I was really astonished to see that two German “entrepreneurs & clone experts”
are speaking at the Web 2.0 conference. One is Oliver Jung, the other Lukas Gadowski, founder of Spreadshirt, which is the number two T-shirt print shop next to Cafepress. Their session will show how Copycatism works in Europe.
So far so good and I am not really questioning a session like that, but it’s sad to see that out of all international speakers two Germans have to talk about Copycatism rather than about innovation. Where have all the German engineers gone?
Especially the Web 2.0 expo, which in my eyes is the most innovative tech conference out there, really deserves more (from Germany) than two guys who make their money by investing in cloned products.
I also just wondered what would happen if a Chinese car manufacturer & copycat, would speak at the Frankfurt auto show about his car cloning strategy. Is there really anything he could say, rather than “File an international trademark, roll out the patents and open outposts as fast as possible”? We’ll see.
September 16th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
As a long time user of Spreadshirt, I think ‘copycattism’ is really a poor term and one that doesn’t justify the topic. People have been printing on clothing since time immemorial, and the idea that Cafepress has some sort of magical lock on the POD (print on demand) market is also nonsense. What Spreadshirt set out to do was make *quality* print on demand and by a very different printing method which uses fused plastic. It is night and day between Spreadshirt and Cafepress on everything from customer service to garment quality. One could as well have Google give a talk about cloning and the search market. They didn’t do it first, but they did it far better and by a more innovative and useful method. At some point it’s all splitting hairs.
September 16th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
It’s not about spreadshirt. It’s about investing in high evaluated US clones such as StudiVZ, a Facebook clone (currently under investigation).
I am not sure, but I assume it will be a self-promotion tour of their newly created fund. All tips and tricks how to avoid being “cloned” by copycats can be said in about 5 minutes.