Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
This post will describe what Sweden Social Web Camp (SSWC) is and why Sweden’s social media geeks meet on an island far far away without Internet connection.
Think of a small island far away from large cities or other signs of civizilation. Imagaine a life without cellular reception, only a few power supplies and most of the time no Internet connection. This is what hundreds of Swedish people have been looking forward all summer and finally this weekend 400 happy and enthusiastic Swedish web geeks have experienced this together.
Sweden Social Web Camp (#SSWC) is an unconferance for people interested in social media. Me (Mattias Tyrberg) and Fredrik Hörte joined SSWC to get feedback from developers regarding their need of text analysis such as tagging and related texts. So what is SSWC?
The history – SSWC 2009
400 social media geeks on an island outside of nowhere, how did this happened?
The (un)conference started by chance last year by Tomas Wennström & Kristin Heinonen. Tomas thought it would be fun to meet some guys in a country house and talk about social media. A couple of tweets later (and a lot of re-tweets) hundreds of people had shown interest in a meetup. Since Tomas didn’t have that a big country house he needed to find a bigger place and in August 2009 the first SSWC with 280 participants toke place on the island Tjärö.
SSWC 2010
SSWC 2009 was nothing but a success. Thanks to all swedish twitter users SSWC got a lot of media coverage and the interest for SSWC-2010 grew bigger.
Tjärö is a small island and the number of rooms for rent is limited. Those who are not as lucky as others need to spend the nights sleeping in tent. Despite the risk of being without proper shelter it only took 40 minutes before the (un)conference was sold out.
So why this hype of going to an island with almost no similarities to the world that we are so used to?
Maybe because we love the idea of being different? Maybe we want to live offline and talk to people in the real world? Maybe we are tired of tweeting about what we had for breakfast?
For us it was all about meeting inspiring people and getting feedback from people using our text analysis services. For others it might be just getting some fresh air and leave the stressful city. Anyhow SSWC 2010 was a success with a lot of good sessions and meetings.
After SSWC 2009 people said that the Swedish Twitter stream died during that weekend since those tweeting the most was trapped on an island without any Internet connection. This year was no different so in our next post we will share what happend during this weekend when Twitter in Sweden was dead.
Tags: camp, conference, Geeks, media, social media, SSWC, Sweden
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Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
So the two last days Saplo has been attending the B0NN13R H4CKD4Y event that was held at Bonnier’s headquarter in Stockholm. It’s an events where developers are building all kinds of applications and/or concepts from idea to prototype in less then 24 hours. Mainly this event was for companies within the Bonnier group, although some external people where invited as well. We (Saplo) had open our API exclusively for this event and the teams. The services we provided was entity tagging with contextual entity categorization for persons, organisations and geo-names and a way to identify similar articles from a semantic point of view.
At a total there were 17 teams attending. Almost all of them used different APIs and solutions but some teams laborated with Saplo API. One of the teams built an application that tracks your geo location (from an iPhone, Android phone etc) and presents news articles that have taken place near this location. They are using the Saplo API to extract the places mentioned in the text and then polls out the geo-ip from Google (we will post a link when the application is online).
For more information about Bonnier Hackday check out:
Saplo talking about the Saplo API
Official Bonnier Hackday Blog
Flickr photos from Bonnier Hackday
Twitter: #bonnierhackday
Tags: Bonnier Hackday, Saplo API, Stockholm
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Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
Read all about it at Seedcamp.com
Last year Saplo was one of the finalists at this great event. We truly recommend you startups to apply!
Tags: Seedcamp
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Monday, November 10th, 2008
We’ve been invited to talk about Saplo and our business at the ISA Conference. The presentation will be held November the 11th. We see this as a great opportunity to meet venture investors and brilliant minds from the participating Swedish companies.
