All Eyes on Berlin for TOA and Campus Party

By Claire Adamson |

Berlin is all set for one of the busiest weeks of the year, with Campus Party set to kick off with it s opening ceremony this evening and TOABerlin just a couple of days away – it’s time to print your tickets and study the schedule ahead of the first part of the conference at Kater Holzig on Thursday.

The massive array of satellite events on Friday should keep you nicely occupied as well, and what better way to finish the week off than with Silicon Allee’s Summer Party?

At TOABerlin, Thursday will begin with a welcome from TechCrunch journalist Mike Butcher at 9.30, with the workshops and events kicking off from 10am. Talks and panel discussions will run throughout the day from three main areas. The Big Picture stage will provide the bones of the event, hosting panels about raising capital, community and team building.

The Advanced Sessions area will delve deeper into the featured themes of the day, with talks by Renaud Visage of Eventbrite, Felix Petersen of Amen and Verena Delius of Goodbeans. The E-Fifteen stage will host short talks, called ‘knowledge bites’ by the organizers, and will feature Floris Dekker of Gidsy, Christoph Raethke of Berlin Startup Academy and Pia Henrietta of Rails Girls.

The Pitch Clinic will run in the afternoon and will give aspiring startups the chance to show off their ideas to investors and entrepreneurs including Jawed Karim, one of the founders of Youtube. Derk Marseille will also host the Friday@6 radio show from the event throughout the day.

The event will round off with a barbeque, music from DJ Daddy Hemingway, and terrifyingly, Powerpoint Karaoke.

We would advise you to not go too hard on Thursday night, because on Friday there is a lot happening all over the city. The TOABerlin satellite events range from serious workshops about javascript, PR and venture capital to more fun and social events like networking, barbeques and breakfast drinking.

EyeEm are hosting a photo-walk at Tempelhofer Park to take advantage of the setting sun. Rails Girls will be throwing a picnic for beginning coders at an as-yet undisclosed location, and Berlin Startup Academy will host a workshop about finding good ideas for business.

Other highlights include the Team Europe Breakfast Club meetup, the Pitch and Pizza event at BDMI, a summer barbeque at Ondango and the chance to watch the sun go down and indulge in a cocktail or two with the Tumblr team. The events are all over town, so you will have to choose carefully because there is no way you will make it to all of them, but you will at least be able to view them all on your phone with Vamos, who have integrated with the event via Eventbrite. More information about the events and how to book is available on the TOABerlin website.

And of course, the only way to end the day is at our Summer Party at Prince Charles, where the fun will go on until well after the sun comes up on Saturday morning.

If that isn’t enough for you this week, Campus Party kicks off this evening, with 10,000 Campuseros from all over Europe currently streaming into the former Tempelhof Airport for the week-long festival. Google is one of the partnering sponsors of the event and will provide information at the event about their upcoming Gründer Garage collaboration with Indiegogo and the Entrepreneurship Foundation. They are also hosting a hackathon where participants will be asked to come up with Google Chrome Extensions surrounding the issues of data protection and privacy.

Campus Party runs until Saturday evening and covers tech subjects from gaming to robotics with everything in between. Other speakers include Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho and the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners Lee.

Good luck everyone, we’ll see you on the other side!