Every day, we search the web for impactful content, projects, ventures and ideas by Sandboxers. Twice a week, we choose the most inspiring, funny or brilliant piece and publish it here on our blog.

This week Marcus Kuhn tells the story behind Connex.io, a new tool that helps you keep your address book clean and organized. Check them out on Facebook and Twitter for the latest news.

1. Tell us the story of your project – how did everything begin? What motivated you to start this project?

connex.io started by someone pointing out a problem – address book management – and me thinking that there had to be a solution. Since there was none I started to develop one. This was in a networking seminar i attended at my University. The coach mentioned how much of a hassle it was to manage your address book and knowing the potential of smart phones, open APIs etc. I was convinced that there must be a solution to this problem. After a little research it became clear to me that many had tried but that there was no satisfactory solution to the problem. After mulling over the idea for a few nights I still had this tingling feeling in my stomach so I went for it. The idea and its potential excited me and I felt that it should be a relatively simple, small thing. Obviously that last part was wrong and the project turned out to be very complex. But the excitement is still here.

The story behind our startup is kind of special anyways. Ata is from Turkmenistan, I am Swiss and we met in Singapore. We started seriously pursuing the idea there – about 9 months after it first had appeared on my radar screen – and since March 2010 have been a virtual team and only met again in July 2011. This setup makes for quite a few good stories but those will have to be told another time.

2. What was the biggest success of your project, so far?

Biggest success is hard to define as we are only launching in a few days. It definitely was a great feeling to sign the contract with the first investor, it was very rewarding to see people start using our product and giving us very valuable and extensive feedback. But the best moment probably was when we got our first prototype working and contacts were synced between a Google Account and a Thunderbird Email Client. It just got real and it felt like we had achieved something. It just put a big smile on our faces and gave us an enormous push to put our product in people’s hands.

3. What is your project’s biggest challenge at the moment?

Our going-to-market. The product is now at a stage where it is good enough to distribute it to a larger circle but finding that larger circle will be a challenge. Obviously we have a lot of ideas but we will have to test them and see what works and what does not. It will be another huge learning process which we actually try to avoid be hiring someone with a lot of experience in this area.

5. How do you see your project evolve in the next:

a) 6 months: In the next 6 months we will launch our product gain our first few thousand paying users and expand our product to more platforms as well as improve our product and continuously adapt it to the feedback we receive from our users.

b) 3 years: 3 years is a long time in the future and I can only guess. Our vision for connex.io is for it to become the default address book. You start your phone, laptop or even car navigation system for the first time, you enter your connex.io credentials and your address book will be there. Kept up-to-date by us.

6. What advice would you give to young people that want to start their own project?

I am a big fan of the Lean Startup Methodology which we apply in our own business. What it basically boils down to is that you build something, measure if it does what it should and then iterate. So my advice would be to go for it and not let the fear of failure stop you. Build a prototype of what you want to do. Put it in people’s hand and see what they thing. Then take those learnings and iterate.

7. How could other Sandboxers and the outside world support your project?

We are launching on the 30. September. I would ask people to give our solution a spin and help us out with feedback so we can improve it into something that is even more valuable to our users. And if they like what they see we won’t stop them from recommending our solution to others, quite the opposite.

Our great Sandbox Co-founder Fabian Pfortmüller was just featured in top Swiss Business magazine BILANZ! Way to go Fabian! Follow Fabian on Twitter.

http://www.bilanz.ch/

As many of you probably have already heard, we have started in addition to our monthly (and often even more frequent!) events in 25 cities across the globe organizing small and intimate dinners / breakfasts / lunches with 5 or 6 Sandboxers and one experienced leader. Whenever we work with senior people, we try to apply the same principles we also do for our own community: we carefully select people that truly inspire us, we love diversity and try to bring them from as many backgrounds as possible and we try to create a setting where people can build real relationships (vs. “networking) and eventually collaborate.

The discussions we had at past events for example when meeting with the Swiss Ambassador to the US, the Cambodian Secretary of State, a cofounder of the Feed Project, or experienced entrepreneurs like Lars Hinrichs (founder of XING), has really brought us to a new level.

In the next few weeks Sandboxers will have the pleasure to meet with Johannes Matyassy, Ambassador of Switzerland and Head of Präsens Schweiz, Hansueli Maerki, currently board member at ABB, SwissRe, former Chairman of IBM EMEA and member of our Advisory Board, Martin Naville, Chairman of the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce, David Bosshart, CEO of the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, Thomas Held, CEO of Avenir Suisse and Nick Beglinger, Co-Founder and CEO of the Foundation For Global Sustainability.

Who else should we invite?

David Bauer (27) is a journalist based in Basel, Switzerland. He holds a BA in English and Business from the University of Basel (although he spent most of his time studying philosophy) and a MA in Journalism from the University of Hamburg. People tell him he is pretty decent at putting words in the correct order, so that’s what he earns most of his money with. David on Twitter and on Facebook.

Since I’ve finished my studies, I’ve been working as an editor with Swiss Sunday newspaper SonntagsZeitung. When they closed down their technology section, I felt there is so much left unsaid. So I started to write a book, a compass to the digital life that will help understand the changes technology brings about for our daily lives. In the meantime, I continued to work at SonntagsZeitung as a news editor and worked on my own music blog, 78s. As of June, I’m fully dedicated to finishing the book, working on various freelance projects along the way.

What are you doing and how did you get there?

I do what I like. I got there by quitting my job.

Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did youlearn?

I like to think of success and failure in a way Churchill did, who famously said: Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. It really isn’t the moment of success that shows how good we are, but the way we cope with failures. Success often involves a good amount of luck, while luck doesn’t help you to overcome failure. Probably my biggest failure so far was that I failed to give a short speech at my grandfather’s funeral. What I learnt from that? Don’t let fear stand in your way when going for something you really want. You might not always succeed, but you sure fail if you don’t try. What I mean, all in one very inspiring video.

What do you want to achieve in the next week, the next year, the next 10 years?

In the next week – Strike the publishing deal I really want.

In the next Year – Make people discuss about my book.

In the next 10 Years – Have the freedom to work on whatever I care about the most. And not be focussed too much on work anyhow.

What was your most inspring moment during the last two weeks?

Cycling through Brooklyn on my very first visit to New York.

How could other Sandboxers and the outside world support you and why would that be exciting for them?

Once my book is out, you can help spread the word. That’s not very exciting, I admit, but do we support others to be excited ourselves? Having said that, let me know if you’re working on something interesting and could need someone who knows a good deal about the media and likes to get enthusiastic about things. That might become exciting for both of us.

David’s favorites:

- book: Le mythe de Sisyphe by Albert Camus

- movie: Citizen Kane

- place on earth: Home

- travel destination during last year: New York

- food: Italian

- drink: In any company: Gin & Tonic, in good company: red wine.

- quote: Never trust a man without a beard.

Every day, our community manager Katrin Winiarski, reads through her feed of all Sandboxers’ blog posts. Every Thursday, she chooses the most inspiring, funny or brilliant one and reposts it on this blog. This post has been written by Sandboxer Marcus Kuhn. The original version can be found here.

I have done it, instead of seeking regular employment with a consulting agency, an MNE or even a startup I have decided to go at it on my own. I will try my luck with connex.io which has the goal to automate the management of your address book. I jumped of the cliff! But what does this mean?

Quite some monetary costs are associated with trying to establish your own company. First of all there is the direct cost of scraping together the capital needed to fund at least the early stages of your own company. Then there are the indirect opportunity costs of the salary you give up by choosing to work for yourself. And finally there are other, non monetary, “costs” such as a reduced standard of living because of the salary one gives up etc. In my case, I didn’t need a lot of funding but the loss of salary is quite substantial. This means I have to minimize my costs of living. [...]

Besides the costs there are risks associated with the decision of trying it on your own. Only one or two out of ten startups become a monetary success, four just scrape by and neither make nor lose any substantial amounts of money. Such startups often are called the “living dead”, they just keep on existing because founders are not willing to admit that it would be much more productive to move on and tackle another project. The remaining four or five startups seize to exist rather fast. All in all this means that in my decision to go at it on my own I face the risk of failure and the consequences of failure. And I also need to avoid to get stuck in a “living dead” scenario.

To counterbalance the costs and risks I just described, there obviously needs to be strong benefits. The most important benefit is that I can do what I really like. Now, I work at the intersection between technology and business which is what I really wanted. But there are benefits beyond that: I don’t have to work in a large corporation or sell myself and my values out to some corporate overlord [...]. By taking the risk of failure I also get rewarded with a potentially higher payout.

Therefore the decision basically boiled down to a simple question: Are the costs and the risk of failure outweighed by the actual and potential benefits? [...] Without any serious commitments and having just finished my studies, [...] my current situation mitigated the costs and risks.