From ISA:
“CEOs of cutting edge Swedish wireless, IT, electronics, and internet startups, and leading Swedish VC and corporate venture investors will come from Sweden to give brief presentations about their companies and financing interests to an audience of US venture investors and corporate development executives…”
Tags: ISA, Saplo
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Friday, September 19th, 2008
Friday, the last day of a fantastic week here at Seedcamp. Today the winners would be announced. Even if we ever since the start of this competition had said that winning wasn’t important and that the most valuable was to meet all this great people we have met during this week, we couldn’t help feeling a bit nervous.
The winners of Seedcamp receive £50.000 pounds each, in return Seedcamp gets 10% of the companies. In addition to this, the company moves to London in order to be able to use lawyers and accountants that Seedcamp provides. For us moving the whole business to London right now wouldn’t be optimal since we have Swedish customers to take care of and a technique that needs to be more developed before facing the huge international market. Still, we had Fredrik Hörte prepared to pack his bags and leave Sweden if we won.
Seven companies where named winners, Saplo wasn’t among them. For us it didn’t come as a chock, since we had no demo to show, Seedcamp had to base their decision on what we said we could do and they probably thought it would be safer to invest in some of the companies that already had their products up and running.
Right now it’s mixed feeling going through us, it would have been great winning, still it’s kind of a relief to get some weeks in Sweden developing our product before taking the step out on the international market. In three months we will be back in London, pitching for venture capitalist, and then we will show them something never seen before…
We would like to finish our reports from Seedcamp with a big congratulation to the Seedcamp winners! All of you have really shown that you are worthy winners and we look forward to see your companies climbing to the top. It has been an honor meeting you, best of luck in the future, we’ll keep in touch.
Tags: London, Seedcamp
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Thursday, September 18th, 2008
On Thursday it was time for the big presentation in front of venture capitalists. After a long night of preparing the pitch and getting the last pieces of facts in place, finally, Mattias Tyrberg and Sverker Sikström, founders of Saplo, entered the stage.
In contrast to our presentation on Monday, we only had our founders Mattias Tyrberg and Sverker Sikström on stage this time. The simple reason was that we thought it would be easier for our audience to concentrate on just two people instead of four.
The presentation went well, we have a disadvantage in the fact that we can’t show a demo of our product yet, still the interest from mentors here at Seedcamp is enormous.
Tags: Mattias Tyrberg, Saplo, Seedcamp, Sverker Sikström
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Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
Our technology offers a lot of possibilities in many different areas. We’ve used the incredible opportunity it means to meet the great people here at Seedcamp to discus what’s the best thing for us to develop and focus on right now.
Today we’ve meet product- and marketing experts. These groups showed a great interest in our technology and had a thousand ideas on how to use it. David Bolokor from IBM had a lot of great thoughts on how to use our technology in order to solve huge problems in the information- and analyze section.
George Hadjigeorgiou from Yahoo found the technology behind our ad optimization tool fascinating. Then we talked with people from Skype, Reuters and Google about marketing. It is a really interesting and of course important section to get good at and it absolutely helps a lot meeting these experts and getting so many great advises.
Finally we bumped into Anders Hallin from Stardoll, nice to have someone to talk Swedish too as well.
Tags: Anders Hallin, David Bolokor, George Hadjigeorgiou, Google, IBM, Reuters, Seedcamp, Skype, Stardoll, Yahoo
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Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
As we have mentioned earlier Saplo is one of the finalist at Seedcamp 08. The last two days has been very intense with presentations and meetings with mentors. We have had the opportunity to meet some of the greatest entreprenuers in the world. Hjalmar Winbladh (Rebtel), Mårten Mickos (mySQL), Todd Sawicki (Lookery), Christophe Maire (Nokia), Kevin Cornelis (buy.at) just to mention a few. We have already been contacted by many Venture Capital Companies that are interested in our product.
Tags: buy.at, Christophe Maire, Hjalmar Winbladh, Kevin Cornelis, Lookery, Mårten Mickos, Mysql, Nokia, Rebtel, Saplo, Seedcamp, Todd Sawicki
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Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
Saplo has now assigned to the Business Plan Competition Seedcamp.
You can follow us here on the site for more information about Saplo and Seedcamp.
Tags: Saplo, Seedcamp
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