Henriette Weber

One of the startups I am really excited about these days is Fashiolista – based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Fashiolista works with a bookmarklet that lets you collect fashion you love. Here’s a view of my personal style on fashiolista:

For me, it gives me a total view of what I am into fashionwise, and it’s not something I have given a lot of consideration before. I would love to have a permalink so I could share my personal style with other people. I was just informed by the team that the link to my style is here.

Anyway I think that Fashiolista is going to be huge. For people like me, who’s into fashion, but not THAT into fashion – it’s a very fun eye-opener, and get this – fashiolista became a “go-to” place in my online browsing habits relatively fast. Now if you can catch my attention like that, I think you have a real shot at growing your site. Anyway because I was awestruck with my returns to the site, I decided to interview the guys behind fashiolista. Also because I have an idea that services like this is going to change the online shopping experience so it becomes more social, and products starts to find us, instead of us continuously browsing for something “cool”. anyway, enough babbling -  here goes :

1. where did the idea of fashiolista come from ?

The idea actually came to us after a brainstorm with students from the Amsterdam Fashion Institute. Our goal, from the start, was to help girls shop online and get inspired about fashion.
We had been trying different things before. Most of them involved combining the items from different shops, which resulted in a massive collection of for instance dresses or shoes. We actually found that this approach didn’t make shopping much easier, maybe even harder

When we came up with the idea for Fashiolista, every girl we showed it to was instantly excited. So we knew we were on to something good.

2. how did you begin to execute the idea?

We started off with the design and user experience. One of our partners is a great designer. We than build the whole website as a prototype in a relatively short time. We had to work fast, because we wanted to launch at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam at the end of April.
- and what where the biggest challenges ?

By far the biggest challenge was keeping it simple. It always very easy to keep thinking of more features. Our designer, Thijs, was great in helping us keep the website clean and elegantly simple.

3. what have you done to get people to sign up and get the word/buzz spread around it?

We launched the product at The Next Web conference with a fabulous fashion show. That was really starting with a bang. We actually ‘flipped the switch’ right there while we were on stage. After that, we didn’t do much marketing. The concept just spread viral. In some strange way, it ended up in Brazil where we were featured on several blogs and by teen magazine Capricho. That gave a lot of exposure. Now we get many visitors from people talking about Fashiolista on Twitter, Facebook and Orkut.

4. what do people like about the site ?

They love the fact that they can save all their best fashion finds and share them with the rest of the world. Building your personal fashion feed is really addictive.. Users also like browsing the thousands of handpicked items on the website, discovering new items, stores and brands. It’s inspiring!

5. what is your favorite thing about having a startup ?

It’s really exciting to do. When you build a website from scratch and people actually love it and use it, that’s the greatest feeling in the world.

6. if you should give some good advice on making your own startup what would that be ?

Make sure you have great people to start your company with. Don’t give up, keep trying until you get it just right!

7. anything else you want to add  ?

Help us spread the love for fashion at Fashiolista.com!

8. where can people find you guys ?

Online at http://www.fashiolista.com, Twitter: @fashiolista
If you want to meet us in person, our door is always open… our offices are in Amsterdam, the Netherlands

So illtags.com was also a web app that sprang to my eye as a part of the finnfacts tour. Most certainly because it’s an app that uses collective knowledge to fight deceases.

It basically gathers data about how you and your friends are feeling – a very good example of this is the current global situation with the swineflu.

If you are ill you can list your tags on either facebook or on illtags.com if you want to give anonymous tags about your wellbeing.

Another nifty feature is that you can receive notifications if any of the places you have listed that you are visiting the most, has an increased level of different illness symptoms. I love when the collective datastream that we put out there is used to increase awareness of the things surrounding us – and illtags.com is one of those services… Two thumbs up from here=)

This was one of the highlights for me personally of the finnfacts tour: to find out that Finland had a innovation “framework” for students – such as Demola.

Demola present themselves on their website as:

- An open innovation environment for the creation of the next generation of digital services, products and social practices.

- An opportunity for students to contribute real-life innovations with end-users and globally connected organisations

- An opportunity for organizations to run agile development projects.

