venture.ch

We were at the handing out of prices for the best business idea at Venture 2004 this evening, held in the Auditorium Maximum of ETH Zurich. My new venture, ZAPPATA Networks had entered with their business idea in the beginning of January, and today the best 10 business ideas were awarded CHF 2'500.–

Not surprisingly, we weren’t in the top 10. We weren’t even in the top 43 - but somewhere between place 238 and 44. Actually there was no “real” IT company in the top 10 and only 3 or 4 in the runners up. Could it be that the sponsoring companies were favoring their interests.? Novartis and Roche and 6 winning projects that are developing either drugs or their products are usable in the pharma / life-science industry? Or that 8 of the projects are coming from a university? But that would probably be pure conjecture on my part.

The positive thing about this whole thing is, that we got feedback on our business idea by four different people. This has been very valuable, because we can see, what people take away from our first presentation and in what ways we need to adapt the message that we are going to present to the world at large when the time is ripe.

It also shows that we are sadly lacking on the marketing front, something we need to remedy soon. Do you know of anybody with proven marketing experience in the software industry? Let me know!