Lars Hinrichs is Back on the Block with HackFwd

There hasn’t been much noise about Lars Hinrichs after he resigned as Xing CEO in early 2009 and subsequently sold his shares to Burda. But now he appears back on the European start-up scene with his new venture aptly named HackFwd.
At HackFwd, Lars takes the role of Executive Geek. That reminds me of the old days at Böttcher Hinrichs where Lars also was the Chief Geeking Officer, kind of. Böttcher Hinrichs went bust in 2001, but this experience somehow laid the foundation for what later became Xing. Founded in 2003, Xing went public in 2006, a few days before Lars turned 30.
HackFwd provides pre-seed financing and all kind of support to geek founders with original, consumer-focused ideas. In exchange, HackFwd gets 27 per cent of the company. As of today, HackFwd lists four start-ups on its website, with TheDeadline amongst them (we already mentioned TheDeadline). According to Lars, the mission of his new company is simple:

Free Europe’s best developers from their day jobs to help them build their own game-changing companies.

But even if this sounds much like the incubator idea, the company sees itself as investor rather than incubator. The basic idea is summarised in this neat video:

Besides Lars, three other investors serve on the board: Marco Börries of StarOffice, StarMoney and Yahoo fame, Stefan Richter, the founder of freiheit.com, and Jean-Paul Schmetz, the former CTO and CEO of Burda Digital.

First Steps with TheDeadline Somewhat Mixed

Last week at Google I/O, a tiny but interesting start-up from Hamburg debuted. It’s called TheDeadline and has something to do with task management and project management. I took some time today to try it out, and my first impressions are somewhat mixed.
First of all, I wasn’t able to login with one of my Google Apps accounts. This may be my fault, but TheDeadline isn’t very verbose on this. Second, I didn’t see the promised integration with Google Contacts and Google Calendar. This may be related to the first problem.
Third, the interface looks geeky and somewhat clumsy. This may stem from TheDeadline’s origin at Hamburg-based IT service provider freiheit.com and also be the handwriting of Lars Hinrichs who recently invested in TheDeadline. But this may change over time, as Lars has already proven with Xing that he founded in 2003. Xing went public in 2006 and was later sold to Burda.
I’ve quickly hacked in some to-dos and particulary liked the tagging functionality. Didn’t see anything of the touted artificial intelligence yet, but that remains to be seem. TheDeadline definitely made it to my watchlist.

Very High Performance Websites: The Next Competitive Advantage

These are the slides of a talk Malte Ubl gave at next10 last week. As the title of his talk makes pretty clear, he spoke about the competitive advantage of very (and he meant: really) high performance websites. And he showed some drastic examples like the comparison of Zalando and mirapodo. The former is a Samwer Brothers venture, the latter was launched by SinnerSchrader on behalf of the Otto Group.
Malte’s talk was livestreamed by zaplive.tv, the stream is archived and can be viewed. A polished version of the video will be released on sevenload soon.

WePad or iPad, That is the Question next10 will Answer

Things are really heating up in the fight between Goliath and David that the battle between Neofonie’s WePad and Apple’s iPad turns out to be, at least in Germany. This week, the WePad was presented for the second time to journalists in Berlin. And this time, things obviously went better than at first try.

While the WePad won’t be available before August, pre-orders started this week on Amazon, thus beating the iPad that still isn’t available in Germany, but can be pre-ordered starting May 10, scheduled to be delivered by the end of May. The German publishing industry hails the WePad as the Holy Grail that will save their struggling business models.
But the public in general seems to be less optimistic: When Internet World Business asked their readers wether the WePad has a chance to compete with Apple’s iPad, the majority answered „No“. There weren’t too many votes, but the trend is still clear. A prophet hath no honour in his own country.
At next10 which kicks off in just 12 days, Neofonie’s CEO Helmut Hoffer von Ankershoffen will present the WePad to the audience. So in case you want to grasp what all this fuzz is about and didn’t grab your ticket yet, you might want to register now.
But if your choice is clear and you want an iPad, then take your chance to win one: Register for next10 and win an iPad right now! Every tenth person registering for a two day ticket using the Promotional Code next10iPad will be presented with one of five iPads. In addition you even save 20% on the ticket price.
That doesn’t sound bad, does it? And all you’ve got to do is get your discounted Regular Ticket (€ 790+Fee+VAT) for both conference days until May 5th. Afterwards keep your fingers crossed: Maybe you’ll be the lucky 10th, 20th, 30th, 40th or 50th, hence lucky iPad winner!
For all those not winning the iPads, don’t worry, you won’t go away empty-handed. With your ticket you’re securing yourself a seat in the talks of the digital world’s quality speakers: Join us in celebrating Dennis Crowley, the man behind Foursquare, and Louis Rossetto, with his techie chocolate TCHO.
You definitely shouldn’t miss out on Pablos Holman who was engaged in developing the smallest computer in the world, and Peter Lovatt alias Dr Dance. He’ll make you move your feet. A highlight for sure will be John Rogers, Game Changer in the automotive industry with Local Motors.
Check out the full list of speakers and the programme right now. And keep in mind to register and win your iPad with the Code next10iPad. Good luck!

ECCO und der Spagat zwischen Marke und E-Commerce

Wie geht E-Commerce und Marke zusammen? Das zeigt, ganz unbescheiden, unsere Arbeit für den dänischen Schuhhersteller ECCO. Die jüngste Ausgabe der WEAVE befasst sich damit in aller Ausführlichkeit.
Marja Annecke (Creative Director, u. li.), Thomas Jacob (Software Architect) und Oliver Annen (User Experience) standen WEAVE-Redakteurin Lena Knake Rede und Antwort zu Konzeption, Design und Technologie hinter ECCO.com. In einem Gastbeitrag erläutert Thomas Jacob zudem, wie der Store Locator funktioniert und wie die technische Basis für den internationalen Onlineshop aussieht, das hauseigene Commerce Framework.

SinnerSchrader arbeitet seit 2006 für ECCO, im Sommer 2007 ging der erste Relaunch von ECCO.com an den Start. Die Infrastruktur für den internationalen E-Commerce war damals bereits gelegt, auch wenn die ersten Onlineshops (in UK und den Niederlanden) erst später ausgerollt wurden. Jüngster Akt der Zusammenarbeit ist die Ende vergangener Woche runderneuerte Produktdetailseite (Beispiel siehe unten), die einerseits möglichst gut verkaufen und gleichzeitig in den Ländern ohne Onlineshop die Marke ECCO widerspiegeln und ein emotionales Markenerlebnis abbilden soll.