„In the end of the 90s, every good startup had Sun servers, but throughout the years Sun lost touch with startups and was said to be proprietary, slow and expensive“, says Christian Mueller, Community Manager Startups of the Sun Startup Essentials Program. In order to get back in contact with startups, relearn their needs and target the market better, Sun Microsystems set up the Startup Essentials Program: „The program started in the US about two years ago and has now been rolled out in 26 countries worldwide“, explains Christian, who attracted 140 members in Germany in 2008. The Start Up Camp Cologne, co-organized by Sun Microsystems, boosted the program's membership in Germany up to 230. Christian is positive that they’ll have around 400 German members by the end of 2009.
Members of the Sun Startup Essential Program get free IT consulting - not only with regard to Sun technology ;) On top of that, Sun offers funding for marketing activities, good hardware discount as well as flexible hosting partners with good service. The program is for free, but you have to meet some conditions: Your company has to be younger than six years with less than 150 employees. You also need to have a real address or a website for „a short sanity check“. For more details, visit Sun’s website at http://de.sun.com/startupessentials/ there’s even a twitter account with additional information http://twitter.com/Sun4Startups Free members sweater are offered for the next 100 registrations, so go for it!
More interviews from Start Up Camp Cologne will follow in the days to come
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Sonntagmorgen.com, founded by the two passionate coffee drinkers Till Achinger and Tamer El-Hawari, is all about mass customized coffee: „We take the magic out of making coffee blends by providing our customers with the possibility of creating their own blend. They can mix Single Origins from all over the world“, explains Till and adds „it’s not such a big secret as the marketing of the big roasteries are trying to tell you. If you mix up two or three Single Origins you get a nice blend that perfectly matches your taste.“
Sonntagmorgen coffee is four times more expensive than the coffee you buy at the supermarket. „You have to consider the high quality we provide. We ensure the highest quality of green coffee beans with a traditional longsome roasting process“, says Till. The biggest challenge for Sonntagmorgen is to get people to taste their coffee: „We cooperate with DHL to deliver test packages. Every new customer of DHL’s automated post office ‚packstation’ gets a welcome package with Sonntagmorgen coffee so that they can convince themselves of our quality. Our experience it that once you tried Sonntagmorgen you will stick to it.“
With some thousands of users so far, Sonntagmorgen wants to go beyond mass customizing in 2009. Till finds mass customizing to be „a nice marketing joke“, but „way too complicated for everyday use“. He explains that they „take the data collected from mass customizing to figure out our customers’ favorite blends. We will then offer those blends as a standard product at a reasonable price.“ There are different coffee tastes in different nations, so internationalization is a problem in the coffee market according to Till: „With regard to roasting there are pretty different tastes i.e. in Austria, Germany and the Netherlands. We still want to go international but there are some challenges to overcome...“ Since coffee is said to accelerate the thought process, maybe over a cup of it those challenges can be tackled more easily...
More interviews from Start Up Camp Cologne can be found
@ www.tiburon-tv.com
CaptchaAd.com - co-founded by Alexander Kraft - is the „Champ of the Camp“, the winner of the Start Up Camp’s startup competition. Alexander explains: „CaptchaAd is the first provider of captchas combined with online advertising. Our product substitutes captchas on websites with captcha ads, i.e. in certain processes like commenting articles in blogs or registrations where captchas are often used.“ He adds: „Everyone who uses captchas could be our customer, but blogs are one of our main target groups.“
Three founders of CaptchaAd are ex-students from the University of Applied Sciences Cologne, the fourth founder is an IT expert. The company is based in Bonn, and online only since last week. According to Alexander, they are self-financed but looking for investors. So the goals for 2009 are obvious: „Gain money, users and websites.“
More interviews from Start Up Camp Cologne can be found on our website www.tiburon-tv.com
YIID stands for "your internet id"and it's an identity hub combined with social search, realised through Marco Ripanti. More specifically it is an aggregator for identities and social activities. YIID seems to be a combination of friendfeed and 123people. You can set up your own profile page, displaying all your different web-identities and the content you produce at typical web2.0-sites. Marco believes in the open web, supporting open standards like openID. That way you can bring in all your content, but also take them out again.
Marco is looking for partners who generate any kind of user generated content, pushing it in a new dimension and through that generating more attention and user.
YIID emerged out of the former project communipedia, which was supposed to be some sort of meta-community or community search engine. Behind YIID stands Marcos company ekaabo, which develops special interest communities.
The interview was taken at the SUN Ctartup Camp in Cologne, more interviews of that event you can find here.