Official Blog

It’s time again for Echtzeit Berlin at our zanox Campus: The German start-ups network Deutsche Startups is once more organising Echtzeit Berlin, a get-together for young and successful start-up founders, business angels and investors. The upcoming edition of Echtzeit Berlin on Wednesday, 27 May 2009, will deal with the topic „Mobile“ and includes two expert speeches by Stefan Bielau of the mobile TV platform dailyme.tv and Clemens Kabel of IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft. As usual, there’s a lot of time for networking afterwards. The last Echtzeit Berlin in February 2009 hosted more than 170 guests.

Everybody who is interested to take on a sponsorship for Echtzeit Berlin can easily get in contact with Deutsche Startups here. That’s also where you can get more information on how to sign-up for the event. Looking forward to seeing you at our Berlin zanox  Campus soon!

Our colleagues, who went to attend the Plug & Play Expo San Francisco, just sent over some pics – despite of a massive jetlag, especially the Berlin crowd But it was definitely worth some wakeful nights: They had great fun during the event, and received a lot of positive feedback on our new zanox Campus in Silicon Valley, which will be opened in June. More pics and also some videos are to follow shortly. For now, have fun checking out the Plug & Play impressions:

Following the great success of our Berlin-based zanox Campus, we now decided to open a second Campus in the heart of Silicon Valley! It will serve as a new open meeting point for publishers, start-up businesses and developers. Designed as a Think Tank for modern web-based business models, projects and partners in Silicon Valley, we created it to support new online talents. We would also like to use both Campuses, Berlin and Silicon Valley, as an open exchange space for all our partners across the US and Europe.

With our first US-based zanox Campus, we would like to invite the creative community in Silicon Valley to help us promote and pursue innovation within our industry. In return, we will offer access to our affiliate network’s infrastructure, our partners and last but not least attractive investment opportunities for the most promising business models. This is where our just recently launched  $2 Million zanox Application Store Contest comes in.

If you are interested in learning more, just drop by from 5 pm onwards today at the Plug & Play TechCenter in San Francisco: Our CEO Thomas Hessler will officially announce the new zanox Campus during the cocktail reception. Some first pics and impressions are to follow shortly! Hope to see you in the Valley soon!

The San Francisco Plug & Play Expo introduces “the best of the breed”: Executives, entrepreneurs, key venture capitalists and angel investors will come together to get insights into the lastest products and offerings of the internet, media, software or mobile industry. Of course we will make our way to Valley on 7 May to attend the event, sessions and presentations. We are also one of the Plug & Play sponsors, so we’ll be hosting the fun part: the cocktail reception! If you want to come along, meet us and enjoy a cocktail or two, drop by from 5 pm onwards at the Plug & Play TechCenter in San Francisco. Our CEO Thomas Hessler will give a brief speech and will let you know a little more about our just recently launched $2 Million zanox Application Store Contest for start-up businesses and developers.

We’d be happy to see you at the Plug & Play TechCenter. Check out the agenda and let us know if you want to join the party! Looking forward to seeing you in the Valley!

The a4uexpo in Amsterdam has just kicked-off! It’s one of the most promising European conferences on Affiliate Marketing, which we support as a Silver Sponsor. The educational and networking event takes place on 28 and 29 April at the RAI Congress Centre in Amsterdam and we are there with an international team! If you want to stop by, you can find us at booth #19.

Denis Maibaum, our Global Product Manager, will hold a session on “Innovative AdMedia Design with Google Gadgets” on day 2, 29 April, 9:30 to 10:30, in room B-B1. His session will inspire advertisers, agencies and affiliates to create better and more creative admedia using innovative technology and new concepts. You will learn how to generate global traffic with Google’s new ad format Gadget Ads, and be presented a wide number of live examples, best-practise gadgets we exclusively created for Fleurop and some interesting business models for affiliates.

Also, Robert Schneider, our Head of Global Publisher Sales, will join Shopzilla for the panel “XML and Data Feeds – Standardisation and Implemtation for Success” on day 1, 28 April, 16:30 to 17:30 in room  C–D. In this session you will learn how affiliates are using feeds in affiliate marketing and what you must do as a merchant to construct your feeds in a standardised way that makes them attractive. You’ll also learn how you, as an affiliate, can use the raw data to construct value, add websites, widgets and applications.

Looking forward to seeing many of you in Amsterdam!

