I’m on the road with the StartupBus Europe trip to LeWeb. When you left us yesterday, the ‘buspreneurs’ were busy forming teams around the ideas they had pitched.
As we sped down the autobahns of north Germany, the product ideas were honed and many ideas were sketched out on paper, and even on the bus’ windows.
Following a short ferry trip to Denmark, we rolled into Copenhagen – one of Europe’s most exciting startup cities. Our host for the evening was Startup Bootcamp, where the 2011 group of startups left last week but things are far from quiet as the accelerator franchise plans for a busy 2012 around Europe.
The StartupBus Europe teams pitched their initial concepts:
LocaFoo: For iPhone and Android, this location-based game will see you picking up virtual items around you to attack and defend against your friends. Brands will be encouraged to get involved. Perhaps you could throw a Starbucks coffee or a McDonalds hamburger at your opponents.The app will have Foursquare and Facebook integration.
BUT: Will brands want their products used as weapons?
Buybone (working title): Imagine a version of eBay where you list your needs and customers bid to sell your their products. Whether the seller is down the road or on the other side of the world, this will be a safe way of buying without being ripped off, with Buybone acting as an escrow service.
BUT: Will the team have their wireframes ready by the time we get to Berlin in a few hours time?
YoBro: – This is instant mobile group audio chat for shared interests. The service links people with shared interests. Type in an interest and the app will link you with others who have entered the same text. A natural link here is to gather around Twitter trending topics. To prevent rooms getting too noisy, each will be limited in size before a new room is automatically generated.
BUT: Do people want to group audio chat with strangers? And where’s the money?
Wander: – Trips and travel are fun, and planning should be too – that’s the premise behind Wander. It will allow you to create a personal travel guide. It will be available when mobile, with timeline and map for exploring. It will emphasise spontaneity – as you explore a location, it will tell you when a point of interest you want to visit is nearby. There will be an offline mode for when you don’t have access to mobile data.
BUT: Who is the specific target market?
Invoi: – The aim here is to disrupt voicemail, by making it interactive. The team is building a service that uses voice recognition, translating voicemail to tasks and events. The user will be able to set conditions – so, for example, when certain words are said in voicemail messages, you can get the service to call someone else, make a to-do list and more.
BUT: Can the team get a working demo completed in time?
After a short sleep in a Copenhagen hostel, we’re on the road again, bound for Berlin. After a brief stop there we’ll be moving again as we head for today’s final destination of Zurich. We’ll keep you posted on the teams’ progress as we make our way towards our ultimate destination in Paris tomorrow evening.
In the meantime, you can invest virtual cash in your favourite idea on the StartupBus Stock Exchange game. You can also join us in Berlin at an event this afternoon. Click here for more details.
I remember the '90s like they were yesterday. Websites such as Amazon and eBay were well on their way to transforming commerce as we know it, and even flash-in-the-pan startups were making their founders into overnight millionaires. But while the money piled up for other people, I quietly nurtured a vision of my own: Craigslist, a revolutionary online classifieds site that allows people who wish to buy or sell goods and services online to be raped or murdered by total strangers.
Nobody, absolutely nobody, thought my idea for changing the way unsuspecting victims were entrapped into life-threatening encounters with sociopaths had a chance. Nobody except me, that is.
Those initial meetings with venture capitalists were some of the most humiliating experiences of my life. I'll never forget the way they just fidgeted as I explained my plan for a virtual bulletin board where a person looking for a summer sublet could be beaten to death with a crowbar or someone in search of a running partner could, with just a click of the mouse, find another person planning to kill and eat them. Everywhere I turned, there was someone else telling me how crazy I was. Even my parents, who had always been supportive, told me I was absolutely out of my mind.
And at first it seemed they were right. When the site went live in 1995, the traffic was robust, and word of mouth was driving up the visits every week. Sure, people found writing groups and good homes for their pets—but where was the deceit and resulting brutality? Every day I checked the papers for a story about someone who had been lured into a soundproof torture chamber with the promise of a $100 like-new mountain bike. Every day, I was disappointed.
Maybe I needed to tweak the design? Maybe I needed to promote myself better? What was I missing?
I started to panic. I even considered hiring someone to take out an ad and then forcibly sodomize the first person who responded to it, just to prime the pump. I held back, however, because that kind of unethical behavior always comes back to haunt you. And, fortunately, my restraint was rewarded.
Ever so slowly, people started using the site the way I had always intended. Right before my eyes, the depraved and violent were going online and finding Craigslist. Half the ads placed in the Volunteering section were put there by sex offenders, while at least a third of the people who arrived for jobs they found in the Gigs section promptly had their legs broken. Maybe most gratifying was the uptick in mayhem in the Casual Encounters section, which had been surprisingly sluggish. Suddenly, it seemed like every other person showed up for his no-strings blow job with a switchblade. I knew I'd reached a tipping point. Only one thing was missing now—one thing I really needed to push Craigslist over the top.
A corpse.
Finally, almost two years after I launched the site, a man who had strangled his tennis instructor and dumped chunks of her dismembered body in a creek near his home told police that he had met his victim through Craigslist—through my site! Through my little site! I almost cried. It took awhile, but my dream had become a reality. Before long, anyone who wanted to bathe in the guts of an innocent knew all he needed was a fake ad for an Ultimate Frisbee team and my URL.
And look at Craigslist now. Here in 2011, it's hard to imagine slaughtering someone without it. Letters pour in by the sackful from people thanking me for helping them find just the right travel buddy to decapitate or math tutor to give to their imbecile cousin to rape. I'm not the type to gloat, but maybe I'll let myself say this just once:
I told you so.
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