Image via WikipediaExactly one year ago was Zemanta’s first public presentation. That took place in Kiberpipa, the topic was an announcement of our project Strip mine, and Andraz had that famous slideshow, where his email in footer changed from previous academic one, to new @zemanta adress.

This marked an important change in lifestyles for all of us, and after a year, I am sure, that I don’t regret it. It’s been a very interesting ride so far.
We started in a garage of course. Ok, to be honest, it was actually a room in my appartenment, with a desk made of a closet sides and the first server humming in the storage room. We moved from there in September, directly to ‘luxurious’ house in Kensal Green and at the same time expanding team to 7 people. We had to multithread the team at that point, having Gasper managing Ljubljana office, while we were hacking London.

Looking back I mainly find good memories of crazy adventures, like building the final prototype that got us to Seedcamp in two nights of six guys hacking. Or squating in Gherkin offices. Or assembling the second server on the floor of a local shop in Kensal Green. Or smuggling the server and the chef’s knife wearing top hats from London via Paris back to Ljubljana in December. Or using team work on California parties to secure precious minutes from journalists in the middle of the night.
There were some frustrations, like the ‘no internet’ crisis, and also, the last morning of Seedcamp, when we were sure we blew it, was probably the worst feeling ever. We survived and with each new experience we grew stronger.

We evolved from an enterprise, tailor-made product to generalized web service, from a two-men band to a 15 people venture-funded company, from Slovenia to the World. It’s not anything near final success yet, but it’s a nice start.

I’d like to thank everyone who was part of this process. Friends, families, patient girlfriends, co-workers, TFL, Seedcamp mentors, Hellerehrman, Eden Ventures, T.A.G., Saul, Scott, Eric, Erica, and everybody else we’ve met in this time.

Image via Wikipedia

Second half of May will be quite busy for us with many conferences. We’re trying to visit as many as possible to have a chance to meet you and see what other innovative people in the industry are doing.

Here is a short list of them, in order of happening:

NT Konferenca, Portorož

Semantic Technology Conference, San Jose

Thinking Digital, Newcastle

BarCamp NorthEast, Newcastle

@Media 2008, London

BarCamp London 4, London

European Sematic Web Conference, Tenerife

(drop a note to jure@zemanta.com to arrange a meetup or follow our twitter.com/zemanta for instant notifications)

OK, liveblogging from Second Chance Tuesday with Niklas Zenstromm, well, quasy-live, since the internet doesn’t work, as it’s suppose to be at a decent web conference. Anyway, some funny highlights as they were happenin’…
As the moderator has recognized corretly, it feels like 1999 all over again. Niklas is a looser! Had a job, finished his degree, had an office, not garage…
Kazaa had 400mio downloaded copies and no business model better than advertising. They wanted to talk about it with music industry but only recived letters from their lawyers.
“Was your principle back then, that the people won’t pay for content?” Yes, the reality is that on internet you can get anything for free, so advertising is the way to go. “So you ended up sued to death?” Yes, noone but lawyers made any money with it. “So then we continued to create services not involving so many lawyers.”
It took more than a year to raise first money for Skype. Becuase it was a bad year and for the track record.
There was noone offering something like it, and they were not easy to use. You had to have one geek talking to the other. “What a horrible conversation that is.” When we launched, everyone called us, at the end of august 2003.
“Did you have a clear business model from the start?” Yes, get people to use free service and upsell skype-out calls, and then maybe have yellow pages with ads.
The telecom companies said “who’d wanna use a computer to make phone calls?”
“And eventually you’ve come up with a perfect business model - selling Skype to E-Bay for an enourmous amount of money.”
“How much money did they pay?” “It depends on how you look at it…”
“How did you feel when e-bay cut back some of the investment” “well, that was mostly accounting”
“How many of you have tried Joost? quite some… How many are actually using it?” [you can imagine the amount... ]
“Profitability is not on the roadmap for this year” - how long has Joost been around allready?
“Startup is not so dependant on the cycle of the economy.”
Biggest mistake and best decision? I missed the first internet wave, ecause I wasn’t etrepreneur from the begining. To launch Skype.
“How did you come up with the name Skype?” “It used to be Skyper, but that was registered to Deutche Telecom…”

Related articles by Zemanta:

• eBay: What to do with Skype? [news.com]
• Energy of Startup Teams [coolastory.blogspot.com]
• CE-Oh no he didn’t! Part XLVI: Skype’s former CEO admits eBay paid too much [engadget.com]
• Euphemism du Jour: Overshot in Terms of Monetization [paul.kedrosky.com]
• Skype founders ‘happy’ £260m exit [guardian.co.uk]
• Skype Co-Founder Admits eBay Paid Too Much [informationweek.com]

After exactly two months on the Continents (old and new one) we’ve visited midlands of London again. I was surprised that walking around town felt less annoying than I remembered.
We were there for a great party, organized by our lawyers under the roof of The Gherkin Building. Since we were in town, the weather was great, and the view was absolutely fantastic!!! It was like a scene from Bladerunner or any other decent SF movie - a metropolis reaching from one horizont to the other, third and fourth. And you could hardly notice when the city lights changed to stars and Thames transformed to Milky Way. It almost felt like the centre of the Universe. Or the insides of a hollow planet with holes in the ground.

Related articles by Zemanta:

• A journey through the London night [telegraph.co.uk]
• Bono’s U2 tower to be tallest in Ireland [telegraph.co.uk]

As you might know, Zemanta is taking part in a Seedcamp process. Which means some initial funding and three months of work in London. Yesterday Seedcamp semi-officially ended in an event called “investors day” where all 6 teams/companies presented what we have done in last months and how we plan to take over the world in the future (starting with our respective markets).

It was quite astonishing how far all of us got since the beginning of September. Presentations were naturally all polished up, but more importantly we knew much better what we are actually talking about. At this point I’d really like to thank Reshma, Saul, all the mentors, investors and rest of the Seedcamp crowd for providing us with this great opportunity to learn, develop and progress.

With new gained experience we are now far better equipped to explore what lies ahead of us.

Related articles by Zemanta:

• 52 hours left to apply for Seedcamp [localglobe.blogspot.com]
• More Events and Seedcamp on the Road [blog.seedcamp.com]