Week 4. IdeaLab

My annoying "learning of the week" was clearly my 2 hours wait at the Chinese embassy for a visa and to be told in the end that I needed a proof of residence or a university certificate to be able to get the document (I'm German). Well ... Tuesday I'll be there again.

Other than that it was a fabulous week. For the weekend I was in Vallendar, Germany, where I stayed at the 2008 edition of IdeaLab, a conference on entrepreneurship (with a focus on the web and technology companies) which gathers about 150 students, entrepreneurs and investors for talks, workshops and networking.

In spite the larger economic climate the atmosphere was excellent, everyone was buzzing with new ideas and energy. So was I and tried to use the opportunity to pitch my start-up (Tagcrumbs) and although I didn't get the slides to work it sparked some interest - and some good questions. The slides can be found soon on our blog.

Another highlight was the speed networking event which I was lucky enough to get into. 20 students/young entrepreneurs and 20 corporates/investors talking to each other for 2 minutes. I was trying to pitch Tagcrumbs and the social placemarking concept to (almost) all of them. It was an interesting experience indeed - it's amazing to see the different approaches and styles people use in such a conversation. This is of course true for both sides. A very agreeable conversational partner was Suhas Gopinath ("world's joungest CEO" of Globals Inc) - calm, relaxed and still very focused although I could also learn a lot by analyzing the razor-sharp questions by some of the VCs and investors as well.