The power to us

After Berlin we decided that there is a lot to be done and now we have a chance to concentrate on those things full time. We had a meeting where we went through the assignments to be done for this semester and located them into our schedule. This helped us quite a bit to realize what will be keeping us busy for the next few months: marketing research, social media research, financial plan etc.

Each one of us went to different seminars and lectures at the ITB Berlin fair. We wrote a report of the notes of the lectures as most of them were really interesting and useful. We got quite a few pages to be able to adapt to our business and future. We are so very welcome, yeah, and it’s awesome. The ITB Berlin fair had many lectures on different social media aspects and talked about the importance and the future of different social media channels. We’re on the right track and want to work hard out to get our way towards our goal.

Hilma started doing a social media plan for GlobeOut and communication plan. I myself started working on our financial plan and Nea will continue working with our double trouble planning the demo to its end.

We were asked to be key speakers at the opening event of HAAGA-HELIA Start-up School and we nailed it! This was on Thursday and we were really excited to get a chance to tell our story. It was nice to realize how far we have come and how much help we have received from all around. Thank you, people.

The evening continued to Ahjo Bar & Club where there was a mingle evening for the women in the game industry. We thought we would go and connect and that is exactly what we did. I talked with a lawyer from a law firm called Aldea which is situated in Helsinki and they are partly specialized in the game industry. It was really interesting to get new tips and ideas for the future. We were also very excited to be able to tell gaming people about our idea and how they got excited too.

Towards the end of the week we had one more meeting with one of our coaches who gave us a couple of tips for the marketing research which we will carry out during this spring. We will also be joining an International day that the Start-Up School of HAAGA-HELIA is organizing on the 11^th of April. We will have our own stand at the event which equals up to the best opportunity to tell our idea to a lot of people and get direct feedback from it. This spring will be full of different events and happenings which are good for us and the whole company so we are really lucky and looking forward to these events.

On Saturday we entered a seminar called HotSpot 2012, which was held at the BioRex hall, in Helsinki. This seminar is for young entrepreneurs with about 6 or 7 different kinds of speakers who told their stories. The hall was full of people and the speakers were phenomenal. We noticed that each speaker had their own will and had done things the way they wanted keeping their own ideas as the most important ones. This gave us a new perspective towards our GlobeOut and our company. Again, we are extremely happy we joined this event. They are investing in the young entrepreneurship in Finland at the moment and we appreciate it a lot. All these kinds of events make us even happier to form GTP Group in Finland.

http://www.hotspot2012.fi/

Ich Bin eine Berliner

Let me just start saying that last week was... AMAZING! 

We headed over to Berlin, Germany where we took part of the biggest international travel fair, ITB. After an intensive planning of what, when and how we were all really excited about going there. We had planned a good schedule which included taking part of some lectures and interviewing exhibitors. The main idea was to educate ourselves more, do tons of networking and have a little fun.

Interviews went really well and I think we got some pretty interesting connections and made tons of new friends. Right now we are collecting some information together and figuring out the next step. By the way, we have now THE MOST COOLEST business cards and we proudly were handing them out to the people we met.

Like I said, we took part of some of the lectures they had and I have to give props to the ITB fair organizers for having a big variety of them. Sadly, most of the lectures were held in German and since we are beginners with the language it was pretty difficult to follow up. Some of them had headphones and you could hear the translated version in English but personally I think it didn't work out that well. We found it odd that if the travel fair is international, shouldn't most of the lectures also be held in a language that the majority of the listeners could understand them?

Enough of complaining because the lectures just confirmed us even more that indeed there is a need for something like GlobeOut. Speaking about GlobeOut, we have done some major changes with the whole concept and we will keep you updated on it when everything is confirmed.

Back to Berlin. We all fell in love with the city. It has so much history behind it and at the same time it's very young and hip. We had a guided bus tour around the beautiful city for a couple of hours and visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp which was quite wakening, however, very interesting. Other than that we managed to explore the beauty of the city in different areas among the 3,5 million people. Berlin is one of the cities in the world that has a very friendly atmosphere and everybody is welcome.

We stayed at this hostel called David's Hostel which was few train stations from the Zoologischer Garten station. The atmosphere was really really really good, people were nice and we even left a little picture of ourselves on the wall there! This is definitely a place to go back to the next time we go to Berlin!

Remember the past, plan the future and live today

Our company went to have a small holiday week in Lapland to get relaxed after all the hard work. We did a lot of skiing and snowboarding. Hilma is a snowboarding instructor and a very good one of those. She even managed to teach Nea how to slide down the hill without falling! On our way back to south we had a stop by in Kajaani. There we had a meeting with the one of the teachers of Kajaani University of Applied Scienses to talk about possible co-working between us and their students. The meeting went well and we made yet another great connection. 

On Tuesday we had our company’s very first board meeting. We decided that Hilma will be given the rights of holder of procuration since she was they only one of us without those rights. Nea has those rights as a CEO and Susanna has them because she is the chairwoman of our board. We also discussed about the next summer and what should we do during it. We all live in different towns so we need to have a game plan for the summer to keep things running.

Rest of the week we spent on preparing for the ITB Berlin-fairs. We did a lot of research about the companies and the lectures that will be held. We also decided to do a little bit of research about backpackers and their travel process. And we had a meeting with Double Trouble about the progress of our Demo-version and how we could help them out in developing it.

Next week we will be in Berlin getting to know the travel industry today and in the future. One of the lectures we are looking forward is called “Technology trends: the google perspective”. We find this one very interesting since if Google is coming harder on the travel industry we might have some serious competition. We are also looking forward for “Mobile Travel Trends, Forecasts and Predictions” to see what’s new and where should we be heading. We will tell you when we know!