But to me it was such an experience to hear about a couple of really cool projects that I will also write more on this blog, projects such as illtags.com that was facilitated by Demola and has used their network to make their startup grow, ideas that might have had a smaller change to grow if not supported by Demola.

I really went home with an idea that I should contact different instances to hear if anything like this exists in Denmark, and if not we need to fund it to be able to grow our startup scene.

Here’s an overview on how Demola works:

more of this guys, please =)

During a coffeebreak at mindtrek our awesome bloggerteam was introduced to Xiha Life ,the worlds first multilingual  social network, that’s targeted at people living outside their home country as well as multilingual people around the world. From my perspective I am so in love with this idea and I can see how it’s useful for a lot of people, but the overall feel and touch could be majorly improved.

Fx I said that I lived in Denmark  and I chose danish as a language – resulting in, that half of my social network was in danish and half of the site was translated into danish and the other halfwas in english. Also it was kind of weird that the people coming into the site don’t really have a chance to find out what they’re looking at until they find the “about us “.

So basically I would say that the site needs a major retouch/strategy redefinition – because the way it looks now I can’t really see it take it to the next level as a startup – however I can really see the use for this kind of community so keep on going strong guys =)

One of the most passionate “startups” we met on the finnfactstour where Muxlim – a Muslim lifestyle media company.  Getting to know the yearly traffic ratings of Muxlim (approx 10 million a year), I would hardly call it a startup, but the dedication, creativity and passion of the team was breathtaking and reminded me of the first steps of  starting something you’re really passionate about.

I think this overwhelming drive of the team comes from the facts that, they are in this to change the world for muslims all over the world – providing a community of lifestyle for people who could use new inspiration – not with a western-centric look, but with inspiring stories for a huge amount of people (majorly muslims) who are sometimes undermined by bigger brands and doesn’t get the same sort of lifestyle content as other cultures.

So this is something there is a huge demand for, maybe not visible to everybody, but for people who has had a hard time finding inspiration to their lifestyle, this is really a valuable service…

So keep changing the world guys! – thumbs up from here =) and keep that fantastic spirit, it’s so inspiring to the rest of us.. .

RunToShop seemed to be the hardrockin’ kidbrother of the finnfacts tour. The guys we met there would just as much talk about snowboarding and party venues in Tampere as their startup – which is really something I believe in, because it showed a LOT of identity in the company and a lot of passion between the people working there…

The only thing that I felt kind of sad about was that their startup isn’t in english beta yet (only finnish so far) so it was really hard for us to see how the actual service worked, however the things they told us about it sounded great.

So these guys are building a startup based on positive recommendations of products that your social network are giving on runtoshop.com. Their mission is to extend the online shopping experience to the places where people allready are (aka. facebook, twitter etc.) – I love the idea but I didn’t feel that I got enough information from the guys to see if it works in real life.

However, the idea is great and genuine and so far it seems like it has momentum in Finland – So I am REALLY looking forward to the english launch (I will let you know when that happens =)

Floobs is a live streaming tool that you can use both for streaming and for videos. I think the first thing that sprung to my eye when I tested out the site earlier was that the flow on the site was great – there was no way that floobs would loose me or other users anywhere – even though I encountered a problem the floobs “get satisfaction” community took over. Visiting floobs IRL was exciting and inspiring, especially because it clearly stood out early on, that floobs wasn’t just another video site online, they had a clearly defined target group and the business model we where introduced to, where more focused on the users and had some really great value for the people using it, when it came to document in what geographical location and how much the videos where watched.

It really left me thinking that if you where getting into live streaming or online video, floobs would be a great option to figure out which of your videos are

1. most popular

2. closest to the targetgroup

3. most effective

and yes! they have a way of measuring that, for the pro users who has purchased floobs. Also something that really would provide useful in a social marketing strategy (my kind of work for Toothless Tiger when I am not writing) is the Floobs TV facebook application.

The traffic on the floobs site and the usage + fans on facebook tells me that Floobs hasn’t really gained momemtum yet with the internet users – but I really think that with a solid video product like this, mainly because of the business model and the hardcore focus on certain groups – floobs is something we will hear more about in the future…