Check out Silicon Allee’s weekly rundown of all the best events going on in our fair city: what’s happening, what’s coming up and what may be of interest whether you be investor, entrepreneur or hacker.

Tuesday

Berlin Startup Culture (BSC) is one for the techies. Engineers with extensive experience in backend application development on web and mobile – including RoR, Python, PHP, .Net/MVC, Java, Scala, iOS, Android and HTML5 – will talk about the advantages and disadvantages of tech stack options. The event will include live code of applications the experts have developed with the tech stack. From 7pm at Wind & Wetter.

Thursday

Co-found me is a meet up to help potential co-founders find each other. It attempts to create an environment where you can make the right connections and form a great startup team. It’s open to everyone – aspiring entrepreneurs, business people, freelancers, hackers and others. From 6.30pm, location is revealed when you sign up.

The Berlin Tech Meet Up is back. Join fellow geeks, entrepreneurs, hackers and investors for an evening of live demos focused around great new technology. The five-minute demos (followed by Q&A) are designed to showcase the tech, not the business model. From 7.30pm at mobilesuite.

Email us at team [at] siliconallee.com if you want your event to be included in the Big Berlin Breakdown.

The Petcube team with their device and their end users

You would never leave a small child at home alone all day – yet we’re more than happy to do exactly that with cats and dogs. Not quite the same thing, of course, but it’s still surprising that no one has come up with a way for you to interact with your pets while you’re at work. Nobody, that is, until a Ukrainian startup came along and seemingly solved the problem at a, um, stroke.

Petcube does exactly what is says on the tin – it’s a square gadget with a video camera and moveable laser pointer which enables you to watch, talk and play with your pet from afar.

The cube also contains a microcomputer which connects to your home wifi, and there is a smartphone app through which you can follow the video stream and share it with friends, family and the general public. There are even plans to allow you to play with pets from shelters if you don’t have a Fido or Felix of your own at home.

The Petcube team were in Berlin this week to showcase a prototype of their device at Seedcamp, allowing other participants to remotely play with a chihuahua belonging to one of the founders. With work ongoing on the hardware and on the iOS app, the team are planning to launch a kickstarter campaign as soon as the device is ready for launch, probably late summer or early autumn.

Kiev native Alex Neskin is the original inventor of the cube and now the CTO of its startup. He came up with the gadget to use with his own dog and it was only later that he decided to turn it onto a business. The team is hoping to latch on to the ‘Internet of things’ wave of smart devices permanently connected to the Internet which can be easily accessed via mobile – other examples include the Nest and Tado heating control devices and the Jawbone UP wristband.

Petcube co-founder and CEO Yaroslav Azhnyuk told Silicon Allee: “People treat pets like their family; a lot of owners even call themselves ‘pet parents’. You already have a phone in your pocket to call your five-year old son, but what about your cat or dog? Pets are bored at home as well. Research shows 20 percent of American pet owners leave TV turned on so their pets don’t feel lonely. There are even dedicated TV channels for cats and dogs. It may sound ridiculous unless you see your dog’s sad eyes, each time returning back home. We want to change that.”

And that sounds fur enough.

The last Photo Hack Day was a hit – this time around it should be even bigger

Google and picture database Fotolia will co-host EyeEm’s third Photo Hack Day next month – when there will be €20,000 in prizes up for grabs, including a trip to Paris. The 24-hour event is once again taking place amongst the shipping containers at the innovative Platoon Kunsthalle venue.

It will see developers, designers and photographers creating new photo applications to revolutionise how we take, see and interact with images. The winning hacks at the previous event, held at the same place last September, included Picture Your Feed – a mashup of the Facebook, Getty and EyeEm APIs – and Tourist Eraser, an app to remove those annoying tourists out of pictures of famous sights.

The prizes on offer include a trip to Fotolia’s HQ in the French capital as well as iPad minis, Samsung Galaxys and Fujifilm X10 cameras, plus lenses and other photography gear. Participants will be given the chance to present their hacks to an international jury to try and claim the goodies.

