Regulars at our Hive53 meetups may have met Piotr Wilam at previous gatherings, where he has sat on the judging panel for our pitching sessions. We're grateful for his support (he even tweeted how nicely Piotr and Ela run the show! Seconded!) and we are delighted to welcome him as our guest speaker just before he takes off to Silicon Valley where he'll be introducing Polish startups to American VCs. 
The meetup will take place at Drukarnia Jazz Club (Nadwiślańska 1) starting at 6PM on Monday 5th March.

Piotr Wilam is currently CEO and leading investor at Innovation Nest, the seed and venture fund for global Internet projects that have their base in Poland. He is perhaps best known to many of us as co-founder and first president of Poland's largest Internet portal - www.onet.pl. In addition to these distinguished achievements, he founded Pascal Publishing (which grew to the market leader in travel guides, with more than 50% market share) as well as the digital publishing startup, Optimus Pascal Multimedia, which became Poland's leading educational software publisher.

Perhaps his background as both a philosopher and a mathematician has given him the uncanny ability to succeed in so many different fields? Let us know you're coming by clicking "I'm Attending" on our Facebook event page and see you there!

The rules for pitching are:
- max 60 seconds
- no slides
- in English

Happy New Year to one and all! It’s time to open your bright, shiny 2012 diaries and make a note of the first Hive meeting of the year - Wednesday 18th January at 6PM at Aquarius Restaurant - on Vistula river, right next to Wawel Castle.

This promises to be a truly buzzing meetup, with our speaker, Jaromir Działo fresh from recent success in Silicon Valley. Jaromir is one of the founders of semantic text summarizing service Topicmarks, a startup that rapidly attracted seed investment from the likes of Mint founder, Aaron Patzer, as well as rave reviews on TechCrunch and Mashable. Winner of Seedcamp, and runaway winner of the 2011 Founder Showcase, Topicmarks was acquired in December 2011 by social discovery leader Tagged. Jaromir’s career includes multiple startup successes, co-authorship of a patent, as well as involvement in more than 100 different web services - read more about him on our speakers’ page.

The format of the evening will be as before:
18:00 Welcome drink
18:15 Interview and Q&A with Jaromir
19:00 Pitch session (register at pitches@joinhive.com)
19:15 Announcements
19:30 Networking

The rules for pitching are:
- max 60 seconds
- no slides
- in English
Each of those pitching will receive instant feedback and will have a chance to win tickets to Startup Weekend Krakow. It's a great opportunity to practice, get feedback and get noticed. The pitch session and prizes are sponsored once again by BrightBerries.

Fundacja Nowe Technologie and Kevin Greene of anotherfriend.com are also sponsoring the event and supporting our startup community.

Let us know you're coming by clicking "I'm Attending" on our Facebook event page, get your beeesiness cards ready and see you January 18th!

Dear busy bees,

It feels great to share that the next Hive meetup will take place on Sunday December 11th at the legendary Piwnica pod Baranami (Market Square 27) - the prominent long-lasting anchor on the artistic and creative map of Krakow.

Our special guest that evening will be Amanda Rose - entrepreneur, event manager, digital strategist and advisor. She is the Founder of Connect the Dots Foundation and Twestival movement. More about Amanda below.

Event agenda:
18:00 Welcome drink
18:15 Interview and Q&A with Amanda
19:00 Pitch session (register at pitches@joinhive.com)
19:15 Announcements
19:30 Networking

The rules for pitching are:
- max 60 seconds
- no slides
- in English
Each of those pitching will receive instant feedback and will have a chance to win tickets to Startup Weekend Krakow and a coaching session from Rafał Han and 2 more great startup mentors (it's a suprise!). It's a great opportunity to practice, get feedback and get noticed. The pitch session and prizes are sponsored by BrightBerries who have been our supporters from the very beginning.

We are also very happy to announce a new sponsor - Fundacja Nowe Technologie is helping us make this event possible.

Let us know you're coming by clicking "I'm Attending" on our Facebook event page, get your beeesiness cards ready and see you Dec 11th!

Amanda Rose is the Founder of Connect the Dots Foundation; established in 2009 to incubate and craft fresh global campaigns and initiatives that use technology to connect people offline for a good cause. She co-founded Space-2, an innovative film and event locations consultancy where she has coordinated events for British Royalty and the Prime Minister of Canada, the Brit Awards and London Fashion Week. 
In 2007, inspired by the shift towards social networks Amanda decided to complete a Masters in Communications Management and spent a year researching a newly forming communications platform called Twitter. This offered unique insight as the global founder and architect of a movement called Twestival, an international volunteer effort to use social media like Twitter to raise money for important causes. Twestival has been able to build 55 wells with charity: water and recent efforts with Concern Worldwide will give thousands of students the chance at an education.  

