A big step towards the future

WOHOOO!!! So now it’s official and we’ve got the company papers in our hands. The whole week was full of happy things happening. On Monday we met with our lawyer and signed the founders’ agreement. On Wednesday we had an appointment with a consultant called Harri Kari who helped us last year with our financing plan. He gave us such good advice on many things about the financial part of our future. Later on the same day we also had an appointment with a bank attendant where we opened a bank account and got everything going from that point of view. Now we just need to wait for the final decision on our company’s name and it’s all real, for real.

We have been busy with our visit to Berlin next month. We will be going to the ITB fair which is held from the 7^th until the 11^th of March 2012 at the Messe Berlin fair center. We will be going there for three days to obtain what the industry has to offer for us and our company. The fair is said to be the biggest travel fair in the world with 26 different halls and about 9970 different exhibitors this year.

We went through all the companies that will have a stand at the ITB fair. One page had about 50 companies on them and there were 201 pages all together. We found a good punch of different kinds of companies that could be suitable for us in a way or another. The idea is to spend our time smart and concentrate on the most important things. There are also quite a few seminars where anybody may enter without extra fees. We did a little research on them and picked up the ones that match with our needs. Now there is a schedule done for our 3 days at the fair as the idea is to be separated from each other so that we derive the most possible profit from the fair. There is still a lot to do so we will be very busy until the next time.

Running as fast as we can

This week our plan was to work on the demo-version so much that the demoboys could start programming. Honestly, we had no idea where we got ourselves into! Even if we did a lot of research about the whole developing a demo-version… it’s a LOT of work. But we are so excited, determinate and full of boom factor to WOW the whole world with GlobeOut.

We started the week with a very interesting meeting with Tapani Siltala, who not only works for Karttakeskus, but is also the connection in Finland for Bing maps and Google maps. We had a long discussion about whether to choose Bing or not and whether Google is still a better choice for us in the end. With Bing you can use their maps for free for 90 days and afterwards the cost consists of the amount of users. Google maps can be used for free until you have 25,000 clicks per day. We still have lots to talk about and we are not in a hurry making any big decisions like this yet.

Tuesday and Wednesday we did more research. We found great websites worth looking for. Check out www.quora.com. Quora aims to be the easiest place to write and share new content on in the web. If you want to get connected it is definitely a place to be!


We found some tools to share documents to make our life a bit easier. With www.dropbox.com you will never have to e-mail a document to yourself nor carry a memory stick with you anymore. We highly recommend this to everyone! We also use www.flowdock.com to chat, share e-mails and documents. They have a 30 day free-trial so we recommend you to try it out. One of our biggest problems was to plan a schedule for every week. We all have a very busy timetable and planning a meeting was getting very difficult. Now we have a calendar in Google Docs where we can write down our schedules and change it if necessary. All of us are able to make changes and the rest will see it right away. This is an awesome tool for small groups!

Few more links doesn’t hurt anyone, right? We have had major issues with pitching. Somehow we can’t get it together and every time we pitch, it’s somehow different. Harvard Business School has a really helpful application on the Internet that will guide you through writing the perfect elevator pitch. Check it out here: http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/careers/pitch/. There are a lot of tips for pitching but this slide is a must see: http://www.slideshare.net/garr/pitching-tips-presentation-tips-from-the-pitching-coach-presentation.

Enough of links… for now. On Friday we collected tons of books that could be useful for us and, man, did we get some really interesting ones. Posts about them will be coming up soon! Also we did a little gallup around our Campus area. We walked around interviewing as many students by showing them pictures of the front page of GlobeOut with different visual effects. We got really important information about which looks good and which doesn’t Next week is going to be the most important week for us so far. We are finally sending our Ltd. papers forward and soon GTP Group will be a real company. We are very excited!

Until the next time, don’t forget to smile!

 

Introducing Double Trouble

Last week we mentioned that there were only three of us left but you never know what happens in a week. Past week has indeed been super fantastic! Now we are back to five members in our team and this is due to the most amazing news: we got ourselves coders for the demo version of GlobeOut! And not just any random dudes from the cellar wearing “I’m from planet anti-social”-T-shirts. No, our coders are super nice and easy-to-work-with  and… wait for it… TWINS. Our own Double Trouble.

So we are finally getting things rolling. There are few pumps on the road we still have to figure out, mostly technical stuff, but it should be easier with our trouble solvers. One of the technical issues includes map services but we are having a meeting with one of the biggest map service providers for the next week. So we’ll see if we are going to be working with them in the future.

There are a lot of technical things we need to go through with Double Trouble and figure out the order in which each function will be developed. That means we will have a lot of work cut out for us. But it is time to remove our nail polish and get our hands dirty.

As ITB fairs (held in Berlin) are getting closer we are preparing ourselves for some heavy networking. So we are getting more familiar with this great book called “Little Black Book of Connections” by Jeffrey Gitomer. It is giving us some good tools for networking and some insight on how to use the connections you have made. So let’s get connected!

And we want iPads!

Until the next week and the future: