SIME Amsterdam – 2 days to go!

With just 2 days to go for SIME Amsterdam at Beurs van Berlage, we are very excited to announce 4 master classes / workshops for you to choose from during the day. Apart from the main stage program which is a combination of panels, keynotes, fireside chats and interviews / Q&A with the audience, we also have 4 separate workshop tracks for you to get a deeper understanding of the topics of your choice. These 4 workshops will be held from 1300-1350 and from 1700 – 1750 at the main stage and choir each. The tracks are:

At 1300:

a) MASTER CLASS 1 @MAIN STAGE: MOBILE SELLS OR DOES IT?

b) MASTER CLASS 2 @CHOIR ROOM: IS ONLINE BOOKING TURNING THE WEB INTO AN EBAY OF PEOPLE?

At 1700:

a) MASTER CLASS 3 @MAIN STAGE: THE FUTURE OF PERFORMANCE MARKETING

b) MASTER CLASS 4 @CHOIR ROOM: HOW TO WIN IN “INNOVATION AWARDS 2012

You can read the detailed agenda and speakers per session

Apart from the workshops, we also have shuffled around the timing a little bit to make sure we get sufficient coffee, food inbetween and have an opportunity to enjoy the sun. We have added some more speakers to the roster. Overall we believe its going to be a great day of inspiration, knowledge and lot of business opportunities. And just as a caveat, we take having fun seriously too!

See you on May 25th.

SIME 2011 – Start of a new web journey

Friends, as you might have noticed we just launched a newly designed web. And its a start of a new web journey as we try to add a lot more interesting ways for you to interact, suggest speakers, be up to date with the news and information from the SIME stable. SIME this year goes to more cities with Vienna already held on April 28th, Amsterdam coming up on May 25th, Barcelona on June 16th and Stockholm on November 15-16th.

So take the site for a spin and let us know your comments.

SIME Vienna Countdown – Days to go : 1

Friends, the big day is tomorrow at SIME Vienna and we are extremely excited!

The updated agenda and speaker info is all here

Some important information for your attention:

1. Start Time: The event starts at 0900. Please make sure you are at our location around 0815 in the morning with your printed ticket from amiando as it will get crowded closer to the 0900 clock mark. There is always coffee and wifi, so that should keep you all warm and fuzzy inside even if you come early.
2. Location for the event is at Ottakringer Braueri.. More info and directions here
3. Interaction during the day — we have created various digital touch points for you:
   1. Our Live Channel powered by Twingly .. Please add in your tweets with #sime11 and #vienna
   2. Our Facebook Page
   3. Our twitter list for SIME Vienna
   4. Live Blogging and Twittering during the event? You can then add yourself to the list here
   5. Capture the SIME moments — by downloading the LiveShare App — and snapping photos within the SIME Vienna Stream. Info here
   6. Although SIME was started in Sweden, we aren’t the regular shy Swedes. So don’t be afraid if you find paparazzi following you for photos and video interviews.

That’s about it! Have fun .. And remember, great people great conference. Lets rock the town tomorrow!

SIME Amsterdam – First Preview of Speakers, Location and Dates Confimed

Friends, SIME Amsterdam is happening! May 25th at a very cool location in Amsterdam, we are very excited to keep the SIME International juggernaut rolling as we aim to take SIME to more cities this year.

SIME Amsterdam will be a 1 day SIME with the best of SIME, bringing together great speakers, a good mix of panelists and workshop experts to teach and learn about the trends, movements and growth of today’s digital landscape. As we get more speakers into our roster, here is the list of the first 5 speakers who have confirmed.

The location is the famous Beurs van Berlage.

We will soon open the registration / invitation system for you to apply.

Stay tuned for continuous updates.

	Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon The Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Amazon.com in Seattle, Washington. In charge of driving technology innovation within the company, Vogels is the only executive apart from Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos to speak publicly on behalf of Amazon.com.
	Sara Öhrvall, Bonnier’s dynamic R&D director Sara Öhrvall is responsible for R&D and new technology initiatives within Bonnier, one of the larger media outfits in the world, based out of Sweden. She is the architect of Bonnier Corp.’s digital magazine development and its point person for Apple in the development of their magazines for the iPad.She has previously worked at Volvo Cars, where she was responsible for concept development of jeep hybrids, sports cars and eco-friendly cars. Other experiences include Managing Director/partner of brand agency D.
	Stefan Glänzer, Serial Entrepreneur, Angel Investor Stefan Glänzer, Executive Chairman and first investor of Last.fm until it got sold to CBS in 2007 for USD 280M, is one of the most active business angels in Europe’s digital space. Currently he acts as Executive Chairman at the research community Mendeley.com and at RjDj.me Stefan is a serial entrepreneur since he left university: in 1998 he founded Ricardo.de, Germany’s biggest online-auction company, which he took to an IPO at Neuer Markt in 1999. The company merged to QXLricardo in 2000 before got sold to Nasper in 2007, for USD 1.8 Billion. Stefan currently holds investments in 25-plus companies. Since the end of 2000 he and his family enjoy living in London.
	Jake Hsu, CEO, Symbio Mr. Hsu served as President, COO and CMO, having led Symbio Group’s North American and Japan operations. Before joining Symbio Group, he was CEO of Trilogica Technologies, a data aggregation software company, and CEO of Epitome Software, an IT services company focused on the financial sector. He began his career as an investment banker focused on mergers & acquisitions at Fox-Pitt, Kelton.
	Joris van Oers, CEO De Telefoongids Joris Van Oers has extensive sales experience, with over 15 years at KPN. Most recently he held the position of Managing Director Corporate Solutions at KPN’s Business Market division and temporary Managing Director Sympac at KPN Mobile International. Prior to this he held various positions within the KPN Sales organisation for the corporate market.

SIME Speaker and Friend Edward Shenderovich organizes LINT Conference in Moscow on May 21 – 23

If you are in Moscow or need an excuse to go there, we have a perfect one for you.

LINT Conference, put together by one of SIME’s speakers Edward Shenderovich of Kite Ventures is planned for May 21 – 23 featuring over 60 speakers bringing together some of the leading minds in finance, science, art, politics, social organizations for a interactive discussion on how various aspects of modern life are affected and inter twined with technology. LINT which stands for Life in Technology facilitates a multidisciplinary dialogue on the effects of technology, taking into account diverse cultural heritage of its participants. The LINT folks expect over 600 people from at least 20 countries and 200 organizations to attend the event, where all sessions of the conference will be broadcasted live in English and Russian.

More on LINT at www.lintconf.org.

Of course, as friends of SIME, you are invited to be part of LINT and you can write in the comments below or DM @simeblog if you would like to participate in the event or apply for invitation directly here

Moscow at the end of May is lovely and, being between Europe and Asia, is a natural place to host an international multidisciplinary discussion. The newly created environment at the Digital October Center is a testament to Russia’s strive towards social change and advancement in technology and education. Additionally, Russia’s profound influence and heritage in science and technology support Moscow as an exciting venue for technology and world leaders from Europe, Asia and the US to gather for a discussion.

We wish Edward and his team at LINT all the very best from SIME.

Updates for SIME Vienna

More top speakers added to our ever – growing roster. You can read the profiles of the speakers here

The Agenda for the day including main stage program and workshops can be found here

Location is at one of the oldest breweries in Vienna, with a great antique setting

And if you are in Vienna the day before, we encourage you to go to the Start Up Mixer to meet some cool Viennese entrepreneurs and companies, organized by the folks behind Tupalo.com. You can find the event information here.

Vienna calling, are you joining us for a journey of digital knowledge and inspiration? Warm welcome to SIME Vienna.

SIME Vienna Countdown begins: 22 Days – New Speakers, Partners and Information

SIME Vienna is right round the corner, and we are extremely excited to be there on April 28th. We have an impressive list of panelists and speakers, great partners supporting us, and fantastic mix of attende profiles. With over 600 delegates already registered for the day, the day is shaping up quite well I must say.

Speakers

You can find the list of speakers here

Our speakers include the top management from some of the most interesting and fast growing European concepts like Criteo, DailyDeal, Stardoll, Etsy; management and leaders from large companies such as Wired, TradeDoubler, Microsoft, Schibsted; and individual super-stars like Blondinbella from Sweden, the famous hacker Pablos Holman. In short, a great mix from the digital industry.

Partners

Microsoft Austria is our main co-host for the event.

Now, we also welcome to our little family, the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and Industry You can find the list of partners here

Location + Info

SIME Vienna is to be held in the famous Ottakringer Braueri (and the oldest remaining brewery) on April 28th. Info here

The event is by-invitation only and you can apply for yours here

Welcome to SIME Vienna, its going to be a great show!

Welcome to the future! MIT SENSEable Lab Assoc. Director Assaf Biderman on future cities

[Assaf Biderman is one of the speakers at the upcoming SIME Vienna summit to be held on April 28th]

Assaf  teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is the Associate Director of theSENSEable City Laboratory, a research group that explores the “real- time city” by studying the increasing deployment of sensors and networked hand-held electronics, as well as their relationship to the built environment. Biderman’s work focuses on engaging city administrations and industry members worldwide to explore how pressing issues in urbanization are being impacted by a wave of new distributed technologies, and how these can be harnessed to create a more sustainable future living in urban environments.

In the talk below, Assaf explains how future cities will be driven by drivers such as technology becoming smaller but powerful and information increasingly becoming an infrastructure that can communicate in building our future cities.

Assaf is part of developing a futuristic 3-dimensional display that can be projected around anywhere in space, controlled by “little helicopters” that are like 2-D pixels with a LED, a location sensor and wireless communication that can be controlled in real time from any computer.

What’s the application? If all these technology platforms become more open, and gets available to the public, these kind of applications can be used to fuel innovation ranging from giving you timely personal information on “blank screens” , showing you the most relevant ads and applications that we haven’t thought through yet.

Well we say, lets make the future happen!

What do we Learn? Entrepreneurial lessons from Match.com

This is a guest post by Johan Siwers, former MD of Match.com. Johan is a seasoned online media executive with a passion for entrepreneurial game changing companies. Johan has over the past 15 years been involved in breaking ground for a wide range of media and online mediaventures within companies like Kinnevik, Spray, Schibsted and InterActive Corp (IAC). Johan tweets @siwers

Do we ever learn from history when it comes to business, a friend asked me recently.

I wanted to say yes, but then I thought a second time and realized that I very rarely neither look back nor make any attempt to summarize or analyze my own life and lessons learned in business.

Feeling slightly disappointed with myself, I decided to try to improve by taking on to look at the past 7,5 years when I have been running Match.com, and see what would come out of it. Realizing that time and stamina would be the main hurdle for a lazy 40+ executive, I decided to start my #recap of the past few years by twittering – that would make it doable wouldn’t it?

To my surprise, after pushing out a few tweets I started to group and structure my thoughts somewhat more, turning it into this blog post that I wanted to share with you: a blog testament of lessons learned after launching, growing and exiting a business.

- In 2003 I started looking at a small business that wanted to roll out in Europe. There was this US based company that wanted to make the transatlantic journey, after its initial success in the US.

In Europe the category we talk about had just established itself, there was quite a large number of players, but there was no one investing/executing with a clear ambition to become the market leader, there were shaky and unpredictable business models as well as a significant stigma tied to the category.

Having done my research, I prepared a business case assessment for the owners, concluding that this was a great business that was bound to explode.

When I was asked to take on and also execute the plan, I got ridiculously excited and I was not overly hard to convince to run the roll out of match.com on behalf of InterActive Corp and Mr Barry Diller.

The starting point was:

- a category with dozens of local players, lacking scale, ambition and execution
- a highly stigmatized type of service, that needed to reshape one of the most basic aspects of human life: how to meet your partner
- a US company with a working economic engine, but lacking bandwidth to make a successful international roll out

What did we do?

- we built a bridge head in the 25 million populated Nordic region, being an internet savvy and e-commerce intense area, with among the highest ratios of single households in Europe
- we developed a network of partnerships with dominating players, local (Tv2 DK, SOL, Aftonbladet/Schibsted, Telia, Startsiden/Telenor, etc) as well as international (MSN, Yahoo, AOL)
- we configured a machinery for efficient customer acquisition within search, affiliation, display and every other available channel
- in parallel we grew a strong, passionate team on the ground, being able to handle e.g. product localization (in multiple geographies, languages, currencies, etc), PR, brand marketing, social media and customer care

What was the result?

