Coworking in Brussels with Betacowork: Better than a Business Center

100 most influential twitterers in the Belgian start-up scene

Stefania Scognamiglio — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:25:55 +0000

Mango Information Systems is a company specialized in web data analytics and real-time social media monitoring. The figure above has been developed by Mehdi El Fadil, its founder: it describes the relationships among the most influential individuals in the ICT Belgian scene.

Several names that result from the analysis are linked to the Betagroup network and are members of the Betacowork.

Here is the full article by Simon Van Dorpe, free lance journalist in economy, finance and sustainable development.

Member of the week: Katerina Skotalova, Czech web designer in Brussels

Stefania Scognamiglio — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 15:59:40 +0000

Katerina (@thisiskatkat) is a Czech web designer living in Brussels. She works for Holiday Autos, the world’s leading leisure car rental company which is a part of lastminute.com group.

She works as a website user interface developer, focused on up-to-date code and techniques.

She is currently working on a soon to be finished mobile version of the Holiday Autos website. It will be focused on booking flow, keeping the smartphone user in mind.

Katerina is a self-taught professional with a background in humanities.

She has lots of different hobbies: she does kung-fu and surf, she is interested in typography and she collects old records and books.

And, last but not least, she can cook a delicious goulash

Do you want to know more about our members? Check out our highlighted profiles in the Member of the Week series and also head to our members page, where you can even contact the coworkers via the social media of their choice.

Xavier Corman, Didier Reynders and a tax shelter for innovative startups in Belgium

Ramón Suárez — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:52:55 +0000

Our member Xavier Corman was one of the organizers of an event by the Solvay Alumni about the creation of a tax shelter for innovative startups in Belgium. The stars of the meeting were Didier Reynders, Belgian Foreign Affairs Minister; Rudy Aernoudt, politician and professor; and Jean Blavier, journalist.

The article has been removed from the website of La Libre (probably a temporary technical glitch). Luckily we had a copy stored

Tax Shelter Didier Reynders Xavier Corman La Libre Belgique 20130613

Is intellectual property protection a crime agains free tought?

Ramón Suárez — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 13:37:05 +0000

Joren de Wachter is an intellectual property (IP) strategist, betacoworker, and startup helper. He’s very active in community events like Bizcamp to help starters understand how to strategically deal with IP, not just with the legal aspects but also adding business insight. He made a great presentation at the last TEDxLeuven that has been selected for the TEDx channel on Youtube this weekend. In it he challenges the current state of IP protection, originally created to promote innovation and creativity but now failing to do so. In fact, Joren argues that IP hinders innovation and details the main flaws.

Pirate or creative genius, it all depends. What is your position?

Member of the week: climb on trees with Bruno de Hemricourt de Grunne

Stefania Scognamiglio — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 10:29:33 +0000

Bruno de Hemricourt de Grunne is an entrepreneur with more than twenty years of experience in maintenance and management of ornamental trees.

He is the founder of Trees & People, a fascinating project that aims to reconcile trees and people in the urban environment.

Lately, a second partner joined the project: his name is Nicolas D’Ursel, he is an architect and he will be engaged into developing installations with minimum impact on environment.

Bruno asserts that we have a new area to “conquer”: the area located between the ground and the crown of trees. Isn’t it our primal dream to climb to the top of trees?

The project wants to bring nature closer to society through playful and educative activities.

Here is one of Bruno’s last installations in Paris, where he built the first cinema on trees ever, on the occasion of the preview of the animation movie “Epic“.

Une nouvelle tribu: les co-workers! De opkomst van co-workers!

Stefania Scognamiglio — Wed, 29 May 2013 14:11:53 +0000

The magazine Glow has published an article about coworking in Belgium. It mentions and describes the Betacowork and shows our pictures.

Here is the full article, available in French and Dutch.

Enjoy

View this document on Scribd

Free lunch Fridays at the Betacowork with Belfius

Ramón Suárez — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:10:28 +0000

In our continuous effort to fight common places and popular sayings, we are once more providing free lunches at the Betacowork. This time it is in collaboration with Belfius and Mohammed, our very own startup adviser, that we will feed the masses of hungry starters every 2nd Friday of the month.

There will be no presentations or anything like that. The idea is that Mohammed and some of his colleagues will come and be available to answer your questions about how to get money from banks for your startup. The only thing that will be forced fed is the sandwiches, and by your own hand.

The event is open to Betacowork members, tryouts, and the other tenants of ICAB and will take place in the cafeteria of our coworking space in Brussels, every 2nd Friday of the month from 12h30, starting on June 7.

If your company wants to sponsor an event like this, contact us.

Member of the week: Patrick Nollet and his startup Cleverphone

Stefania Scognamiglio — Wed, 22 May 2013 09:00:53 +0000

Patrick Nollet, founder at Cleverphone, is an engineer with many years of experience in the telecommunication sector. He decided to launch his own start-up about 3 years ago, when he realized that his idea could meet a high demand.

He was inspired by a personal need: he did not want to share his personal phone number while organizing apartment visits. Nowadays, with so many people operating in the internet, protecting customer privacy has become a primary need.

Cleverphone provides temporary and virtual phone numbers, allowing to manage incoming calls in a very flexible way (for example you can transfer calls to your personal number, deciding what calls you intend to take and when.) If you ever need a temporary phone number, or a flexible phone number for your startup, you can go visit their website and activate it in a few clicks.

Cleverphone is currently working on its next product, call analytics: a tool to measure and analyze the performance of your advertisement, by placing different phone numbers on media.

For any question related to telecom, drop him a mail: Patrick@cleverphone.com

GNOME history at the @Betacowork

Ramón Suárez — Tue, 14 May 2013 08:26:36 +0000

Every year we open our doors to the community in order to support the largest European event for free and open source software: FOSDEM. A lot of people, also locals, don’t know that Brussels hosts one of the biggest FOSS events in the world, with a lot of technical talks and great people to meet, all for free. This time we had a team of 30 developers from GNOME coming for the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest.

If you don’t use Linux you’ve probably never heard of it. GNOME is a free (as in freedom) desktop environment used by most Linux distributions. At the Betacowork there’s an interesting group of Linux users, including me and our latest convert: Stefania. In fact if you are reading this webpage you are also using Linux, which powers the server of our website and most of the Internet (Google too.) Our coworking space runs 100% on Linux.

But let’s get back to the subject… 30 developers from around the world gathered at the Betacowork for a few days to work together, share their knowledge, and take decisions. And what’s the historic part? Well, they decided to use JavaScript as the default programming language for their future development. It may sound trivial to the uninitiated, but if you know a few programmers you probably understand the depth and feelings stirred by this decision. They were fully aware and decided to make a choice to move forward:

at the end of the day, we had to recognize that no language is perfect and there will always be disagreement. The important thing was that we had to make a decision

As far as I know, the final decision was among Python and JavaScript.

These are some of the articles and resources about their work:

And all we got in return is this TOTALLY AWESOME poster Looking forward to host you again soon!

Check them out: the members of the @Betacowork

Ramón Suárez — Mon, 13 May 2013 15:42:25 +0000

Or at least some of them We have just released the new Members page of the Betacowork. It is still a work in progress, but you can already see the names, pictures and links of the members that have chosen to make their profile public.

If you want to know more or contact any of them, just click on their name or picture and you will have access to their short bio plus their social media links, so that you can reach out to them through Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+.

The next steps are to add keywords and a search engine to make it even easier to find awesome professionals and entrepreneurs, plus custom links. Then we will work on their projects page, to showcase their companies, startups, and other interesting things they may be working on. Coming up soon, so keep an eye on the members page.