What to expect of DreamA ́s Lounge?

For DreamA ́s Lounge we have invited 5 different DreamAs to show and talk about their dreams. Those are:

• DreamA Talent
• DreamA Entrepreneur
• X-DreamA
• DreamA International
• DreamA Global

So 5 amazing dreams in 5 exciting categories will be presented! Also you will have the chance to watch the first prototype formats of DreamA TV. Thanks to numerous requests you will be also one of the first people to see and use the new DreamA Networking Tool, which will support realizing dreams together soon in a new innovative way!

Additional Information:

Tickets: DreamA’s Lounge Registration on Amiando.
Program: DreamA´s Lounge Vienna

Can´t wait to see you again. All the best from DREAMICON VALLEY,

The team of DreamAcademia

Hermann Gams
Manuel Gruber
Harald Katzenschläger
Roland Trimmel

www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_qQdR5uiCk

Description

Newsgrape is a platform where users can provide texts and build their own magazines. The Austrian start-up raised a Kickstarter funding as one of the first European projects. The beta version of the platform launched on Mar 9, 2011.

More information: Newsgrape.com

At the end of the year, I want to give you an insight on what we did in 2010. So many memories. Just like it. Have a look.

January

After receiving the license for the very first TEDx event in Austria on December 23, 2009, one thing was sure: We need some warm up. After having a “dreamA’s lounge” in September 2009, we started the year with an event series, later called “Future Lounge”. In January it was called “Social Media Days”, as we decided that an important part of dream development is communications. It was an honour for me to speak in front of a crowded house.

February

This success needed a second edition in February. This time I got support from Silicon Valley. Rainer Cvillink, head of video communications at Mozilla Foundation did a session on, yes, video communications and the power of social media. Roman Padiwy from crealiity did a talk about his human potential search engine.

March

Beginning with March, we called the event “Future Lounge”, this time innovation was the theme. Hannes Offenbacher from metaview, as well as Moritz Schuschnigg from 3M introduced their innovation projects. Tamara Olorga from acoustic tale did an entertainment session and our international guest this time was Dr. Kai Romhardt from Berlin, author of “Wir sind die Wirtschaft”, introducing us to his view of work/lifebalance. Oh, before I forget it, we had Faruk Onmaz with us, football freestyler. He got third at the Red Bull world championship two months later and made us all very proud.

April

In April we visited Sonnentor and began with the preparations of TEDxPannonia. A good event takes time. Theme of our fourth Future Lounge was “Energy”. We had Erwin Stricker from “Cleen Solair” with us, as well as Wolf Sator, international e-mobility icon speaking about intelligent mobility.

May

In May we did our first international press conference for TEDxPannonia. Oh my god, what an event. We sent a limousine to the people to bring them down to Siegendorf. I only remember, they were more than an hour late because of a traffic jam. But it was great fun afterwards, we finished the evening with watching virals, as viralvideo was founded in April.

On May 15 we joined a startup lounge by STARTeurope, this is when we learned to know this amazing initiative, Fredrik, Flo and some of their members. It was a rainy evening, but it was one of the most important ones for DREAM ACADEMIA.

Our fifth Future Lounge took place on May 28, it was all about education and we had loads of great speakers. Norbert Hackl from “Tobiasschule“, Dr. Peter Krauskopf from “Vienna Business School“, Johannes Lindner from “IFTE” and Rosemarie Sadjed, founder of an education project in Kenya. For the first time appearing on our stage: Chaos Drums. Shouldn’t be the last time.

June

In June it was talent’s time at Future Lounge. Theme: video marketing. I had the honour to do a short talk, also Erich Zeiler-Rausch did a presentation on where it goes with video on the web. This time we had two very special talents with us, Maxx Harnisch (9), actor and Hanna Job, violinist (12). Their dreams ranged from George Clooney to Brahms.