- we built the dominating player, in terms of revenue, users and brand recognition – becoming the largest non English speaking region globally for the company in terms of revenue
- we were awarded Best E-commerce company (SIME), Campaign of the year (Media Week) and were proud to be celebrated for building one of the more successful online businesses in the region
- we changed one of the most basic human aspects of life, where official data show that today 23% of relationships starts online (SIFO)
- we exited when merging match.com in Europe with French Meetic [MEET, listed at the Paris Stock Exchange], creating a dominant European player with a market capitalization of approx €400m.

So what where my lessons learnt?

FOCUS
* The effect of doing a few important things right is so much greater than doing many things in chaos
* Saying yes is easy, saying no requires character – dare to be brutally honest
* Don’t do ‘one offs’, impact comes from coordinated efforts, thinking 360 degrees in everything you do

DATA & CELEBRATION DRIVEN
* If you can’t measure it, it does not exist
* Structure, control and understand your data
* Make your points of celebration holy – and measurable

PROVIDING VALUE
* Irrespective of short-term monetary considerations, you only win the end game by providing the end customer with most success
* In a transparent world, you can’t fool people. In a fully transparent world you need
to be true. True to what the purpose is in what you try to achieve

STORYTELLING
* Stories matter
* Stories give life. Stories turn random into to order
* Stories give meaning. Meaning create passion

NON-MONETARY GOALS
* Making money is not a business idea
* Few people are passionate about making someone else rich. Therefore egocentric
goals cannot drive any business
* Earning money therefore becomes an irrelevant goal, for any business that wants to make a difference, and for any business that wants to be truly successful

TAKING ON CHANGE
* Very few people like change. Still change is the only thing that will be constant
* As a leader you are paid well to be agnostic to direction, as long it is the right thing
for the business
* Be clear beforehand what metrics you want to impact initiating a change, so you
can validate your change of direction over time

PEOPLE
* Passion beats seniority
* Ability to adapt to change beats analytical skills
* In an Internet company, traditional skills are only valuable if accompanied by
an “Internet DNA”

FUN FACTOR
* It’s important, but it is a job. It’s important, but it is a game. It’s important but it’s fun, so laugh at it. It’s fun so enjoy.

And surely, I have enjoyed the past 7,5 years with Match.com immensely.

But now it’s time for a new chapter, even if I am sticking around as a grand old dad and advisor to the company and new owners.

This time I will make sure to recap more often and if you are curious of what I am up to, you find me on Twitter as @siwers.

SIME welcomes ZIT as one of the partners for SIME Vienna

SIME Vienna is brewing quite nicely, we are in the midst of getting some great speakers, cooking up the agenda to be in tune with the times as our landscape keeps continuously evolving. That said, ZIT, the technology promotion agency of the City of Vienna joins SIME as one of the partners for SIME Vienna.

You can find more information at http://www.zit.co.at/

When we spoke to ZIT about the city of Vienna, Dr. Claus Hofer, the CEO of ZIT wanted to be part of SIME to promote Vienna as a hot bed for new ideas, innovations and entrepreneurs. The short of the story is, ZIT offers support for innovative companies in the media space through funding and other strategic services to promote Austrian digital economy and the long of the story is below.

“For the last decade, media business has been under constant transformation – and it still is today. Those survive who are flexible enough to profit from these changes, who invent new business models, who innovate. As the City of Vienna’s Technology Agency ZIT offers support for these innovative media companies: through the development of the Vienna’s Media Quarter Marx, through monetary funding and through valuable services.

To me, SIME VIENNA seems like the ideal platform: both for successful Viennese companies, as well as international firms. I’m positive that meeting each other will be of additional value to all media players.” – Dr. Claus Hofer, CEO ZIT – The Technology Agency of the City of Vienna

We are very happy to have ZIT with us in this journey for our quest for knowledge and digital opportunities. In the past, we have worked with Barcelona Active and Stockholm City Council to promote the respective cities, and with SIME having a major share of audience being international (who isn’t these days huh?), there is a good win-win scenario as we see it.

Brewing the digital economy coming up April 28th. Are you part of the new world order?

Come join us at SIME Vienna