The Next Web

Switzerland gives start-ups Silicon Valley offices

Written on September 20, 2008 – 10:54 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Here’s another great idea I heard during Web 2.0 Expo New York. Dania Gerhardt from social collaboration platform Amazee (review here) told me about her brand new office in San Francisco. Somewhat surprised, I asked her how an-angel funded start-up could afford that. To my excitement, she told me the Swiss government provides promising tech start-ups like Amazee a shared office space in downtown San Francisco. Isn’t that a genius way of supporting your national start-ups?

The building is called Swissnex. Here’s an explanation from the web site:

Swissnex San Francisco is initiated by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research (SER) as a public-private venture, and managed in cooperation with the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs, swissnex San Francisco is an annex of the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco. Vital financial support is provided by public and private sponsors sharing swissnex San Francisco’s commitment to “connecting the dots.”

Amazee got this office space thanks to the CTI Startup program, initiated by the Swiss Federal Office for Professional Education and Technology. When they enter the building on 730 Montgomery Street (which dates from 1852), they have wireless Internet connections, video/audio-conferencing, projection capabilities, and a fancy board room to play around with. What makes it even more interesting, is the fact that any Swiss with something interesting on his mind can work at Swissnex. So apart from the fact that Amazee can operate in world’s most booming tech atmosphere, they’ll also be inspired by other ambitious folks.

Swissnexx also has offices in Shanghai, Singapore, and Boston.

Does your country support a similar initiative? Or do you think that it’s actually a waste of money? I know plenty of people who dislike anything subsidized, so this post may be an interesting foundation for a good discussion.

Whatever the result of that discussion will be, I don’t think Swiss entrepreneurs like the Amazee team and Dominik Grolimund from Wuala (review here) will really mind. They have an excellent opportunity to build their presence in Silicon Valley.

I hope you like that post!

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Amazee, Montgomery Street, san francisco, Start-ups, Switzerland, wuala

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Wuala, online social storage from Switzerland, ready for your files

Written on August 14, 2008 – 11:15 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Ladies and gents, Swiss start-up Wuala has launched. This is a free social online storage service. What’s up with the “social” part, you might ask. Well, it refers to the easy share features and the possibility to see what your friends are uploading. In addition to centralized servers, Wuala is a mesh/cloud/P2P storage which can harness idle resources of participating users and thus provide a better solution - there are no file size limits, no bandwidth limits, etcetera. That makes them different from famous competitors like Box.net.

The technology has been developed at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). Files on Wuala are encrypted, so that might reassure people who are still a bit afraid of online storing. Even the founders won’t get to see what people are saving on their online hard disk.

Wuala was in alpha mode for three long years, founder Dominik Grolimund told us during an interview in June. They allegedly had “tens of thousands of alpha users and thousands of communities around the world are actively sharing millions of files.” So they’re used to a rather large crowd using their service. Let’s see how they cope with it now.

online storage, Switzerland, wuala

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Wuala: social storage from Switzerland (we have invites)

Written on June 29, 2008 – 5:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.

This time we’re interviewing Dominik Grolimund from Wuala. This is a free social online storage service. The “social” refers to the easy share features and the possibility to see what your friends are uploading. In addition to centralized servers, Wuala is a mesh/cloud/P2P storage which can harness idle resources of participating users and thus provide a better solution - there are no file size limits, no bandwidth limits, etcetera. The files are encrypted, so that might reassure people who are still a bit afraid of online storing.

Developing a service like this, takes quite some time and effort. So I thought it might be interesting for you to learn from Dominik’s experiences. Moreover, although his service will remain in closed alpha, we do have 50 invites for you. Instructions follow below.

How did you come up with the idea of Wuala?

“We started research and development on Wuala 3.5 years ago at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). Our goal was to build something that was both challenging from a research point of view but which also had a great potential. Distributed storage systems were a hot research topic at that time and building a system that can harness idle resources seemed very promising, as the need for online storage was rising and file sizes were increasing. The research projects had an academic focus only - we wanted to realize it and make it work in practice for millions of users.” (more…)

five questions for start-ups, online harddisk, online storage, social storage, Switzerland, wuala, zurich

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