This article was published on May 15, 2012

StartupBootcamp and Campus Party events in Berlin open registration for this year’s excited entrepreneurs


StartupBootcamp and Campus Party events in Berlin open registration for this year’s excited entrepreneurs

If you’re in the business of tech startups and entrepreneurial spirit in Berlin, there’s a lot coming up that you might want to try. Today, Telefonica and O2 have opened up their European Campus Party and Startupbootcamp has announced that it will be hosting its Mentor Kick Off Event.

Campus Party started in 1997 as a way to bring together bright technical minds in Latin America and Europe. This year’s event in Berlin runs from August 21-26 and promises to be a week-long 24 hour tech fest for ‘Campuseros’.

In the past 16 years, the people who attended the first Campus Party have grown into a global community of over 180,000 with annual events taking place in Sao Paulo – BrazilBogotá – ColombiaQuito – Ecuador and Mexico City – Mexico.

The Berlin event this summer will take place at the historic former airport of Tempelhof.  The event will have speakers such as Sir Tim Berners Lee, Paulo Coelho, Don Tapscott – TED speaker, author of ‘Growing up digital’ and business guru, and Yossi Vardi – one of Israel’s first high-tech entrepreneurs.

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If you want to attend for free, the event is running a competition to collect ideas that will lay the foundation for “re-typing Europe’s source code.”

The event organisers are looking for ideas for the European Digital Agenda, to be submitted via Twitter as a tweet or as a blog posts or video that can be tweeted with a link. Send your idea between May 15th and June 15th with the geolocation option on and include the hashtag #I4DA and a specific tag related to your idea. The themes include #YouthEmployment, #AgingWell, #Entrepreneurship, #Health and #InternetRights

Universities from each country in the European Union will be responsible for choosing the best ideas and will select the 5,000 ‘campuseros’ that will take part in the biggest tech movement in history. There will be a ceremony at the event where the ideas will be presented to Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission who is responsible for the Digital Agenda.

Getting around Berlin with Startupbootcamp

Good news also comes from Startupbootcamp Berlin, the German branch of the Pan-European startup accelerator program. The organisation has announced a partnership with DriveNow to provide the ten startups accepted into its event with full access to its car-sharing network.

DriveNow is a neat car-sharing service that is a joint venture between BMW Group, which provides the vehicles and Sixt AG, which manages leasing for the network to make bookings. DriveNow is independent of defined stations for renting and parking and cars can be rented and returned everywhere.

Startupbootcamp has accelerator programs running in Copenhagen, Dublin, Amsterdam and Berlin. The event in Germany runs from September till November.

Registration for the Berlin event is open now and closes on June 17th, so make sure you get your ideas lined up and sign in if you want to join the fun.

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