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We were too late for Oktoberfest, and too early for the Weinachtsmarkts of Germany - but made it over here just in time for the first ever TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon and conference in Berlin this week!
Between the delicious bretzels, the HotDogCam and the excitement of staying up all night, we had a great time meeting some of Europe's finest hackers. We saw some great hacks on the Box API as well!
AnyFetch, an aggregated search engine for all your content, added the ability to loop in documents from your Box account to make sure you have access to the most relevant content at any time. We saw a really cool mHealth app called KlikBrush - a toothbrush sensor that measures how well you brush your teeth. When you're done, you can send that data about your dental hygiene to a folder on Box so that you can reward and incentivize good tooth-brushing behavior in your family. Inspirat.io was another great hack - the team built a Chrome plug-in that aggregates content from many sources so that you can use that content within your browser.
While the hackathon was a great way to get a sense of what European devs were interested in building, the Disrupt Conference itself provided a lot of insight into European entrepreneurship trends and challenges the European tech ecosystem faces.
It is impossible to give justice to 2 days of such solid content but we particularly enjoyed the session on "Crossing the Enterprise Chasm", which featured Zendesk, Klarna and Huddle. The panelists mainly talked about the challenges of building a global company, but all 3 companies had very different approaches in terms of how they built out customer bases that span worldwide. Conversations then turned to the next steps for these companies- Huddle and Zendesk both got drilled on their aspirations for an IPO, but both founders agreed that IPOs are a means, not an end. One of our favorite quotes came from Mikkel Svane at Zendesk: "It's not about the money. If you're confident in what you're building, you want to see what impact you can have and how you can change the way that customers & businesses work together."
After a whirlwind 4 days in Berlin, we are now in the lovely land of Guinness and Gaelic folk! Dublin is crawling with founders, devs, and techies for the Dublin Web Summit, and it's been amazing to meet so many enterprise and SaaS startups here! If you're in Dublin, come visit our booth - we've got plugs on plugs on plugs to make sure you're completely charged up for all the DWS activities.
All in all, lots of exciting things happening on this side of the pond! We'll be rounding off our trip with a Happy Hour in London with Aaron tomorrow (Friday, Nov. 1). We would love to have all you London devs join us for drinks and lively discussions on what's happening with the cloud, trends we're seeing in the enterprise and exciting new announcements from the Box platform!