Since two weeks I am now working around the clock to make my dream of making address book management an automated task happen. So far it feels good. But what happens if I fail? Many companies on this planet are looking for entrepreneurial people so I’ll be able to value my experience. Failing is no big deal: I will have learned just as much as if connex.io is successful. And if I really like the startup game, I will probably just try again and again.

Marcus Kuhn is a young swiss entrepreneur who recently graduated from a double degree master program at University St. Gallen and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Previous to founding connex.io, Marcus worked at Accenture, Namics and as an independant online consultant.

Taking the idea of the Time 100 list locally, the Swiss magazine L’Hebdo publishes every year a list of the 100 people who – through their actions and their visions – contributed most to the dynamism of Switzerland’s French-speaking part.

Sandbox CEO Antoine Verdon has been named yesterday in the 2010 list under the category “Eminence Grise“. He is featured next to public figures such as WTO Director Pascal Lamy, auctioneer Simon de Pury, and tennis star Stanislas Wawrinka.

The full article can be read here (in french). Congratulations!

Peter Vogel is a 25 year old Austrian‐American who grew up in Germany most of the time. In 2000, he developed his passion for entrepreneurship when he co-founded the lifestyle magazine re.flect for the lake of Constance region. Before moving to Zurich in 2004 for his engineering studies at the ETH Zurich, he travelled for a decent amount of time, getting to know wonderful places and people in this world. After 5 semesters in Zurich he went to the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. When he came back, he received the ETH Zurich Excellence Scholarship with which he partly financed his current company, Jobzippers Ltd. This project keeps him occupied until today.

Still, he decided to start a PhD in Entrepreneurship at the ETH Lausanne last May. Currently, he lives in both Lausanne and Zurich.
Find Peter on Facebook and Twitter. Jobzippers on Facebook.

Tell us the story of your latest project

Having two full-time jobs makes it difficult to pin-point the latest one. To form a big picture, combining my function in Jobzippers, that as a PhD student at the EPFL and the general approach I want to take, into one project which I want to call “making meaning”. I see this project as a continuing project which I have and always will make part of my life. To follow this path, I had to (at least temporarily) leave what I had actually studied and worked for, but I now know that it was the right decision. The nice thing: there are about 10 projects just waiting to be kicked-off, so once I find the time for it, there will be some new and exciting stuff taking place.

What are you doing and how did you get there?

As stated in the introduction, the mindset for “making meaning” began in 2000 where I decided that I wanted to do something that actually has an influence, not only on my own life, but rather on the lives of many. But this was the moment where something switched on my entrepreneurial mind rather than really making meaning yet. This journey continues with the foundation of Jobzippers Ltd in 2008 and then that of Stipendia (our European scholarship service) in 2010 (launch still to be announced).
In my PhD I am investigating programs offered by the US and many European countries to help unemployed transition into self-employment, as one mechanism to grow (in the current situation rather heal than grow) the economy. By collaborating with the national employment agencies we try to find out which programs work best, which people and industries should be supported in which way, thus providing insights for the individuals, economies as well as policymakers.

Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?

Let me start with failure, because without failure there cannot be any success which is also why I do not see failure as a real problem but just part of the game leading to new opportunities. There are several moments in my life when this statement was proven. Two examples are: (1) When I applied for a scholarship for Berkeley, my application was rejected. Totally ruining my day and week this was the worst that could happen. But 3 days after having received this notice, I received an email saying that Georgia Tech is among the top 3 universities in the US for Biomedical Engineering. The application window for Georgia Tech was later than that of Berkeley, so I applied for a scholarship there and received it.
(2) During my Masters studies it was always clear for me that I want to become a consultant. For more than 1 year I was considering only this career option (even though I had already founded Jobzippers and signs were good that it will become a success) and when I finally applied for jobs (last January probably was not the best time-point to do so) and went to the interviews, I failed (probably my inside knew that this is not the right time for me to become a consultant). So I started looking for alternatives and I ended up with my PhD in Entrepreneurship which, when looking back, was the much better option for me at that time-point.

When it comes to success: There are various nice things and achievements that have happened that make me happy and proud. But instead of naming various details, I think I am happy to gain traction and awareness in my project of “making meaning”. Three recent achievements are the acceptance to the St. Gallen Symposium 2010, the nomination for the WEF Technology Pioneer 2011 program, as well as my presentation (highly recommended by Sandbox to watch) at the St. Gallen Speakers Series. At the end of February 2010, I was presenting at the St. Gallen Speakers Series in front of several dozens of students as well as a video camera which not only recorded the talk, but also transmitted the video to the AutoUni in Wolfsburg where an additional set of people were sitting.
The main topic was on “Opportunities, Risks and Responsibilities of Running your Own Company”. With this talk I tried to highlight some of the problems that startups might have during the early phases but then also try to encourage students to go out and actually do something.

