The weekend from February 7-11, eleven members from HHL's student initiative accelerate@hhl went to Hamburg to get insights into the local entrepreneurial scene.
The program on Saturday started with a presentation by Michael Trautmann, one of the founders of the marketing agency KemperTrautmann which was recently awarded the global Newcomer Agency 2009. After this impressive start the day continued to be outstanding with roundtable discussions starting with Dominik Reisig, founder of the start-up Cavi.tv followed by Michael Backes from eVenture Capital Partners. Participants of the weekend were excited about the trip and ended their visit with a very nice dinner at an Italian restaurant in the famous harbor of Hamburg.

HHL Alumni Johannes Kreibohm and Thorsten Lubinski co-founded social games venture Plinga. Plinga develops and publishes games, which let users play online with their real-world friends using the infrastructure built by social platforms like Facebook or VZ Networks. The start-up is funded by Rocket Internet, the business builder of the Samwer brothers' European Founders Fund where numerous HHL alumni currently work on developing new ideas.

After the succesful launch of the startup career fair last year, HHL career
services in cooperation with the Entrepreneurship program invited HHL
entrepreneurs to the second startup career fair. For a long time,
HHL-entrepreneurs have been looking for a way to present themselves in front of
HHL students to gain popularity for internship and employment. To meet this
demand and based on the discussions with many students that showed us their
interest as well, we introduced the HHL Start-up career fair. The slots fo the
fair filled very fast and we are happy to welcome these companies on campus in
April for presentations, discussions and an after-show BBQ: mycitydeal UK, Mellowball, trivago, MisterSpex, KeyX.

One of the core courses of the entrepreneurship elective at
HHL is the businessplan seminar where students develop a business plan for their
own idea and present it in front of a jury of experts. This event has been
hosted by Venture Capital firm Grazia Equity as the "Grazia Equity Businessplan
Competition" for eight years already and we are happy that this partnership
continues also in 2010. The seminar is a great way to test-drive ideas and to
get real-life feedback. Two years ago, we started to open up the seminar for
outside entrepreneurs. Here, we bring together researchers and founders with
those HHL students that want to apply their know-how on a business case without
yet having a clear own idea what kind of firm to start. This win-win situation
has received great feedback from both HHL students and the outside entrepreneurs
and praises go to the IHK zu
Leipzig - without their support we would not be able to conduct the seminar
in this form.
For our next round of the seminar from April to June 2010 the
application deadline is now open. For more information, read here
or contact us directly.

Serial Entrepreneur Friedhelm Wachs was awarded “Most Outstanding Senator of the world” by the largest entrepreneurial organisation of the world, Junior Chamber International (JCI) in Hammamet, Tunesia. He is the first German to receive that honour in the last 64 years. In the event, was honoured for his entrepreneurial achievements and his international support of adult education in business and administration. Friedhelm’s nickname within JCI apparently is “ Mister Negotiation”

HHL alumnus René Brembach co-founded a Mexican food concept called típica. típica is an authentic Mexican taquería offering fresh tacos, alambres and other modern Mexican dishes in a modern and classic atmosphere. You can find the first restaurant at Rosenstraße 19, 10178 Berlin or under www.tipica.mx.

German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche started an discussion on their online service wiwo.de how Germany can become more entrepreneurial. Among the discussants are HHL graduates Julia Derndinger and Lukasz Gadowski. Read more here about their views.

German product test service Stiftung Warentest recently assessed online booking portals. Among the seven tested services, billigflieger.de - the meta price comparison engine for flights from HHL alumnus Marcel Radzei was testified to deliver the best prices and was branded as test winner. Read more here.

Finance portal investor.com featured successful German hedge fund managers. Among the most successful ones (Barron's ranking #23) is HHL alumnus Karsten Schröder with his own fund Amplitude Capital. Read more here.

Several articles already featured the impact that MisterSpex from HHL alumnus Dirk Graber has on the optician market. Read here about a recent Handelsblatt article on MisterSpex.

Online gaming portal playnik.com, where HHL alumnus Malte Paul is a co-founder, succeeded in winning over 1 million new users in 2009. "Currently we win 5.000 to 10.000 new gamers a day" told Malte in an interview with German newspaper die Welt. 

Serial Entrepreneur, Venture Capitalist and business builder Oliver Samwer talks about how to best prepare for the decision to become an entrepreneur. Very good stuff.

HHL alumnus Gregor Dorsch has already won several awards for his company Syntops. Just recently they launched their newest product: PersonalNews, a customizable newspaper for end consumers. Basically you pick-and-coose the topics you are interested in, syntops aggregates the respective articles from several partners and delivers your very own personal newspaper to you. More info here and here and here.

Online Optician MisterSpex from HHL alumnus Dirk Graber announced a whooping 4.5 Mio Euro revenue in 2009 - up from 0.5 Mio Euro in 2008. This is a remarkable development and we are looking forward for Dirk's future development. Read more here.

HHL graduate Christopher Muhr now starts Mycitideal's UK-spinoff as CEO. After having supported several startups within the Rocket Internet sphere (amongst other as CEO of ecareer), Christopher now took an the charge to independently grown the business of Mycitiydeal out of his London base. Read more here.