Olivier Sirven is the vice CTO at Fotolia. He said: “Photo Hacking is somehow part of our DNA. We already provided the very first API stock photo library in 2005 when we launched Fotolia and count more than 4,000 API installations today. Software and coding have played a major role in helping us become Europe’s number one stock photo agency. We want to support the developer scene, see what the best developers are doing and work with the most talented people. That’s why we are co-hosting Photo Hack Day.”

Around 150 people are expected to take part on June 1-2 and there will be a sizzling BBQ to help you hack through the night. Registration is free and everyone is welcome to join for the demos on the Sunday from 1.30pm.

Ramzi Rizk, CTO of EyeEm, said: “From the beginning, our vision behind Photo Hack Day was to create an open space for people to play. You only have 24 hours, so instead of juggling around an idea for months, you actually have to nail it down and get it done. It’s a good opportunity to try out things, learn and get inspired.”

Flo Meissner is the CEO of EyEm, which has had a fantastic start to 2013 as its rival Instagram has suffered from problems largely of its own making. He said he was expecting “some of the brightest minds in tech and photography” to attend the Hack Day: “It’s not only a great opportunity for developers to show off their skills but also for designers and photographers to come and think about the future of photography – and then put their ideas into practice. I’m always amazed by what can be created in a mere 24 hours and can’t wait to see where it’s going this June.”

And so enters a new player: Vamos, the Berlin-based startup which up till now had been focusing on event discovery by pulling in details from Facebook, is expanding into event ‘inspiration’ and ticketing purchases.

The company has already started down that road, with Converse becoming the first paying customer this month with three events promoted through mobile banners, newsletters and web pages. The last of the three is taking place tonight.

It’s no surprise that Vamos – which secured a six-digit seed round last October – would be looking to muscle in on the online event ticketing market, which is reportedly worth €50 billion in worldwide revenue a year. And mobile is the way forward, with rival Ticketfly3 seeing purchases on mobile platforms double last year.

Luis-Daniel Alegria, Vamos co-founder and CEO, said: “We’re full of belief that Vamos will become the go-to source for events much like what Google is for websites today. Just like them, our engineering challenge will lie in crafting better and more personalised event results for our users.”

He added that the team is currently working on its next round of funding to improve the platform’s recommendations, as well as trying for a higher conversion rate when selling tickets.

Compare! Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 vs. iPad 3

Comparison platform VERSUS IO has closed a $2.8 million (€2.18m) Series A round led by Earlybird. The round includes the $100,000 from 500 Startups founder Dave McClure, who made the company his first German investment late last year, as well as contributions from angel investors Lars Dittrich and Dario Suter.

VERSUS IO, whose parent company is called URGE IO, has enjoyed substantial growth since its launch in July 2011, which came three months after it received €700,000 in seed funding from JMES Investments and HTGF. The platform allows users to compare consumer technology products such as smartphones and tablets as well as cities. The startup boasts of providing comparison results in a simple and clear format without an overload of information, “ultimately allowing consumers to digest complex product data quickly and efficiently.”

To achieve this, VERSUS IO uses a unique natural language algorithm and an intuitive user interface. The platform currently offers 25 million comparisons in 18 different languages and sees an average monthly traffic increase of 35 percent – currently at two million unique users.

Ramin G. Far, VERSUS IO CEO and founder, said: “We have worked very hard to build an amazing platform and, as a result, have experienced impressive growth and extremely positive feedback from our users. The closure of our Series A round is further evidence of the significant opportunities that are emerging in the comparison landscape.”

Earlybird co-founder and partner Christian Nagel said: “VERSUS IO’s exponential growth over the past year reflects a massive demand among consumers who want to make more informed purchase decisions.” Dave McClure, meanwhile, said: “VERSUS IO’s ability to take a sophisticated algorithm and make it so incredibly simple to use is one of the main reasons it caught me eye. … I’m predicting big things.”

