This post is a little late, but busy as we are I couldn’t make it earlier. Still I wanted to share some more insights and experiences we acquired while being in the Silicon Valley in November/December. So here’s a short summary of 2 interesting things we did on Nov. 29.
Meeting Jajah
Shortly after lunch we had an appointment with Frederik of Jajah, an originally Austrian company, now headquartered in Mountain View, CA. We used the Jajah service since we arrived in San Francisco in early November and we heard about their office from Hans (SimplyHired), whom we met at the Web 2point2 social media unconference earlier that month. He told us that some German speaking company was in the same building as they are and also that they had free lunch on Fridays. So we wanted to take advantage of both and Hans hooked us up with Frederik (we missed the free lunch though).
Frederik showed us around the Jajah office a little and we had a nice talk about their company and ourselves. We gained many interesting insights, learned quite a lot and were amazed about the openness and willingness to share experiences. Quite honestly we would have expected a more typical German guy, not willing to really talk about what he and his company does and so on, but luckily we found that the viral marketing guru of Jajah is quite the opposite of that.
We also talked about cooperation possibilities and were hinted to the API Jajah offers to business clients. We will definitiely look into that.
Web 2.0 and Poland
After that we went to the Stanford campus to attend an event called ”Web 2.0 Wave in the U.S. and Poland”. I got invited by one of the organizers whom I met at the Mobile 2.0 event, so we gave it a shot.
The event that basically was one big panel discussion featuring speakers from Google, LinkedIn, Intel, HP and some more was organized by the US-Polish trade council. There were (surprise) many Polish people there - actually most of the attendees were, but we also met John from razz.com - a company offering a software for mobile phones that allows you to play audio files while you are talking to somebody, apparently to spice up the conversation.
The whole event was not really providing many new insights. However it strengthened my suspicion that Google employees have an internal guideline to mention at least 3 products of Google in every answer they give - no matter what the question was all about. The event left an aftertaste of a general information event for Poland and Polish companies and start-ups in the Silicon Valley, not so much focussing on the cooperation.
Some interesting bits we heard:
- Intel’s Greg Welch was the first one who mentioned Second Life since we came to the Silion Valley a month ago
- he also talked about how Intel is looking at the web 2.0 development towards web 3.0 and what they have to anticipate in order to produce good processors for that
- LinkedIn does not plan ahead the development of their product too much, but try to look at what people demand and then respond to that
The bottom line of the event was something like “listen to your users” - as I said not too exciting or new. Still it was worth going there - we saw the Stanford campus, met some interesting people and got free drinks. I even got recognized as a Polish attendee (picture) :).
