have read, and are looking for a content writer for your team please go to www.contentfarm.org for details. See you next time!

Original version of the post can be found here.

The Last yard: Closing the Sale

Paul Chen

Polish businesses has spent a large amount of money on marketing by placing adverts on billboards and different websites. They have taken advantage of many website advert tricks. However, they aren’t growing and making more money? What could the problem be? You might call them the DeSean Jackson of business.

On September 15, 2008, the Dallas Cowboys were playing the Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles were on their own 39 yard line, there were 7:54 left in the 2nd quarter. Donovan McNabb threw up a long range pass to DeSean Jackson. Jackson catches the ball and trots into the endzone, but no touchdown. Why? Video replay said that he spiked the ball on the 1 yard line for a turnover.  The Eagles goes on to lose the game 41-37.

Similarly, on September 6, 2011 Polish National Men’s Team was playing against Die Mannschaft of Germany. With the score tied 1-1 going into the last minute of play. The hosts thought they had won the game when in the 89th minute Kuba  Błaszczykowski converted a penalty given for a foul by Wiese on Brozek, but Cacau popped up with a last-second equalizer as he powered a cross from Muller from close range to earn a draw for Germany.

What do these two have in common? They celebrated too early. How does it apply to Polish businesses, or businesses in general? Imagine your business did everything perfectly, got the right content marketing strategy. You got good amount of foot traffic to your stores or web-stores. Then you hired an apathetic prick to man your cash tills or the check-out process of your e-shop is a bitch because your back-end can’t handle the traffic.

Bad service results in over $300 Billion of lost revenue worldwide.  

This last step can often trip up businesses who employ even the most sophisticated sales strategies. Bad customer service is very costly. consider these:

• It is 6-7 times more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to keep an existing one (White House Office of Consumer Affairs)
• 78% of consumers have abandoned a transaction due to bad customer service experiences (American Express Survey 2011).
• Unhappy customers are highly unlikely to be repeat customers as 89% of customers report having stopped doing business with companies because of bad customer service (RightNow Customer Experience Impact Report 2011)
• People are twice as likely to talk about bad customer service experiences than they are to talk about good experiences (2012 Global Customer Service Barometer)
• Bad service results in over $300 Billion of lost revenue worldwide.  

How to solve it?

If you run an e-shop you better have sufficient infrastructure on front end and back end to handle the traffic. Your UX has to be super friendly and intuitive. And security should be your top priority. Most Polish e-shops have come a long way in this aspect. And I am happy to shop here.

That said, it is the brick and mortar ones that involve actual people that is the most difficult to improve.

You can’t stress the importance the of culture enough

It doesn’t matter whether you are running a restaurant or a supermarket, everybody’s main goal is to make sure the customer spends his money, has a good time, and feels better coming out of the store. American businesses have this down to an art. Walmart has a greeter to welcome you to the store. The Gap always has an employee standing at the entrance “folding” shirts to ask you if you need help. This does 3 things: make the customer feel welcome, let the customer feel safe because there are people who want to help, and tell the customer that he is being watched so don’t try anything funny. With bright displays and well organized stores, they know how to make you put merchandise into your carts. At a recent visit to a Target in Los Angeles, an employee offered me an empty cart when he saw that my hands were full. It’s these little things as well.

Again in Los Angeles, at a Ralph’s supermarket and a Walgreens pharmacy, the cashier knew that some of the items in my cart was on sale if you had a club card, so they scanned their own card so I can get the discount. I left those establishment feeling like I had just gotten some wonderful deals. However, if you think about it from a broad perspective, by scanning their own club card, they insure that I would actually buy the product and feel good doing so. Sure, they lost a few dimes and nickels worth of revenue, but they gained a happy customer. A happy customer is more likely to open his wallets even wider.

At a Zara in Prague, I had bought a nice shirt for my ex and had asked for a nicer paper bag to present it to her, the cashier said “no”. That shocked me. So I just put my card back in my pocket and left the store without paying.  My expat friends often joke that the Polish Customer Service is an oxymoron. These days, I will just leave the merchandise on the belt and leave if the cashier is snippy with me. And it’s happened quite often. Just because I had come to the cashiers with merchandise, doesn’t mean I necessarily have to pay.

You can have the best products, the most kick-ass marketing campaign, and the most flashy ads, but in a free market, a sale is not a sale until you put your money in the shop keeper’s hands. To think otherwise is to think like DeSean Jackson.

Thank you for reading another post done for you!  If you liked what you read please share it by using one of the buttons below and check out other posts in this blog.  I don’t want you to miss out on future posts so please follow me on Twitter @Eurodude23.  If you haven’t done it already, please like my Facebook fan page by clicking here!  And if you like the content you have read, and are looking for a content writer for your team please go to www.contentfarm.org for details. See you next time!

Vice-President Ansip speaks about Europe's startup ecosystem

Ladies and gentlemen

Thank you for inviting me to the launch of this mapping project, which I am sure will give a significant boost to Europe's startup community.

Dynamic mapping will give a unique insight into emerging startup ecosystems, providing detailed information and regular updates of their basic characteristics.

The initial focus will be on 10 major European hubs: Berlin, Brussels, Bucharest, Helsinki, London, Madrid, Manchester, Munich, Paris and Stockholm. There will be another 10 hubs mapped this year.

Some of this information has never been put together or analysed in such a way before. The new mapping tool will show the geographic distribution of startups together with their financial data, for example.

Perhaps more importantly, it will provide service and customer-related data, along with the factors which led to the venture's set-up and success – or failure.

Startups themselves should find the mapping useful as they seek to link together in networks, join ecosystems across Europe and find partners and investors.

It will also help us – policymakers and regulators – to know exactly how to help, in the best and most appropriate ways that startups really need.

They are, after all, vital to Europe's economy and job market.

Nobody creates more jobs than startups and other young companies; they provide around 50% of all jobs created.

As I have said before, I think startups could be given an easier beginning and helped more to bridge the gap from lab to market – to scale up and expand beyond national borders.

This is why we have the Startup Europe programme, of which this mapping tool will be a new and important part.

I believe in the policy approach that the programme takes: do not interfere with business decisions; rather; give support to better connecting startup communities to join up forces, ideas, talent and funding. All this across Europe, linking younger and smaller communities up with larger and more established ones. Dynamic EU innovation 'hubs of hubs', of a sort.

As a whole, the programme aims to strengthen the business environment for web and ICT entrepreneurs and make it easier for their ideas and business to start and grow.

This is also a main objective of our project to build a Digital Single Market for Europe, which is designed to support startups to the fullest possible extent.

We are already working on how to simplify and modernise the EU's rules for online and digital cross-border purchases, for example.

Doing this will help e-commerce startups because it will become easier for them to comply with laws across the EU.

In turn, that means they will be able to expand across national borders more quickly and offer their services to more customers.

We are also working to explore ways to attract more venture capital as part of the Single Market Strategy and the Capital Markets Union, which focuses on improving access to financing for all businesses across Europe and investment projects – startups in particular.

The mapping tool being launched today will be another instrument that can help Europe's startups and help to build the foundation for our digital future.

I wish you all a great day of startup link-up – here in Brussels, and in the other nine participating cities. More cities will join in, I am sure.

Thank you.

Andrus Ansip, 24 September 2015

Thank you for reading another post done for you!  If you liked what you read please share it by using one of the buttons below and check out other posts in this blog.  I don’t want you to miss out on future posts so please follow me on Twitter @Eurodude23.  If you haven’t done it already, please like my Facebook fan page by clicking here!  And if you like the content you have read, and are looking for a content writer for your team please go to www.contentfarm.org for details. See you next time!