To see off competition from the likes of diffen, future comparison verticals on VERSUS IO are to set to include people – think ‘Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates’ – real estate and even plastic surgeons. Currently resident in the Factory, Ramin and his team were among the startups who met German President Joachim Gauck on his visit to the future tech hub.

Peter Read on stage at Heureka

Some of us are born to be entrepreneurs, some of us just don’t have the right mental make up to cut it – but could science, by way of Buddhism, help to change that? Serial angel investor Peter Read believes so, at least in part. In a talk at Heureka on Tuesday, he revealed his work with top psychology and neuroscience experts to see if founders could learn the ‘soft skills’ he believes are necessary to be a entrepreneurial success, alongside ‘hard skills’ such as coding.

Read, whose investments in Berlin include Toast, HowDo and Loopcam, was giving a talk entitled ‘are you the kind of entrepreneur that angel investors want to back?’ during which he explained the skills he looks for in potential investees.

The hard skills are relatively easy to learn – there are any number of places you can go to be taught how to program, design or run a business, for example. But soft skills are a different matter.

Read further splits them into two areas; “protecting the downside of being an entrepreneur” and “unlocking the upside”. The former involves skills for “living in a very, very uncertain, changing, dynamic environment. The stress and anxiety go along with that. And therefore [the] capability to manage that stress, to deal with it.”

By unlocking the upside, Read explained, he means “having a refresh button; [the ability to] come up with ideas, keep evolving, keep innovating, keep disrupting. And having self awareness of others, empathy, and communication skills to take other people on that journey with you.”

Yet these sorts of mental and emotional qualities are usually seen as being innate, rather than something you learn. Read, however, believes that the theory of mindfulness, of concentrating on what is happening right now rather than the past or the future, can help you improve on them. Emanating from Buddhist meditation, mindfulness involves the focusing of attention and awareness and the adoption of an open-minded acceptance, and its backers say it can help reduce stress and depression.

Read has been working together with the likes of Mark Williams, a professor of clinical psychology at Oxford University and director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, and Felicia Huppert, a professor at Cambridge University specialising in cognitive and behavioural neuroscience, to see how far this effect can be taken.

Read has also spoken with Jon Cabat-Zinn, an academic at the University of Massachusetts Medicine School who helped to popularise the idea of mindfulness in the West.

Some serious minds – and Read believes that while you can’t just take a random person and transform them into the perfect startup founder, mindfulness can nonetheless help. “Whether you can take somebody who was going to be a racing driver and make them into an entrepreneur, I have no idea. That almost sounds like genetic engineering. But you can take somebody who has a bunch of entrepreneurial skills, and help a good entrepreneur to become a great entrepreneur. The language is important; it’s not like you can make somebody something, but you can support them, you can help them improve their soft skills.”

It is easy to be cynical about how much of an effect mindfulness can actually have – many would undoubtedly dismiss the whole thing as a nonsensical fad – but Read insists that schemes such as the Mindfulness in Schools Project, which tries to help pupils improve their “well-being and learning”, do make a real impact.

And he also believes the same can be true of entrepreneurs who perhaps want to learn more soft skills. “It seems to me,” he added,  “that that is much harder than learning the hard skills – but it is possible. We don’t have to take your genes or the neural structure of your brain as an immutable given; there is something that can be done to change it.”

Eventbrite founders Kevin and Julia Hartz

Berlin’s startup scene is all about the events – that’s why it has been such a fertile market for Eventbrite, the Silicon Valley-based company which has embarked on an aggressive path to conquer the world of ticketing. After seeing some serious organic growth in the German capital, the company launched its own presence here. That was backed up recently with the visit of two of Eventbrite’s three co-founders, husband and wife team Kevin and Julia Hartz (CEO and president respectively).

They sat down to speak to Silicon Allee about where the company is headed after its notable latest round of funding, and what it’s like to have Oliver Samwer as an investor.

SILICON ALLEE: Why did you decide that Berlin would be a good growth market for Eventbrite?

