This weekend has been our slack-off weekend. On saturday we worked
only half the day and then went to see a soccer game in a pub around the
corner. And as with everything at the moment, this game also miraculously
turned out in our favour, the small team we were rooting for, Mainz 05,
the club of the city in which Christoph grew up and we finished high-school
together, a club that just ascended to the first league this summer and has
the smallest budget of all teams in the Bundesliga, beat the biggest, most
famous, most successful and of course wealthiest club of the league,
Bayern Muenchen.
This once again shows that David CAN BEAT Goliath.
And at the moment we feel like little Davids and we’re looking for our Goliath!
We’re just not sure who it is. Is it Microsoft or is it Google? Or is it some
pet-site-Goliath?
Anyway that’s what makes soccer fascinating. Soccer teams can basically
be seen as complex system, a field that I was and am very interested in
over the past years. It basically means that in a complex system such as a
soccer team, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. I’ve read
studies that say that in a match between two soccer teams of different
strengths, the probability of the stronger team winning is approximately
at 60% whereas in individual sports such as tennis, the probability of the
stronger player winning is at 90% (that’s why R.Federer has won everything
in the past years but Real Madrid couldn’t win the Champions League)
I believe that the same can be said about companies and the market.
If the right components (in this case people) find themselves than
they’re able to create stuff that transcends their individual and
collective capabilities. And applied to the market it in turn means
that the biggest companies with the most capable people will not always
win (Or in the case of Microsoft over the past years, never win 
Other than that, I also got my RFID set from touchatag on saturday
and spent sunday afternoon playing around with it. Since they have
a cool API and it is a possibility for petsicon to enter the vet market
later, meaning to provide online medical documentation software
to vets, I programmed a little app that automatically logs the pet into
the petsicon system (and some more stuff that’s secret 
Basically later the pet can walk into a vets office, a RFID reader would
read the RFID chip of the pet and if that office or veterinarian was authorized
before to have access to the pet’s data by the owner, the vet would
automatically get the medical history and all relevant data on his
screen instantly.
Pretty cool, huh?
The miracles of technology obviously don’t protect us from human
stupidity, in this case my stupidity, as I wrote a world-changing,
potentially literature-nobel-prize-winning blog-entry the day before
yesterday but stupidly copied some other mail correspondence in the
file and so this cute blog entry will be lost forever, and I don’t
remember what I wrote exactly.
PetsiAttack!!
Probably I was still raving about our first petsicon core team
photoshoot with our new friend Daisuke Nikaido, a Japanese
photographer who put up his tents here in Berlin recently to get a fresh
perspective and refine his super-photographing-skills as you can see on
our team pictures. Here a small sample:
It was a lot of fun for the four of us, especially with our Duisburg-
petsi Calle, who we can only meet every couple of weeks but who’s in
constant skype-conference reach and,as I mentioned in the last post,
still manages to do a great job.
Later we went to the best pizza place in town (some in the team say
second best) Il casolare, the rustic italian pizzeria run and founded
by Italian punk-musicians, to have our first petsicon company dinner!
(The three-star-michelin restaurants will have to wait until we
actually MAKE some money )
Furthermore our long lost brother, Andreas Mertin, our UK vet who we
had lost contact to for a few months while he explored the UK
veterinarian wilderness, must have smelled our reunion and surprisingly
also showed up in Berlin and joined our first petsicon party which
(unfortunately?) didn’t last as long as those parties that we had
when we young (that means when we started studying)
I could never have imagined that I would rather go to bed not too late
to be able to get up the next morning and work, but I’m happy to have
found something that is worth it.
We were also asked recently who we later want to sell our business to.
The answer of course is: “To NOONE!!!” (Yes, we know, that’s not
something potential investors and venture capitalists want to hear)
At least that’s our wish, what the harsh reality might bring we don’t
know and we’re also pragmatic and don’t see that as a dogma.
So I guess the core team is of the same opinion about petsicon
as Alfred Lord Tennyson who said in his famous lost-love-quote:
“‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
We love you petsicon and we’ll make sure never to lose you
Risking again of being accused of “sounding too enthusiastic” I want
to comment on what our team is doing:
Calle, our tireless future-super-surgeon, who also has the “petsicon gene”,
meaning he apparently doesn’t need to sleep and, despite having night- and
weekend-shifts all the time, produces marvellous content for us.
At the moment he is translating the content to English which Mike then
corrects to “native English”. This system works well and approximately 90%
of the content is already translated to English, “naturalized” and in the first
proofreading loop.
Mike, our US petsi and master of the Japanese language, is working fulltime
on the Japanese front-line, translating like a maniac, coordinating with the
proofreaders and other helping hands in Japan as well as reaching out into
his extensive network to find Japanese veterinarians, something that we can
report first successes as Mike managed to establish some connections, let’s
hope something good will come from that
I expect this weekend to be fun, as Calle will join us here in Berlin and we
plan to party “the petsicon way” because I think everybody in the team has
been so focused on working almost all the time that we forgot to take necessary
breaks and socialize but our team bonding weekend will do us good, we are
also planning on taking some nice group shots, so check our Team page for
even prettier pictures of us
So as I said before, the petsies are a tight team, I even believe the BEST TEAM,
and WE WILL NOT LOSE TO ANYONE whether they’re from Silicon Valley,
Napa Valley or Death Valley for that matter!!
So here’s the conclusion and challenge to other companies:
BRING IT ON!!!
Posted by taro | Posted in Petsicon-Progress | Posted on 06-08-2009
Over the past few weeks, to be exact since we published large parts of
the content of the iDiDi in html-form, the little traffic that we had from
Google, i.e. users who wanted to try out the iDiDi-component of petsicon,
had unfortunately halved and it seems to have taken Google quite some
time to send its crawling army back to us.
This is all because we have a much more maschine-readable
/understandable structure of the html-part of the site now and
therefore deleted all that old stuff.
Now the traffic is slowly picking up again and we see good progress
in our rankings in the searches for relevant search terms (yippiee)
We felt that this step was necessary to increase our relevancy
to search engines so this shows that sometimes you have to
take a step back in order to jump three steps forward.
