anders.tyckr.com

On the May 8, STING's Innovation & Technology Award will be given to the top technology companies that apply to the competition. The winners will get a nice 150,000 SEK (€16,000) in pricemoney, but more importantly the winner will be direct qualified to the final of this years Seedcamp. Last year I was lucky to be among the winners, and I have nothing but good things to say about the experience.

When working in a venture capital financed company and trying to get stuff going really fast really early, the most important thing to have is a good network of contacts. Once you know the right person at the right company, things get way easier. Seedcamp is about giving you the opportunity to create such a network, whether you win or not.

So if you are a Swedish company I strongly recommend applying to both STING's competition, but also to Seedcamp directly.

Today in about 1 hour I will go down to Condeco, Linnégatan to see if there will be anyone else wanting to network around business. I started OpenCoffeeClub Göteborg as I saw the concept was really working well in London, and I saw that this is something that is missing in the Göteborg area.

So if you need to get in contact with some interesting people and perhaps want to get some feedback on your new business idea, don't be afraid to share it, as this will probably only help you make a better business from your idea.

Looking forward to seeing you all at the first OpenCoffeeClub Göteborg event!

Today the developers worked hard, and have been for a long time now, to release the Chamomile version of the site.

The first-page is completely redone, and the search results are much better organized and with better information about the restaurants.

I really like the interface of the first page though. Just type in a location and press enter or drag the map to the place you want to look at. Then if you want to, refine your search in step 2 and press enter. The map refreshes to see if you'll find any restaurants. In step 3 you say how big your party is and when you want to go and voilla... you get a nice page with results.

And you can save that search if you want to... just click the "link to this search" button and get the url to save or share with your friends.

As friday is cleaning day at our apartment we always tend to go to Portobello Gold, a soon to be bookable restaurant through Tablefinder.

And every friday I have been here I have eaten their delicious BLT sandwich. And of course since it is friday, a nice half pint draft to go with the sandwich. The place has free wifi so thus the choice of place to go. Really nice environment and cool people who work there. I definitely recommend people to go here. On 95-97 Portobello Road.

Tomasz, my fellow co-founder and CTO, represents Tablefinder at The Internet Marketing Conference in Stockholm November 29-30th. He will be on a panel about Taking a Business from 0–100 km/h in No Time with other Swedish internetentrepreneurs like Jonas Hombert from JayCut.

Read more at: http://www.webanalysts.info/

Last week I was at Catapult in London - a conference about launching your business in the US - and it was a very good networking experience.

Talking about networking, social networking, which of course is very hot these days, it is starting to turn into something so much more than just playing around on the internet. On one of the panels at the conference a panelist said that

"Social networking is turning into Business networking"

And I couldn't agree more. Not only online, but social networking IRL is one of the best ways to do business.

We would not be where we are today without doing serious business networking. I think that how it is done is one of the main differences when comparing European entrepreneurs to US ditto. In Sweden when people do business networking it is almost always about making money or connections to people that will help you make money. What I have experienced these last few trips to London, but also going to conferences with great entrepreneurs is that, there, the focus of business networking is helping each other.

People are much more happy to help you and give you advice, rather than focusing on how they can make money off of you. This difference might seem marginal, but is an essential detail in the "new" Business networking that is starting to occur. I guess one could say that the sharing trends of social networking and open source are finally coming to business networking. By helping each other I believe we are creating a collective wisdom of business.

So, I believe that by surrounding yourself with great entrepreneurs that are willing to share their knowledge is a key to success in doing business in the future. But it is important that you are as willing to help them, as you are eager to get advice. With this said, I'm happy to give advice, for free, to anyone who would want some.

This is a couple of days late... but we won at SeedCamp!

The week was really exciting and I think I will write a longer post on what it gave me personally.

Wow! What a fantastic week at SeedCamp! Me and Tomasz managed to do a pretty good presentation today. At least in my opinion.
During this week, we have been able to change the way we describe our idea in a better way than what we have been able to do for over 16 months of trying. I'll swallow my pride of not being able to figure it out myself, and say thank you very much!

Tonight we are going to the TechCrunch Party at a really nice and big private flat somewhere in London.

Tablefinder is a finalist at SeedCamp and I will be in London the whole of next week for the event.

This is also the start of my personal blog. I will try to talk about stuff in my daily life as a startup CEO.

Update: It was nice to see our name on one of my favorite blogs: TechCrunch

Best Regards,

//Anders Fredriksson