July

In July we had our last Future Lounge before we concentrated on the preparations of TEDxPannonia in August. This time, “Crossing Borders” was the theme. Fredrik Debong from STARTeurope, Klaus Sommer from “Peiso Communications” and winemaker Franz Weninger explained what it means to them to cross borders. Rainer Cvillink, former satellite station from Silicon Valley, showed up personally for the first time. What an amazing event. Beautiful weather, wonderful people, one of the greatest events I can remember. I simply loved it.

August

August was the month of preparation for the whole team. PR, speaker preparation, location check. And, of course, holidays, for me it was Cairo this year.

We also visited Ideenalm by metaview and startup lounge Alpbach by our partners from STARTeurope. I remember an unforgetable spirit, a bunch of entrepreneurs and a huge load of inspiration for the things to come.

September

Excitement. TEDx comes to Austria. Hosted by DREAM ACADEMIA. We set our expectations high, but we couldn’t even have wished to have nearly as many inspiring, wonderful talks on just one day. It was mind-blowing. 12 ideas, entertainment and the most wonderful crowd we could have wished made the new energy center in Pamhagen the place to be on the new 9/11. Just want to say thank you for making this wonderful day happen.

October

Time to lean back and work on our concept. My colleague Katzi found the right location for it. A private mansion directly at the lake Neusiedl. Wohoo. We felt like kings there. Selma Prodanovic joined us on the terrace of our own little paradise. Roland Trimmel joined our way from there. We visited Franz Weninger’s vinyards and got some inspiring inputs from a great entrepreneur. Nice memories.

The outcome? An adaption of Future Lounge. “Health” was the theme of this evening. Daniela Fritz, Florian Heiler, Thomas Gutdeutsch, Vera Brandes, Ernestine Halbwidl and Augustine Stummer made this evening unforgetable. And a big success. Thanks to all who showed their trust once again.

And, last but not least, we joined STARTup Live #4 and worked on dreamA TV for a whole weekend. And well, it worked. Today I sit in front of a concept that makes us ready to start producing. Thanks to all the people that helped us there. And for the amazing after party at MQ Vienna.

November

From November we started to work on our concept deeply. After all these adrenalin pushin’ events, all the wonderful moments, it was time to get a business model going. Oh, and we got our last Future Lounge for this year. Film. Crowded house. And talents all around. What an evening. Georg Csarmann, Tobias Hermeling, Roman Pachernegg, Mike Kraus (my big idol, what a moment!!!!), Roman Tolic, and mister entertainment, Axel E. Blanck. This was great.

December

In DREAM ACADEMIA you have to work hard until the end of the year. Our second TEDx event for this year took place on Dec 7, 2010, TED Women time. We had great talks and a livestream from Washington D.C., featuring CNN founder TED Turner and some of the greatest women on this planet. Physically and virtually. And we did it on the international TEDx frontpage. What a feeling!!!

Our concept phase is going on until today, we had much fly, a little die but I have one good message for you: we are going to fly. Definately. So no worries, we will be back fresh and relaxed in 2011.

Thank you all. For Inspiration. For breaking with standards. For not being conventional. For believing in your dreams. For supporting us. For being who you are. For workin on a positive future. For building a better world.

It’s our dreams that shape our surrounding.

Happy new year!

The team of DREAM ACADEMIA.

RepRap was a guest at TEDxVienna too.

Josef Prusa was my first highlight. He did a talk about 3d-printing with some nice quotes. Great talk. I loved this one: What do I need money for, if I can print anything on my own? All in all some great thoughts on what is possible with a printer that can not only print itself, but almost everything you can take into your hands. Josef is one of the developers of RepRap, an open source 3d printer project.

Next interesting one: Gregoire Cosendai. He works on the development of a “bionic eye”. Well the explanation for this is beyond my technical competence, I’ll try it in my words: He builds an implant into the eyes of blinds and puts a device on his/her glasses. The device records what shows in front of the glasses and is able to transmit it to the implant inside the eye. What makes blinds see again. I’m going to follow the development of this technology, the presentation was very, very interesting. The background too. He presented a statistic that says that the life time costs of supporting a blind person is over one million dollars.