UPDATE: For all of you who didn’t have a chance to attend Robert’s and Denis’s sessions, we are happy to provide you with the presentations both of them they held during the event. Here is Robert’s presentation on XML and Data Feeds:

We had a great time at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, met many interesting people and learned quite a lot from the conference. Giving you a recap of all the sessions we attended would probably fill a whole book, so we just wanted to point you to the site where most of the speakers share their presentations for all those who didn’t have a chance to be there. We also took some pictures of the zanox team, our booth and a little San Francisco sightseeing tour. Check them out here:

I attended several sessions and found the following ones most valuable: Ryan Sarver talked about  “W3C Geolocation API – Adding ‘Where’ to Web Applications“and showed us how important location information will be for the future developments of apps. In “Best Practices in Social Media Integration for Web Publishers and Content Providers” Bob Buch, VP of business development for Digg,  pointed out the essential ingredients for social media integration. Tara Hunt explained how to have a good community presence during her session “The Whuffie Factor:  The 5 keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities” and I learned a lot from Jyri Engestrom, talking about  “Building Sites Around Social Objects”. All in all, it was a great event and we are already looking forward to next year!

The Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco holds a lot of intriguing sessions for the zanox team to attend. I picked some great ones for myself and wanted to give you a little update on what I have been experiencing so far:

Day one started off with a session called “What’s coming for HTML developments”, including loads of interesting examples and tools for web developers. Another session I found really great was “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries: He talked about how to identify a profitable business model faster and cheaper than the competitors, exploring the consumer’s wants and needs as well as about how to build a company-wide culture of decision-making.

Day two at the Web 2.0 Expo started off with the session “CRM with Facebook” by Clara Shih, the founder of  Faceforce, which integrates Salesforce CRM with Facebook. It’s the first social enterprise mash-up, which will also be valuable in regard to Twitter. Clara walked us through the thinking behind Faceforce, future development plans, and how the social networking phenomenon at large will fundamentally change how business software is developed, deployed, and used.

I also attended the sessions “Enterprise 2.0” by Aron Kim and “It’s the people, stupid” by Deborah Schulz. Deborah talked about web products for connected consumers and put emphasise on helping users to participate, instead of interupting them. I particularly liked this outcome of the session: “Love you give will come back to you”. More interesting sessions and update to follow shortly! Photos as well of course, just managed to capture a snaptshot with my phone, hope you like it. And by the way, if you want to stop by to meet the zanox team, our booth is #435! Lookign forward to seeing you there!

If you happen to be in San Francisco the next few days, come and visit us at the Web 2.0 Expo! The leading US internet event showcases the latest Web 2.0 business models, development paradigms and design strategies for the builders of the next-generation Web. We will be officially kicking off our $2 Million zanox Application Store Contest tomorrow and also tell you a little more about our zanox Application Store which is to launch very soon! So if you have a business idea and are looking for investment, visit us at booth #435 and learn more about our $2 Million zanox Application Store Contest!

Wow, 250 guests at zanox Gap Campus! Last night was one of the biggest events we have hosted at our Berlin Headquarters so far – and it was definitely one of the most exciting ones. The 1 Million zanox Web Services Contest Award Ceremony attracted the who-is-who of the German internet scene, start-up founders, investors and bloggers.  The evening was themed “Internet Republic Germany – entrepreneurs and politicians focus on the internet as a critical success factor” and also hosted the leader of the German liberal party, Guido Westerwelle, as a guest speaker. Check out the pictures – a best-of video will follow shortly!

Starting at 6:30pm tonight, there will be the 1 Million zanox Web Services Contest Award Ceremony held at our zanox GAP Campus. For all of you who can’t be there, we will live-stream the event here on our blog. The evening will be themed “Internet Republic Germany – entrepreneurs and politicians focus on the internet as a critical success factor” and will also host the leader of the German liberal party, Guido Westerwelle, as a guest speaker. The live-stream will start at 6:30pm, the event kicks-off at 6:45pm. Celebrate and network together with the contest winner Webtrekk at the zanox GAP Campus live here:

For our non-German speakers: Please note that the event and the stream will be in German, so that might be a good opportunity to practise you German language skills

Here is what the zanox people have been waiting for since everybody returned to their home offices again after a great Aspen weekend in Poland: The Best of Aspen 2009 video, featuring the zanox teams from Berlin, Madrid, Milan, London, New York, Warszawa, Amsterdam, Paris, Stockholm, Shanghai and our eprofessional colleagues from Hamburg. Check it out and enjoy!

Celebrate with us and Webtrekk, the winner of our 1 Mio Euro zanox Web Services Contest: On 24 March, we will have a great final party at zanox GAP Campus. Read more about the contest, the event and how to sign up for it on our Web Services Blog. Looking forward to seeing you there!

The GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is one of the most inportant events for the global mobile industry. We were keen to learn what the latest trends are and what industry expert think. And as expected, they all agreed on one key direction: The internet turns mobile! This is mostly due to the iPhone’s great success and how its technology changed the mobile internet world and its overall concept. Following the iPhone App Store’s best practise, companies such as blackberry, Nokia, Google Android, O2 or Microsoft announced their own coming-soon versions of an application store during the congress.  Another outcome of the Barcelona event was that the industry finally recognised the power of openAPIs and is more than keen on using it as a basis for third-party developments of the global development community.

