The Luxury Law Summit deals mainly with legal questions that luxury brands have to face. This year, one session was dedicated to digital trends and the impact they can have on producers and traders of luxury goods.
i2i together with its partner Holisticsec attended a panel session and addressed topics like data privacy, network protection and social communities. The audience showed much interest and there will be lots of follow-up activities.
May is a busy month for the i2i team.
Last week i2i attended the ITW (International Telecoms Week) in Chicago, the annual meeting place of hundreds of telecom operators from all over the world. The ITW is the ideal place to get up to speed on what is hot in the industry, and to promote the solutions of i2i’s clients.
This week, i2i – together with partner Holistic Sec – will attend the Luxury Law Summit in London and participate in a panel session on the topic of “Digital and technology in the luxury world”. From industrial espionage to identity theft and privacy, luxury good producers are facing many challenges that modern IT and telecommunication solutions can address.
Wendy Williams works internationally as an expert in sustainable business strategy. Wendy has 20 years of experience advising both government and the private sector on issues of green IT, sustainable mobility, environmental labelling and sustainable innovation. She is based in Vienna, Austria and works across Europe.
Wendy has undergraduate & graduate degrees from universities in Canada, Switzerland and Austria, including a Doctorate from the Vienna University of Business & Economics. Her doctoral thesis, titled “Eco-labelling: A Socio-economic Analysis”, was recognised by the City of Vienna as an outstanding contribution to understanding issues of environment and business. Wendy is an international guest speaker and university lecturer on topics of sustainability and innovation, sustainable business strategy, and environmental communication.
As much as one has to appreciate the urge of innovators to deliver a perfect product to the market – perfection can also kill an innovation. We all know the 80/20 rule (or Pareto principle) that the last 20% of a project will cost the most time and resources.
What therefore happens frequently is that start-ups get stuck in last, final details and loose precious time to go to market. Chances are that a similar technical development is already being worked on somewhere else in the world, because this is what happens when the time is ripe for a technology. If this competitor is faster, convinced that “80% is good enough”, then this gives them an advantage over others, who get bogged down by details.
Another factor that tends to cost start-ups their success, is the naïve belief that marketing and sales can be done “somehow on the side”. Especially engineering driven start-ups tend to think like that. It is always a painful for them lesson to find out that having a good technology is only one condition for success – taking it to the market in a professional way is the other one.
We have seen many examples of start-ups failing, because they spend too much time with technical detail, and are ignorant about the challenges of actually taking products to market. R&D is definitely a precondition of success – but so is marketing and sales.
So, if you want to maintain any technological edge that you have over your competition, make sure that you take your product to market as fast as possible. Or else don’t even bother with R&D in the first place!
Ivan Sølvason has founded numerous high tech companies after being editor-in-chief for a computer magazine for 6 years. In 1988 he founded the world’s first interactive television program, using touch-tone technology to remote control a live program on air. Two years later Hugo was created and was an instant hit among TV viewers – during the next 14 years, the show was sold in 43 countries, and 10 million computer games on 5 different platforms were sold in 14 different languages.
After exiting his company to a venture capital company, he founded GoIP International, a white label VoIP company, where he worked with his team to market this technology into over 30 countries, working closely with Deutsche Telekom on several clients. GoIP International company was backed by a venture capital company with over 3,2 million dollars.
On the development side, Ivan invented several second screen convergence technologies for television and educational purposes.
Ivan lives in Copenhagen (Denmark).
Pannta has developed and patented a unique technology to refill battery packs for various devices (power drills, e-bikes etc.). This will not only save the users lots of money, but is also environmentally friendlier than current technologies.
i2i will handle the global licensing business by locating and contracting local manufacturers all over the world, who want to participate in this huge business opportunity.
In February and March 2014 the two leading European ICT events took place again: the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and the CeBIT in Hannover.
i2i attended both events, meeting existing and prospective clients. With i2i’s rising reputation and global reach, opportunities also arise at an increasing rate. Subsequent to the events , i2i has added some more names to its impressive list of clients.
Robert B. (Ben) Gore brings over 30 years of business planning, analysis, operations, and M&A success to the i2i team.
With deep roots as an executive in the telecommunications industry, Ben possesses the spectrum of knowledge and experience needed in planning, operations, product management, corporate transactions, as well as regulatory and business development in the global wire line, mobile, fixed wireless and satellite businesses.
Ben was an Executive Vice-President at TerreStar Networks, Inc. and TerreStar Global, Ltd. where he served in several executive positions.
In addition to his operational experience, Ben possesses extensive transaction related experience. While with Deutsche Telekom, he was head of the U.S. based Mergers and Acquisitions group and led the negotiations and due diligence of several major acquisitions for the company in the US and Europe. Prior to Deutsche Telekom, Ben was Senior Vice-President of Business Development for CAI Wireless Systems, Inc. and executive with Bell Atlantic (now Verizon Corporation).
Ben earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from Virginia Military Institute and a Masters of Business Administration from Virginia Tech. He is based in the US in Virginia.
Often Europe and the EU are used as synonyms. But this is totally wrong and misleading.
Europe as a continent consists of ca. 50 countries with a total population of 740 mio. 28 of these countries, representing a population of 500 mio, are also members of the European Union.
The EU constitutes a huge single market, surpassing the US in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), while having a lower debt ratio than the US.
For companies wanting to export to the EU, the single market means that once their products are within the EU, they can be moved to other EU countries without any further tax or bureaucratic hurdles.
But let us not forget the European countries that are not part of the EU! Countries like Turkey, Ukraine or Russia are huge single markets with lots of potential for smart products. So, depending on the potential of a product, it may be worthwhile to take on the bureaucratic and other challenges that doing business in these countries entails.
So, when about to start export business to Europe, make sure you weigh the pros and cons of focusing on the EU vs. the European non-EU countries.
i2i’s exciting 1st year of operation definitely warranted a celebration. We therefore invited our friends and partners for a night of networking, accompanied by excellent food and drink.
Among the participants were Canadian Ambassador Mark Bailey, the Canadian Trade Commissioner Susanne Schmidt-Knobloch and many representatives from notable financial, academic and industry institutions, including prominent start-ups.
Our new partner HolisticSec held a short presentation about internet and network security – a topic of general interest and great relevance.
We thank all our guests for a great evening with lots of interesting discussions and valuable networking.