After the first break, we moved to Santa Monica. Florian Brody, who built the market for Apple Austria in the 1980′s, had a talk at TED in 1993 (or 1994, he wasn’t sure). He gave us an insight on what TED was about before the internet came up. And on what makes the difference between TED and other conferences. “TED re-invents itself since 26 years over and over again”.

After Tomás Rousek, who did an interesting talk about space architecture, it was time for Selma Prodanovic, who did a talk on the power Europe could have, if the way we think about it would change. “Who was the winner of the last Oscar night? European fashion designers.” Liked that. Selma talked about what networking is and should be like no one could do in such an authentic way. “Yes, I will make a positive difference!”. I really look forward to her talk at TEDxPannonia Women next week.

Sava Dalbokov did a talk about “Money and Honey” afterwards. He was introduced by the moderator with the words: “Next we have a banker, speaking about corporate social responsibility. Yawn! Heard that before? Listen to him!”. His talk was about micro-funding, he showed an excerpt of the projects, his bank supported and what an impact they had for them. Maybe the first banker with an interesting talk I saw for a long time.

Daniel Grumiller was introduced with the words: “He promised me, that he will do a black hole in a bathtube on this stage next year”. I was like: Ok… After reading the bio of this guy I was like, what’s coming now? In the end I have to say that I was a bit disappointed, his talk was very interesting (he spoke about the “rindler force”), but I think a maxmimum of 5% of the guests understood nearly what he was talking about.

The next one I loved. Sean Bonner on “neo-minimalism and the rise of the technomads”. A wonderful talk about the worth of things. About what humans really need. He stands for the point that people, the more they own, the more become trapped by these possessions and the less free they become. “We are buying and financing our own prisons”. I loved his view about things, it was an eye opening talk about all the senseless thoughts of what we all need. Thanks for this inspiration.

Sean Bonner made us think minimalistic

The maybe best talk on this evening was performed by Johannes Grenzfurther on “how to subvert subversion”. Johannes is founder of “monochrom“, an internationally acting art and theory group. In his talk he tried to find answers on the question of what really makes aware in a time of jackass. And he had some nice stories to tell, I almost fell from my seat when he spoke about “Professor Thomann“. It was a story about “an artist that never existed and saved a country that shouldn’t have existed”. I was also impressed by their project “Eigenblunzn“, people who make blood sausage out of their own blood. A nice lesson in arts and politics, entertaining and stunning, that’s what I like TED for.

Last but not least: Herbert Nitsch, freediving world champion and “the deepest man on earth”. Herbert is a pilot, in his spare time he dives. For fun. And for world records. In 2007 he did the freediving record at a depth of 214 meters (freediving unequal scuba diving). The videos he showed were simply amazing, only a man and a coke bottle diving to the bottom of the sea. It made me think about my own reasons of motivation. And my boundaries. Because this man broke all of them. He is the owner of 31 world records by now. Could there have been a better final for this event?

Herbert Nitsch is the best freediver in the world, he set 31 world records by now.

Congrats from my side for a perfectly organized event. Though there were talks that could have been improved, there were some really outstanding ones! Hope the Viennese TEDx guys go on like this, so we can go on build a strong force of TEDx’s in Central Europe.

Vlad was one of the main organizers of TEDxVienna

What we’d like to develop over the weekend is the details to our organizational units, which are (in the first step): DreamA Consult, DreamA Talent Management and DreamA Media (including DreamA TV and others). As we build our platform to help as many people possible to work on their dreams, we need the help and inputs from all of you. So what’s the plan?

