Posted on

itnig at the Mobile Mobile Conf, Kraków! #mmconf

Last April I was sent from itnig to Krakow (Poland) to attend one of the best Ruby conferences in Europe: Railsberry. What I later discovered was that just a few days before Railsberry there was another really cool conference, organized by the same people, about mobile development. So there I went!

I’m talking of course about the Mobile Mobile Conf, or #mmconf. In short, #mmconf is a conference for mobile designers and developers to share what they think is going to be the next big thing. After the talks they use the wonderful environment of the conference/Krakow to meet with other people working on the same.

The talks covered topics such as “native vs html5”, multi-platform, the future of mobile, the relation between “mobile” and “web” and marketing of mobile apps. I guess we could sum up the whole message of the 2-day conference with the message from Brad Frost in his talk:

For a future friendly web

One thing that developers (in this case specially mobile developers) have to always keep in mind is:

We don’t know what device will be under the christmas tree two years from now.

Being an advocate of Mobile First, Content First, responsiveness, etc, Brad sums up the 5 features that a future friendly mobile app/web must have as follows:

  • Ubiquity: Same content everywhere. People DO WANT to do the same things on mobile, don’t assume they’re just looking around. Mobile e-commerce growing like crazy is a good proof for this.
  • Flexibility: Give the best possible experience given the constraints of the devise being used. Don’t try to always do everything, but do it the best possible way.
  • Performance: 74% of the people will abandon a site if it takes more than 5 seconds to load. Performance is a feature.
  • Enhancement: Mobile-first, enhance progressively to add extra features or better experience if the bigger display allows it.
  • Future-friendly: Be backwards-compatible to try being forward-compatible.

Slides (from the same talk, but in a different event).

Jordi Romero
Partner at itnig

Posted on

Welcome to itnig’s blog!

Hopefully, this will start a series of interesting posts about startups and any information that can be valuable to them.

What is itnig?

itnig is an accelerator, labeled like this mainly because of the powerful network effect of the term, now broadly used in the startup scene. However, here at itnig we do not care much about the standard way an accelerator is supposed to work.

itnig is a startup that strives to master business development in the most rational and scientific way. We select entrepreneurs who share the same spirit and harbour crazy and ambitious business visions, we participate in their projects and help them make their plans come true no matter what stands in our way. Accepting risk is something that turns us on. Seriously.

itnig doesn’t give away cash, but it provides the startups with more that they can buy with it. We offer the teams a place to work and live together. We help them find the most suitable mentors among our network, we get them inside our learning and experimantation program, we roll up our sleeves to write really awesome code, we participate creating alpha and beta versions of the products and interpret user data from the market, we come up with killer online marketing strategies, we jointly develop financing plans to sustain the projects and we share our network of partners offering the best services to them: legal, accounting, delivery and anything necessary. We are very good at assembling “A-Teams” that get the job done. We hold workshops and events about almost everything related to our world, every day.

We share expenses with entrepreneurs in the starting phase in order to sustain the projects and be able to grow.

We are proud of being in Europe

We never really understood why entrepreneurs are abandoning our continent to go to Silicon Valley, all the more so as getting a US visa is among the most difficult achievements for mankind. Proportionally, very few European born and grown startups make it to the global markets, the best teams fly away to other places and most European accelerators offer, as great value propositions, direct bridges to the US in order to move their startups to the Disneyland of entrepreneurship.

We are quite fed up with economic and political pessimism, and we believe we can do better by creating growing organizations in spite of crisis and social meltdowns. We know for a fact that Europe is filled with skilled entrepreneurs and talented professionals that can really make a difference and conquer the world with their products and services. So be it!

We are hackers

We are a bunch of individuals filled with curiosity, energy, passion and perseverance. We identify ourselves as hackers, and those who apply for our process as well. And we bring hacker’s culture directly into our everyday business strategies. The following are some examples:

  • Sharing tools and information
  • Openness and transparency
  • Decentralization and horizontality
  • Hands-on imperative
  • Technology is central, it can be art and beauty
  • Disregard for the status quo
  • Commitment to find the most elegant and efficient solution to any problem
  • Learning the how and why a system works in order to hack it and do it better

We are independent from government, universities and coorporations and plan to keep it that way in the future. We didn’t call ourselves “The hacker accelerator” as we started, but we’ve been called like this continuously by others so we finally decided to use it as our tagline. Yes, we are very conscious of the controversy we cause by doing so.

I hope you enjoy your stay at itnig!