What do you want to achieve in the next week, the next year, the next 10 years?

Next week: Find a present for my 6 week old nephew, finish up an investment proposal for Jobzippers, finalize our CTI project application, sign contracts, some more contracts, and hopefully some more contracts…
Next year: Open our Lausanne office, raise enough capital to hire passionate and motivated people, expand to other European countries, continue with my PhD project and my “making meaning” project.

Next 10 years: Finish up my PhD, hopefully achieve an exit with Jobzippers, buy a sailing boat, sail around the world, climb Pik Lenin, Aconcagua and Mt McKinley, launch my startup consultancy to help governments around the world establish and improve their startup as well as unemployment support programs.

What was your most inspring moment during the last two weeks?

Leaving my desk last Thursday to go for a run down at the lake (the nice thing is that my desk is just about 300m away from the lake) feeling that Spring is coming back.

How could other Sandboxers and the outside world support you and why would that be exciting for them?

With Sandbox being an amazing community of outstanding individuals, I am always happy to meet and network with its members. If I had to state things in which I would actually need help right now I would ask for support in the following:

- Help us find investors to accelerate the growth and European expansion of Jobzippers
- Help us find PHP software developers
- Help us find entrepreneurs that are potentially interested in becoming Jobzippers country managers in one or more of the European countries
- Keep me informed of events that could help me in my project of “making meaning”
- Join our Jobzippers mentoring program to help the “younger” generation become as visionary as you are (contact me for details on how to join).

Peter’s favourite:
- Book: Brave New World
- Movie: A Beautiful Mind
- Travel destination during last year: 3 months sailing from Marquesas to Vava’u
- Food: Wienerschnitzel
- Quote: Life is too short, don’t waste it…short and simple

Remember these childhood dreams, where you imagined that you would once work in a place that consists entirely of chocolate and where you could just indulge in sweets all day, maybe taking a nap in between? Well, as you probably have realized until now, this place doesn’t exist. But: The Google offices in Zurich come quite close.

Antoine and I were lucky enough to get a tour of Google’s Zurich offices, where more than 450 people, most of them engineers, work on search quality and many other projects. Our competent guide to the five floors of Googleland was Matthias Meyer, Spokesperson for Google Switzerland. Matthias clearly enjoyed showing us around – no wonder, because what Google offers its employees is almost certainly unparalleled.

There is food and drinks almost everywhere – and it is all free (and, by the way, excellent). In addition to the main canteen serving three meals a day, there are “mini-kitchens” on every floor, stocked with drinks, ice cream, bread and snacks. To counterbalance this diet, the office also has a nice gym, complete with trainers. If exercising isn’t your thing, you can also get a massage or take a nap in the massage chair.

Or maybe you’re stuck in the work you’re doing and need to get some fresh ideas? For that, there are not one, but several playrooms with billard tables, table tennis, air hockey, Nintendo Wii’s and almost every other imaginable game. And to top things off: There is a huge slide going down from the first floor to the canteen. We tried it, and it’s awesome.

All of this is of course nice – but the reasons for Google’s success also lie in the way the company is structured. Google, although 22’000 employees strong today, prides itself on still working like “a lot of small startups”, as Matthias told us. Teams can work very independently, and innovation is driven by the famous “20-percent-rule” that allows every employee to work one day per week on his or her own projects (GMail originally was one of these projects).

But if it is fun, it is serious fun: As Matthias says, Google engineers are obsessed with two things: The user – and data. Google collects enormous amounts of nonpersonal data (Matthias emphasized that they take data privacy seriously), analyzes it meticulously and uses it to take decisions and improve their services. (For a good example, read this fantastic Wired article on the economics behind the Google advertising system).

The enormous innovative drive that made Google so successful thus seems to be based in a combination of focus on data, flexibility and independence – and giant slides. It very obviously is working.

But there are other ways than “just online” and “just offline”. A case in point is the <head> conference, scheduled to take place from October 24-26. <head> is a “global web conference” – which means that it actually takes place on the web, where all the presentations are streamed. But the twist is that there are also “local hubs”: gatherings in different places all over the world, where people will follow the conference. <head> thus combines local offline hubs and connects them globally online. The hub in Fribourg, Switzerland, is hosted by our good friends from Liip.