Our team meets on Friday, Nov 2 at Sektor 5 co-working spaces. We will prepare and open the weekend at 10am. Then it’s up to you when you want to join, we will do the presentation about the plan for the weekend once at the beginning and once in the afternoon, something around 4pm. Then the group divides into small working groups to certain topics. These topics will be “How does the perfect consulting model look like for start-ups”, “DreamA TV format development”, “DreamA TV channel Identity” “How can a DreamA’s Corner look like” and some more. Every team gets an assignment of tasks and starts brainstorming. In the evening they do presentations on what they worked out.

Saturday starts with a breakfast, afterwards the teams go on working on their tasks. On 5pm we will do the final presenations of the results worked out.

6:30pm starts the After Party together with the boys and girls from STARTeurope. Feel free to join us on Friday, Saturday or both. We need people with all kinds of backgrounds, so yes, we want to have you with us! And another yes: You can take people with you, for working, as well as for the party.

Here’s the Agenda:

Agenda DREAM ACADEMIA Developer’s Weekend 2010

Location: Sektor 5 Co-working spaces, Siebenbrunnengasse 44, 1050 Vienna
Date: Nov 26-27, 2010

We are looking forward to meeting you there!

Best, Manuel

Well I understand that most of the people out there think we’re crazy. We invest our whole energy in a platform that tries to help as many people possible reach their dreams. That’s the short form. The main thing we discussed in the last three years was change. How to really change something in this world. Now don’t get me wrong. We are not naive. But we have a clear vision.

The thing is, that there are hundreds and thousands of initiatives out there that try to do that. And we were amazed by the mission of many of them. We often thought like: Ok, that’s kind of big. But what we realized in the end was: None of those initiatives had any influence on our lives or the lives of people we know. Most of them hadn’t even heard about them. As those initiatives tried to use the social web as a catalyzer, many of them never occured on a physical basis. Mistake no. 1 in our eyes.

Can change take place in a virtual space?

Followed by mistake no. 2. It’s nice to do the change with open collaboration, crowdsourced ideas and web 2.0 platforms. But to create a movement, the people need to be involved from the beginning. They need to find themselves in the initiative. And even in times of the social web, there is a big (maybe an even bigger) need for physical contact. It’s all about people.

So why do we think that we can be more successful than all the others? To be honest: We don’t know anyway. What we know is, that our passion for change started something special. We find great visionairs on an international base that want to work with us. As soon as somebody thinks of what it means to live in a world, where people do what they are passionate about, they realize what this would have meant for their lives. This gives us strength to believe in what we are doing and never lets us think about stopping this. Our visions are our drugs.

Back to the story – DREAM ACADEMIA Developer’s Weekend

Well, this article deals with DREAM ACADEMIA’s developer’s weekend. This takes place at Sektor 5 co-working space Vienna Nov 26-27, 2010. What it is about? It’s about passion. It’s about finding a model in which everybody finds himself. It’s about making DREAM ACADEMIA an open platform for building a micro-system of change.

We would love to see you as a part of us on this weekend, no matter which background you have. We will work on all different kinds of stuff in small groups and exchange our ideas several times. We will think about the perfect events to get inspiration, about our media channel „DreamA TV“, about change management, marketing, communications, a social venture fonds and many more.

The aim? The aim is to get the platform DREAM ACADEMIA shaped by those who will use it in the future. We see ourselves as the ones providing a white sheet of paper and inspiration in form of the thoughts we collected over the last three years and the actions we took so far. Now it’s time for you to grab this sheet and let your own very passion flow into a concept that lets others live their passsion.

Our dream is to see as many people possible believing in theirselves and working on their dreams. To make this possible, we need your kick-ass support, your ideas, your passion. We would be glad to welcome you at our developer’s weekend.

A big thank you to all the people who inspired us over the last three years. You changed our lives.

Before I forget it, there will be an after-party together with the guys of STARTeurope.

