LetsBuyIt Blog

Last Thursday we participated in the OpenCoffee Roundtable in Hamburg, which treated the topic “PR for start-ups”. It was an interesting get-together because entrepreneurs from Hamburg met to discuss how the PR should be handled for start-ups. Those exchanges of experience in a small group are very inspiring because it gives you the chance to also see what others are thinking, who they know and what mistakes have already been made. These were the participants of last week along with their companies:

• Frank Felix Debatin www.1000mikes.com

• Monte Miersch www.mikestar.com

• Lars Wehmeyer www.formatune.com

• Achim Schnell www.formatune.com

• Ulrich Tekniepe www.tekniepe.com

• Anne Arndt www.digicol.de

• Tobias Caldeweyher www.letsbuyit.com

• David Cordes www.sightseaing.de

• Christine Stumpf www.weblin.com

• Jonas Bandick www.docinsider.de

• Mirco Beisheim www.postalo.de

• Paul Watzlaw www.meetya.com

• Matthias Henze www.jimdo.com

• Jan Milz www.sixgroups.com

• Thomas Promny and Jürgen Lankat www.gimahhot.de

• Tobias Worzyk www.hamburg-startups.de (organiser)
  

Without getting too much in details our conclusions are somewhat the following:

1) When you want to do PR then you better be well prepared for it and have a significant impact on the agency, in case you use one, because only the founders can really communicate and reflect the “spirit” of the company.

2) Only when you are really creative will the PR be successful because nowadays every is overloaded with great ideas, events and stories so it is difficult to stick out.

3) When you want that a journalist writes a story about you then you must deliver them a story, that can mention you as an example, because they will definitely not write an ad about you for you.

4) In case you want to use an agency you better a get a good one that actually knows all the individual journalists and bloggers, one that does those tedious follow-up calls and knows WHEN to contact the press (Mondays and early mornings are just the worst time, according to this great Techcrunch article).

Here we are! A new logo for LetsBuyIt! Not that easy..
To be honnest, we kind of think that our actual/old logo (see above) is not very modern and most of all does not match with the new idendity of LetsBuyIt.

We are then in the middle of a big ‘logo study’: what are the actual trends, which factors create a better recognition, which font, which colors, adapt the logo to the global chart or the global chart to a logo, etc!

We found that amazing video (play below) on the subject:

So, which ones do you remember now? On our side, we kind of all remembered the same logos!

Enterprise 2.0 is Web 2.0 technology taken to the corporate world. Just as in the consumer Web, the goals of Enterprise 2.0 technologies are better collaboration, easier information management, and more personalized productivity.

And just as in the consumer Web, from mashups to wikis, startups abound. To differentiate from big companies, they’ll have to do things differently.

Let’s start by discovering iotum

iotum is a company which empowers conversations by connecting people where, when and how they choose. iotum’s software platform immediately makes people more productive, accessible and in control of their communications.

It delivers benefits to

• consumers
• mobile professionals
• enterprises

Presence technology aims to make communication smarter by letting people know if someone is available to take a call. The reality is that presence is typically a pain to constantly update and stumbles at organizational boundaries. Startup iotum’s “relevance engine” automates the process, and its hosted services get rid of those boundaries.

The relevance engine pings a user’s instant messaging client, calendar, recent call history, and list of important contacts to automatically determine how calls should be handled or what presence information should be displayed to a potential caller. For example, if it sees a salesperson’s been calling a customer a lot recently, iotum’s Talk-Now app for BlackBerrys might escalate that customer’s importance so the customer could see the salesperson’s presence information or have his calls patched through more often.