KEVIN HARTZ: With Eventbrite you can publish and start selling tickets when we haven’t localised, and prior to even having German language and when we were just solely integrated with PayPal, we were seeing a lot of activity in Berlin and in the wider areas of Germany, and that is an indication that there is a great demand. With German people, there is a high degree of gathering together and Eventbrite is about bringing people together, and you can see that whether it is on the entertainment side or whether that is going to a club and seeing a DJ, or whether that is at a tech event, which is obviously a fast growing segment inside of Berlin itself.

SA: You recently announced $60 million in new funding despite having apparently been on a straight course towards an IPO – why the change of heart?

KH: There are two points there. The first is, businesses generally require more capital than they have in two situations – when they are dong very poorly and when thy are doing very well and you have expansion opportunities. The second point is, why did we raise a private round rather than going public? We always had the intention of going public sooner rather than later, but over the last, I would say, 18 months, we have really shifted our thinking there. A lot of the reason, having talked to a lot of the entrepreneurs like Dave Goldberg [at SurveryMonkey], Drew Houston at Dropbox and Brian Cheskey at Airbnb, is that there are a lot of advantages to staying private. We have a great balance sheet, we have $100m in cash on our books, and we can take some big risks and do some things that would be very difficult and would raise a lot of eyebrows in the public markets. We want to take these risks now, get the company on an even faster growth trajectory and bring something to the public markets that’s even bigger and better.

SA: So you’re planning some big changes in the near future?

KH: Absolutely. And that revolves around international expansion, that revolves around the consumer experience, that revolves around mobile.

SA: Let’s talk about Oliver Samwer, copycat king and co-founder of Rocket Internet with his brothers and one of the most divisive figures in the German technology industry. He decided to invest in Eventbrite at an early stage rather than follow his usual MO and copy the business model – why?

KH: Oli was out in the Valley when I was fairly active in investing and we kept crossing paths and comparing notes on deals. I find Oliver to be extremely sharp, extremely aggressive, and we were talking and he made us an offer and invested into the company. I think the Samwers are often kicked around a bit in the Silicon Valley media but in reality they have had a very positive impact on helping to build a startup culture in Europe; they have trained so many – there are hundreds if not thousands that have been part of Samwer companies that are now going off to start their own companies.

SA: What is he like as an investor on a personal level?

JULIA HARTZ: We found him to be extremely supportive and enthusiastic, and I’ll never forget when he first came in and said, I really love what you’re doing and want to invest in you, and of course he had the opportunity to invest in a lot of different people closer to home who were doing what we were doing but he saw how we were doing it and he identified that, and it was really helpful at the time.

KH: He is extremely bright and very very aggressive. He loves growth; he lives, breathes and sleeps growth; how do you grow a company fast?

SA: When it comes to competitors, where you are facing off against the likes of Amiando and Ticketscript, you have said that the event ticketing space has an easy entrance threshold but an extremely difficult success one – can you leverage your current position to dominate the market?

KH: We’ve been absolutely gaining momentum while competition has been waning so it’s a period where we just have a tremendous amount of momentum and that is punctuated by the aggressive nature in which capital is coming our way.

SA: What’s next for Eventbrite in Berlin?

KH: Eventbrite is really is all about what Berliners create, and the tech community has been so strong in adopting Eventbrite but we’re also very excited to see electronic dance music, we’re excited to see other conferences in different content entering onto the system – we put the platform out there and the market really grows upon it.

In another big week for startup events in the German capital, it’s also not too late (on Monday, that is) to grab a ticket for the Heureka conference.

Law firm Hengeler Mueller‘s offices in Mitte will play host to Capital On Stage on Thursday with 20 VCs and angel investors set to attend to present their views on the tech market, what value they bring to startups and what they are looking for in their next investments – a can’t-miss opportunity for the 200 founders who will also be there.

Confirmed investors include Rob Moffat from Balderton, Andreas Hoffman from JMES, Uwe Horstmann from Project A, Kurt Mueller from Target Partners and Andreas Schlenker from Partech.

