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Europeans in Silicon Valley [Malta Independent, The](Malta Independent, The Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Career Transitions, LLC, an American company from Indiana, is using the innovative presentation tool, Prezi, to better engage clients and potential clients. The latest addition to the Career Transitions website is a Prezi presentation that showcases the company and its Talent Acquisition, Contract Staffing and CareerSmart Outplacement services. Unlike traditional slidedecks, Prezi offers a fresh approach to visualisation, engaging the viewer in a dynamic way using a zooming, virtual canvas. "Prezi makes presenting ideas visually interesting and engages clients better than traditional presentation tools, both inside and outside of the boardroom," said Brian Hulecki, Career Transitions director. "Prezi is becoming the standard way in which Career Transitions highlights our company and our services." In an interactive and visually interesting way, Career Transitions Prezi highlights: 1) Talent Acquisition, 2) Professional Contract Staffing, 3) CareerSmart Outplacement, and 4) Job Seeker Services. "We expect our Prezi, in some cases, to be a potential client's first impression of our company," Mr Hulecki said. "Prezi communicates our services in a fun and creative way, and makes a lasting impression." With its 300 million users, PowerPoint by Microsoft is undoubtedly the world beater. But it is now facing competition from this Hungarian start-up, Prezi, which has already attracted 55 million fans. Launched in 2009 in Budapest and later in San Francisco, and still being launched elsewhere in the world (the latest just days ago in France), Prezi is increasingly being used by companies such as advertising companies, design and especially architectural studios who want to impress their clients by their creativity. It was created by architect Adam Somlai-Fischer who wanted a tool to highlight certain areas in his presentation. He was helped by an engineer from the Budapest Technology University, Professor Peter Halacsy, and a serial entrepreneur Peter Arvai and together they created Prezi. Its success was immediate. The start-up gathered $14 million from Accel Partners and it was included by President Barack Obama along with companies such as Apple, AT&T and Microsoft in the ConnectED project, which, with a budget of $750 million, hopes to improve the way lessons are given in schools. Prezi has seduced mostly young people. One many times meets its users in classes of schools of design, commerce or of engineers. It is based on a freemium model, just like LinkedIn. Its payment model is rather unique and has helped the company attain profitability in a very short time. Peter Arzai was one of the speakers at the recent Innovation Convention organised by the European Commission held in Brussels. Mr Arzai spoke in the session, Europeans in Silicon Valley, on the second and last day of the convention. When he and his friends came up with Prezi in 2008 it was a time when Europe was deep in recession. The new, young company wanted to take on giants such as Microsoft, Apple and Google. Before launching Prezi, Peter had launched another company, in Sweden. At that time, as well, his father was ill in hospital. He created a website which compared data on medical treatment in different countries and the prices charged. Almost immediately, he received a call from a shouting lawyer who asked him who did he think he was. Eventually, the idea caught on and soon it was lawyers themselves who became some of the most frequent users of the website. In other words, he had had a great idea, which nobody else thought it, but doing the right thing and thinking a new thing was not enough. That was when he moved to Silicon Valley in California. In SV there is a critical mass of globally successful companies. Of the top 500 companies in the world, 27 are in IT and 18 are in the US, five in Asia and four in Europe. Speaking earlier at another discussion, Mr Arzai said that in this interconnected world, one may create a very successful company from the most unlikely country. Spotify, for instance, is a commercial music streaming service providing digital rights management-restricted content from record labels including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group and Universal. Launched in October 2008 by Swedish start-up Spotify AB, the service had approximately 10 million users as of 15 September 2010, about 2.5 million of whom were paying users. Total users reached 20 million by December 2012, five million of whom pay a monthly subscription fee that varies based on locale. Skype is a freemium voice-over-IP service and instant messaging client, currently developed by the Microsoft Skype Division. The name was derived from "sky" and "peer". Skype was first released in August 2003. It was created by Janus Friis (Denmark) and Niklas Zennström (Sweden) in cooperation with Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn ( Estonia), who supplied the backend which was also used in Kazaa. Skype had 663 million registered users as of the end of 2010. It was bought by Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion. Microsoft's Skype division headquarters is in Luxembourg, but most of the development team and 44% of the overall employees of the division are still situated in Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia. Also speaking at the same discussion was Xavier Damman, the co-founder of Storify.com. An entrepreneur and an engineer in computer science from Belgium, Xavier moved to San Francisco in 2009 to create Storify, a social media curation platform used by the largest publishers and brands around the world from CNN, New York Times, the BBC, to the White House, the British Monarchy and the Prime Minister's Office. It has been, he said, a rollercoaster ride which took all of four years to reach success. When still in Europe, he tried to raise money through banks and other sources, but they all told him they needed to see his business plan. In California, on the other hand, people did not want to see his business plan but only to see if enough people were interested in it. He now feels like telling would-be investors: Keep your money. We do not need it. On the contrary, his advice to would-be entrepreneurs is to focus on the product and find a market for it. There are still lots of red tape in Europe and Europe looks at start-ups only to see if they make a profit or if they fail. In Silicon Valley, one feels he is successful if he or his company get acquired. When someone came up with a really innovative idea both in Paris and in Belgium about ordering a taxi without waiting in a queue, the idea was blocked by governments afraid of organised taxi drivers. Yet another speaker, Max Senges works in Google's Policy Team in Berlin to liaise and collaborate especially with colleagues from academia and civil society in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. He is passionately thinking and working on the crossroads between Internet politics, innovation, culture and philosophy of technology. In the last 10 years he worked with academic, governmental and private organisations, centring on knowledge ecosystems, e-Learning and Internet governance. He had two start-ups, in Silicon Valley and in Heidelberg and both were unsuccessful. The ideas he was espousing were too progressive for his time. Then he did a pilot project on Google and Google, besides poaching his idea, offered him a satisfactory package. The last speaker was Soren Stamer, co-founder and CEO of Yokudo. He described himself as passionate about the fundamental change and disruptive force a massively networked society brings to the world. Born in Hamburg, Soren co-founded CoreMedia, a provider of content management software, with two of his university professors and a colleague in 1996. He acted as CoreMedia's founding CEO until 2009 when he moved to Silicon Valley. Throughout his career, Soren has advocated the use of social media, self-organisation and fairness in the workplace. He has blogged about self-organisation and co-edited the book Enterprise 2.0 – The Art of Letting Go. He spoke to the conference about the importance of learning quickly and also about one of the rules he learnt at a very early stage: if you run out of money you lose all the training you have put in the company and many valuable persons who could have been an asset to the company. (c) 2013 Standard Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. Provided by Syndigate.info, an Albawaba.com company |