The following speakers are confirmed right now:

• Selma Prodanovic
• Angie Rattay
• Moni Müksch
• Nicole Trimmel

Day 1: Pitching and teambuilding

So what is it about? It starts on Friday evening with a pitch session. If you have an idea, you have 90 seconds to present it to a crowd of 100 participants and additional guests. This time, DREAM ACADEMIA did a pitch too, for our media unit “dreamA TV”. Besides us, there were 25 pitches. I was totally amazed by the high quality level of the other pitchers. After this session every pitcher had about an hour to find a team to support him/her over the weekend.

I had the luck of finding ten team members, an interdisciplinary bunch of highly creative people coming from 6 different nations. We started working right after the team was formed. We used the time until 12pm to get to know each other and to do the first brainstormig sessions.

Our business model canvas. Quite a lot of values

Day 2: Building a business and thinking about prototypes

On Saturday we met for breakfast at 9 and joined for the business model canvas session at 10:15. Grandmaster Can coached us on how to develop a business model for our particular idea. And well, we took the recipes and started working. In the afternoon, some mentors joined us to give us feedback on our ideas. This was awesome. They analyzed our project and gave input that took us several steps further.

STARTup Talk in the cafeteria

7 was dinner time and the team of STARTeurope had a big surprise for the participants. I remember towers of pizza, I never saw this before. We enjoyed it while listening to three great Austrian entrepreneurs, Chris Kahler from qriously, Florian Gschwandtner from Runtastic and Tamás Locher from Garmz.

Great atmosphere and a monster spirit in the Microsoft cafeteria. Inspired by the words of the three guys, we went on working on our project. At the end of the day we were like: Jihaaa, we will conquer the world. We were the last to leave the Microsoft headquarters this night.

Simon with a smile @ Cafeteria

Day 3: Work out a presentation

On Sunday we met for breakfast again. The 14 hour brainfuck of the day before reflected in all our faces. Finally we finished our business model canvas and worked out our presentation. The amazing thing about our project is, that it went from “that’s the most groundbreaking stuff, I ever heard” to “Doh, thats the model of a local TV station”. In the end the team of STARTeurope, especially Fredrik and Can gave the final inputs and created the base to a nice business model and presentation.

Philipp masterminds our

Final presentations

At 6pm the presentation session started. We were the second team to present after amazing Silvy Chin with her “Clear Karma” project. It was a big pleasure to present our idea in front of a crowd of top entrepreneurs. In the end we heard 14 presentations and a load of cool business ideas. I think the people pretty much liked our idea of “MTV for Entrepreneurs”. For me, as for the jury, the projects of the day (besides dreamA TV…) were “warrantify.com”, a Finnish start-up, Sylvie Chin’s “Clear Karma” and Rico. Warrantify built a software that replaces paper bills when buying electronic goods and stores the warranty information online. The dream behind: A world without paper bills. Like.

Hari, Founder Warrantify, winner of STARTup Live #4

The project Rico and especially founder Michaela Gimpl was one of the winners at STARTup Live #4

The presented projects in an overview:

• Clear Karma
• dreamA TV
• Scribando
• runtastic
• Rico
• Warrantify
• Twingz
• Playmakers
• 2-Topf
• Life Missions
• Tarifagent
• 3TO Pharma
• MG (Magnesium)

STARTup Live: Finished. It was Wohoooo!
After show party at MQ Vienna: Start.

What shall I say? A crazy party with 50 entrepreneurs from countless different nations. Holy ghost. Spiritus sanctus in the air. To sum up, I’m looking forward to the next couple of STARTeurope events. They do a great job in unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit in Europe. One last question: What about STARTworld?

More information: Official Website of STARTeurope.

THE PROGRAM

Download the whole program here: FUTURELOUNGE #9, Film – Invitation

REGISTRATION

Online Event Registration with amiando

SUMMARY OF FUTURELOUNGE #8

You can find the videos of FUTURELOUNGE #8 here: FUTURELOUNGE #8 Summary.