In addition, the conference will include sessions on fundraising and open office hours enabling startups to book 15-minute private meetings with individual investors.

Arjen Strijker, co-founder of Capital On Stage, said he was excited about bringing the event to Germany for the first time: “I expect the tech startup scene in Berlin to produce some great companies with global brands in the next 18 months.”

The office hours take place from 9am-12pm, with the conference itself going on into the evening. You can get your 45 percent discount – €65 instead of €125 – by entering ‘Silicon Allee’ into the ‘referred by’ field when filling out your ticket application here.

Check out this week’s Big Berlin Breakdown for more info on attending Heureka.

Check out Silicon Allee’s weekly rundown of all the best events going on in our fair city: what’s happening, what’s coming up and what may be of interest whether you be investor, entrepreneur or hacker.

Monday

The Play! May meet up takes place at leanovate GmbH with a presentation from Michal Gibowski about Loudcloud, a web app for listening to music collaboratively. At Blücherstrasse 22, from 7pm.

Tuesday

The theme for the second running of the Heureka conference is ‘discover the five elements of a startup’ and speakers will include HitFox’s Jan Beckers, Gitta Blatt from Wooga and Pawel Chudzinksi from Point Nine Capital. It’s not too late to secure a ticket – more info here. At Alte Münze, from 9am through till 10pm.

Also on Tuesday is the Start-up Berlin Meetup; a networking event – without presentations – which is aimed at garnering the maximum opportunity for interaction for its attendees whilst retaining a small group atmosphere. Tickets cost €7 or €8 and come with a free drink and a simple buffet. At the WYE Lounge at Skalitzer Strasse 86, from 6-10pm.

Wednesday

Wannabe techies can become a web developer in just four weeks with the Code Bootcamp program, which is suitable both for complete beginners and the more advanced. The teaching is through a variety of live group sessions, hands-on mentoring and online courses. Classes will take place on four consecutive Wednesday evenings, beginning this week. The program costs €59.

If you have an event you want us to include in the Big Berlin Breakdown, send us an email to team [at] siliconallee.com.

This week in the Third Degree, our regular Friday feature where we chat with some of Berlin’s best and brightest CEOs, we spoke to Giorgio Bertolini of Ploonge about emerging countries, a positive web culture and why Berlin is like a child.

SILICON ALLEE: If you weren’t the CEO of a startup, what would you be doing?

GEORGIO BERTOLINI: I would be looking for a different challenge; it wouldn’t matter what kind as long as it’s a challenge. However, right now I can’t see myself doing anything else other than this exact project.

SA: What do you like about Berlin?

GB: I think Berlin is like a child waking up after an inspiring dream. It’s full of young people from different social backgrounds willing to challenge themselves, build innovative projects together and share their dream. I can feel positive energy in the air.

SA: East or West Berlin?

GB: I like the Prenzlauer Berg area with its mix of fancy and underground atmospheres. So, I’d say East.

SA: What do you like to do when you’re not working?

GB: I like to do sport outdoors, mainly swimming and tennis. I also like to travel a lot and explore new places.

SA: If you leave Berlin where do you like to go?

GB: I’m very interested in emerging countries such as South America and Asia.

SA: What is your favourite cafe/bar/restaurant?

GB: I really enjoy Michelberger Cafe – it’s really great to relax there with friends. I also like to have informal meetings there.

SA: If you could employ anybody who would you choose?

GB: That’s easy. I would employ anybody who believes in this project as much as the team does.

SA: How do you think Berlin as a city will develop in the next decade?

GB: Unfortunately, I think Berlin will gradually become a normal city, a normal metropolis of Western Europe with skyscrapers and an expensive standard of living. But I hope this will come as late as possible. Berlin is fascinating as it is, for us today, but nothing lasts forever.

SA: What do you think the Internet will look like in ten years?

GB: I think the Internet will go on to disrupt many more barriers. It is fundamental to build a positive web culture which will use the power of the Internet to improve our lives and give more opportunities to everyone in the world.