At the ATEC (Aachen Technology and Entrepreneurship Conference) we were interviewed by Normann Kreuter from the organisation team about CoboCards and the Business Angel Day. In the interview itself you can see Ali and Tamim. But in the intro (and later as well) Ali and Jamil are mentioned. However. This way all team members are mentioned

Link:

For those who read that for the first time, a short explanation.

After winning the start2grow competition we were asked how we had written the business plan. In Part 1 of this trilogy I wrote about the company goals. In Part 2 about the product description.

Today I will focus on the Chances and Risks.

The best way to do an analysis on chances and risks is to conduct a so called SWOT-analysis. SWOT means Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threads. The first two are an internal view on your team and company. The last two an external view by looking at market, competitors etc. This implements that you know your market and your competitors.

To visualise the four, which are somehow linked to each other, I used a puzzle.

I hope I could help a bit. If you have comments, don’t hesitate to use the comments field.

Wish you all the best if you should write your own business plan.

Today we have reenabled the function ‘Inform team members about new pinboard entries by email’

So what have we done hereafter?
The notification email was designed in a way, that such an accident won’t happen again. From now on everybody is receiving his own email, without any team members being in CC or BCC. Furthermore the bug that lead to the mass mailing is fixed and other security checks were introduced. The system was tested extensively. It’s not possible that such a fault happens again.

Is my data secure with CoboCards?
Yes, it is. We backup your data several times a day. Your data is loaded onto a separate backup environment. However, we have decided to improve and upgrade our backup system step by step.

We wish you further on success in your studies.

Today a bug caused a big problem. A pinboard notification, that was meant to be send to a couple of users, was send by our system to thousand of users, that are not linked together. Everybody who got that E-Mail was able to see the other recipients E-Mail addresses.

We immediately disconnected the server, localized and fixed the bug.

Though the pinboard notification functionality, will stay deactivated, till extensive tests are done. And we are going to expand our safety measures to avoid such painful problems in the future.

We are really sorry and apologize to all concerned users. Our own standards are not compatible with such a bug.

Update: Function reenabled

Last week we participated at ATEC (Aachen Technology Entrepreneurship Conference). The venue took place in a cool location, the castle of Rahe. At the same time the Business Angel Day was hold, so we could present CoboCards to potential investors. Yesterday we were at the European Venture Summit in Düsseldorf. When we started with CoboCards we didn’t imagine being part of such events. But we were. I guess winning the start2grow award was a door-opener.

In both events we have done a short presentation about our vision and our concrete plans for the future. In one sentence: To become the most common tool for “microcontent learning” based on the Freemium business model concept.

Unfortunately, there weren’t enough business angels at the BA-Day. Hence, only a few interesting chats. At the EVS we had the possibility to arrange 1-to-1’s with venture capitalists to figure out potential funding.

Our conclusion:

Events with business angels could be worth to go if there are enough interested business angels. This was not the case until now though. On events with venture capitalists there are those who want to get millions for their investments and those who show off with millions of revenues just to get attention. We have realised that this is aloof from our world. Most probably we will not participate at VC events anymore.

Should a business angel read this and be interested in supporting a young, dynamic team, he could drop us a line though