By Sandy Hathaway at Startup Camp Berlin
UPcload is one of the hottest startups coming out of Berlin at the moment, and the company’s Itamar Weis and Steffen Poralla spoke candidly with Silicon Allee at Startup Camp Berlin 2012 about the event, the message that they want to send out to their startup colleagues and the importance of Berlin as an entrepreneurial ecosystem in Europe.
Steffen said: “What I like about this event is that it is an opportunity to meet a lot of people – not only other entrepreneurs, but VCs, journalists, accountants, as well as your colleagues – your neighbours – and they deliver a very dynamic diversity of talks.”
Itamar said: “Startup Camp is good place to meet people from the scene, share your ideas, and most importantly to learn and find ways to cooperate with each other… My goal is to share a message that testing products with users is one of the most critically important steps in perfecting any product design.”
A video of the complete interview will be posted here in the coming days.
————————
A popular speech earlier on Friday was given by Kjetil J. Olsen. He is the vice president for Europe of Elance, an online work marketplace which is helping build and run startups in the human cloud. At SCB12, he addressed a full room of hungry entrepreneurs looking for ways to build their infrastructure without all the overheads.
And the story he told about Elance was compelling enough that when he finished the questions kept coming long after he was asked to leave the stage, with the line of people wanting to continue the conversation six thick.
With an offer of quality controlled, as-you-need-it expertise for many different basic startup positions, that perhaps wasn’t too much of a surprise. And there were numbers: More than 130,000 customers, awarding them a ranking of 4.8 out of 5. Kjetil explained the training and monitoring programs that they have in place to ensure that the contractors they market are qualified, the value that they deliver to their contractors in return and an almost humanitarian vision for business transcending boundaries and allowing anyone with the right skills work for anyone else who needs them anywhere in the world.
There will be more from SCB12 tomorrow.