Editor’s Note: This article has been created in collaboration with Leaf. As a company focussing on how brick & mortar stores can better engage with their customers, Leaf, a Berlin-based fintech startup, has been in close contact with retailers for the last couple of months. Thus, when closures were first discussed as a possible…
Today, the very same platforms and communication apps used by dissidents in the Arab Spring, protestors in Hong Kong, and ordinary folk to chat and organize — like Twitter, or Telegram — can also be employed by those with destructive agendas. This — the pervasive use of digital technologies, and the growing power of the…
Every day, companies with billions in their R&D budgets and nascent entrepreneurs tinkering in their garages are connecting ordinary objects to the Internet of Things (IoT) — and creating along the way rafts of new smart functions that spawn from the connectivity. As wondrous as these new functions and services may be, they also open…
Happy new year and welcome back! At the beginning of each year, we reflect upon the happenings of the past twelve months, and ponder about what might be coming. What we thought in 2019: Last year, we thought that use cases and sophistication of AI would expand to different sectors, but fall short of…
Earlier this week, we celebrated the official end of our 2019 accelerator round at our Demo Day, where we brought together the six teams that we’ve been working with over the past year for a pitch competition. In attendance was a crowd of investors, students, entrepreneurs, and tech insiders. On the slightly rainy December evening,…
We’re rebranding as the High-Tech SeedLab. We made the decision after confirming that we’ve received funding for the next two years to continue supporting Berlin-based innovators, and we chose a name that better reflects our new program focus. Of course, the changes to our accelerator aren’t in name only. As a part of the new…
In February 2020, we will be kicking off the next accelerator round. For those of you who haven’t heard, the themes are sustainability, promoting women in tech, and scaling Berlin startups beyond German borders. We are currently in the middle of interviewing candidates and reviewing applications — and in light of all the interviews we’re…
A central part of the tech startup lifestyle is wearing many hats. On a given day you might shift between marketing, product development, research, or kitchen cleaner — and no position in a startup characterizes this dynamic more than the CEO, or the corporate leader by another name. The heads of big tech firms today…
One of the focus themes for our next accelerator round is innovations for sustainability. So we thought it a good time to ruminate a little on the topic over a spot of lunch, and our discussions quickly took us towards a seemingly irresolvable philosophical conflict at the heart of our economic system: the ideology of…
For the climate-conscious carnivore, mealtimes are a testing source of moral dilemma: satisfying a craving for a juicy steak necessitates not only murder (likely in cruel and horrid conditions), but also the staggering amount ecological collateral involved in the production process (colossal sums of water and energy consumed, egregious amounts of greenhouse gases and toxins…