Advance Conference – International Web and StartUp Conference in Cologne - September 19 & 20, 2011, Cologne (Germany)

It is all about the money and its price: Welcome to ADVANCE Pitching Day 2012, an event about raising capital for startups from the digital economy. Taking place November 22nd at the Skulpturenpark  in Cologne, this  event will feature closed and open pitches by startups, investor´s pitches, information about different forms of financing, informal networking …

Take 80 web developers & designers, brillant ideas pitched in a raw location and 48 hours of mere time. Mix ´em all up, stir well and let yourself draw into pure code: Welcome to ADVANCE HACKATHON. From April 27 to 29 this coding event will feature the finest coders of North Rhine-Westphalia and beyond, hitting …

After the awesome first edition of our conference-baby ADVANCE, we decided to have spin-off events throughout the year to keep the dialogue with our European community going and learn more about the challenges that founders face in Germany. So here we go: We are excited to announce the first stand-alone ADVANCE Founderleaks session!

One of the most intriguing sessions at this year’s ADVANCE was Prof. Dr. Worbel‘s keynote about “The next big thing”.  As director of the renown Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS), Wrobel gave an overview of their latest research with regards to possible market impacts, outlining seven major trends that will shape …

Wow, what can we say? First of all, thank you to all participants, startups, investors, geeks, speakers and sponsors of ADVANCE11. You made this a f***ing great conference (as Morten would put it). And you are the reason why we hosted ADVANCE and would love to do it again. Almost 500 participants from 15 countries …

In his workshop Kai Thierhoff, Founder and CEO of Thierhoff Consulting, presented some key advices concerning venture capital. His first advice was „Bootstrap as long as you can!“ Like this a startup can stay independend while still developing its basis. Only if a startup wants to scale up quickly, the founders should look for an …

After the panelists Patrick Meisberger (T-Venture), Markus Fuhrmann (Team Europe), Lars Hinrichs (HackFwd), and Isaac Wolkerstorfer (6 Wunderkinder) had introduced themselves, host Mike Butcher (TechCrunch Europe) got the discussion going on the pros and cons of “cloning” successful business models, and kept it lively by playing the devil’s advocate. Not unexpectedly, opinions were divided, even sharply drawn at times, between what …

While entrepreneurship, according to Fadi Bishara (blackbox), is exploding as less and less resources are needed and more and more markets become accessible around the globe, the rate of success is very low: 9 out of 10 startups fail. Searching for a scalable way through community building, mentoring, and empirical research to accelerate startups globally, they came up with what …

“Part of the business of the Fraunhofer Institute is to try to look into the future,” opened Prof. Dr. Stefan Wrobel (Fraunhofer IAIS) his presentation, but it is focused on trends that reach beyond “fleeting technology.” Seven such trends, “The Big Seven,” he introduced to the audience. These comprised input and output technologies, data models and the semantic web, mobility …