We believe that the mobile marketing potential will massively grow in importance and volume in the very near future. There are more than three billion mobile phones all around the world already and the number will increase even more, that’s for sure. Together with most advanced mobile phones also the applications and the features provided are increasing.  For the first time, more advanced features are permitting to integrate pure web based applications with the mobile world allowing value added services not imaginable before. We are now really active in finding mobile internet monetisation opportunities using for example our Web Services infrastructure and some new great project we are currently working on.

Visit us at booth# T1.01 at the Webciety area of CeBIT starting today till 8th March 2009.
Join our CEO Thomas Hessler for the panel on ‘Advertising 2.0’ on 4th March 2009, 13:50-14:40, Webciety Forum and learn more about the future of online advertising.

We are looking forward to seeing you in Hannover!

UPDATE: And for those of you who didn’t have a chance to attend the panel discussion, you can watch the full stream here:

Just one more week to go: Next Thursday, 19 February, the Live Shopping Days Berlin will take place at zanox GAP Campus. It’s the biggest and most important event of its kind – organised by Exciting Commerce, the Live Shopping Days spread from Hamburg and Munich right to the German capital. More than 100 guests, founders, start-ups as well as e-commerce business experts  will talk about market perspectives and live shopping strategies or take part in panel discussions and expert interviews. There are only a few tickets left, so if you want to join the crowd, make sure to get your ticket soon.

The zanox GAP Campus at our Berlin Headquarter was quite packed last night: 170 guests came to attend the first Echtzeit Berlin event in 2009. Deutsche Startups, the German start-ups network organising a total of four business get-togethers at zanox GAP Campus this year, had invited start-up founders, business angels, potential investors and two guest speakers to discuss the topic „External Funding vs. Bootstrapping“. If you didn’t have the chance to attend Echtzeit Berlin or were too busy having canapés while the speeches were going on, you can read the full transcripts  of Andreas Haug’s  and Sebastian Fiebiger’s speeches here (German). Check out also the image gallery at deutsche-startups.de or some of our pics on Flickr:

zanox France took part in one of the most important French tradeshows this week – as a silver sponsor and speaker: The Forum E-Marketing, which took place on January 27 and 28 at the Palais des Congrès in Paris. Hundreds of experts were present to fill all the expectations of the 15.000 visitors on digital marketing, during two days of meetings and exchanges. With 200 exhibitors, 200 free conferences and eight training sessions, the Forum E-Marketing was a great opportunity for zanox France to show its own expertise: Especially the conference “Affiliation: an anti-crisis weapon”, co-animated by Guillaume Gélis and Nicolas Nauche, was a huge success for us. And for those of you who missed the conference, you can read a brief recap here (in French).

We are more than happy to announce that we’ll support the most promising European conference for Affiliate Marketing in 2009: the a4uexpo Europe. The educational and networking event will take place on 28 and 29 April at the RAI Congress Centre in Amsterdam and we’ll be there with an international team! We are very much looking forward to a conference agenda with more than 50 industry experts, workshops, panels and Q&A sessions. Of course you can also meet us at the a4uexpo Exhibition, which is an essential part of the event. We will keep you up-to-date on our agenda for Amsterdam and hope to see you there!

Hi there, start-up founders, business angels and potential investors! As promised in our earlier blog post, we keep you up-to-date on the first Echtzeit Berlin event in 2009: Deutsche Startups, the German start-ups network who is organising a total of four business get-togethers at zanox GAP Campus this year, has announced the speakers for their kick-off event on Wednesday, February 4:  Andreas Haug of eVenture Capital Partners and Sebastian Fiebiger, Director of  Softclick and Cynomic Internet, will discuss the topic „External Funding vs. Bootstrapping“ from two different perspectives.

If you don’t want to miss out the first Echtzeit Berlin, you should sign up for the event here. You can also check who else will be there and get in touch with everybody. If you would like to support Deutsche Startups as a sponsor, you can still do so by dropping them an e-mail here. And all of our German-speakers can get some more information on the event right on their blog.

Hope to see you at zanox GAP Campus soon!

Now that it’s time to think about what 2009 might bring you and what exciting challenges you want to take on next year, we would like to draw your attention to an exclusive networking event which will take place at  zanox GAP Campus early next year: The German start-ups network Deutsche Startups is organising Echtzeit Berlin, a get-together for young and successful start-up founders, business angels and investors. On Wednesday, February 4 2009, Echtzeit Berlin will kick-off a whole series of networking events at the zanox HQ in Berlin. The first out of four get-togethers will deal with the topic „External Funding vs. Bootstrapping“ and includes two expert speeches as well as a networking part. The first Echtzeit Berlin in September 2008 hosted more than 130 guests and of course we hope that even more will take part in the 2009 events.

And everybody who is interested to take on a sponsorship for Echtzeit Berlin can easily get in contact with Deutsche Startups here. You can also find some more information on the event here (German only). We will keep you up to date on how to rsvp for this event from January onwards and on the follow-up get-togethers at zanox GAP Campus soon!