Advising technology startups and those with a social good focus keep her energized. She is passionate about developing unique digital and creative strategies for brands and organizations looking to take the next step.  Amanda is currently in development on an exciting new project that is still to be announced.

It has only been a week since Sandy Swarm and we already have another great opportunity to meet again. We'd like to invite you all to a meetup which will take place on Monday November 14th at 6pm at 'u Louisa' club. 

Our special guest that evening will be Nalin Mittal - an entrepreneur all the way from Sillicon Valley. We know it's a bit short notice but we hope you'll be able to make it nonetheless. It'll be well worth it. 
We will have an open discussion about fundraising in the Valley, mobile apps and other startup-related topics. 
Let us know you're attending on our Facebook event page and see you there.

Nalin Mittal
Nalin is the co-founder and CTO of Appstores.com - a San Francisco based company backed by - among others - Sand Hill Angels, Alfred Lin (TellMe, Zappos, Sequoia), Dave McClure’s 500 Startups and i/o Ventures.

Prior to Appstores, Nalin started Blu Sky Labs where he created My.Zappos.com - a social shopping experience for Zappos. He's an entrepreneur with passion for creating consumer web based software.
Follow him on Twitter @nalin.

We're really happy and excited to announce that the next Hive meetup will take place on Friday November 4th and the venue will be the great Plaża Kraków.
Right - it's not just a sandy beach, they have a great indoor part too! Pictures below. We'll be starting, as always, at 6pm.

What's so special about this Hive? 
First, Mike Butcher, the editor of TechCrunch Europe and a big supporter of ours agreed to be our guest. Mike will share startup PR tips with Hive community (yes, if you are reading this, you are a part of the community!).
This is a great opportunity and we already know that some befriended startups from Warsaw Gamma Rebels will be driving South ;-). 
On top of that, we're planning five 60-second pitches - each followed by a round of feedback from Mike, Rafał Han and Marek Przystaś. It's a great opportunity to practice, get feedback and, well, get noticed. 

Thanks to our sponsors - Brightberries. They have been great supporters of the growing startup and entrepreneurship scene in Krakow.

But hey, there's more! 
It's a great coincidence that the kids at Applicake will be celebrating their 5th birthday that very night and all Hive busy bees are invited to join that celebration! The party will kick off as soon as Hive is over and it is going to be a blast! 

Let us know you're attending on our Facebook event page, get your business cards ready, practice your pitches and see you Nov 4th. Get ready for a long night!

Mike Butcher
Mike is the editor of TechCrunch Europe. He is also involved in a project to bring European technology entrepreneurs and investors together in a club environment called TechHub (@TechHub). A long time journalist, Mike has written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. He is a former editor of New Media Age magazine, the leading new media weekly in the UK, and the European edition of The Industry Standard magazine. Since 1996 he has launched or re-launched numerous media web sites and in 2000 he was nominated as NetMedia’s European Internet Journalist of the Year. 
In August 2008 TechCrunch Europe was awarded the best “Web 2.0 and business blog” in the UK, by the readers of Computer Weekly magazine. In 2011 Mike was named as one of London’s 100 ‘Secret Power Brokers’. He’s ranked as in the top five of the UK’s 100 most influential journalists online.
Mike is a regular commentator on the technology business, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, Channel 4 and Bloomberg. Mike’s personal blog is mbites, while he Twitters as @mikebutcher.

Dear busy bees,  

We'd like to invite you all to our second Hive meetup. It will take place on Tuesday September 20th at 6pm at Betel. Our guest speaker that evening will be Uzi Shmilovici - an amazing entrepreneur, Founder & CEO of Future Simple. He will give a presentation on the future of software. There will be an interview and time for Q&A afterwards.

We will also have an elevator pitch session. If you'd like to share your idea, present your company or simply practice your pitch let us know via email (piotr@joinhive.com) or on the event wall. The only rules of pitching are:
- max 60 seconds
- no slides
So let us know you're coming by clicking "I'm Attending" on our Facebook event page, get your beeesiness cards ready and see you on Tuesday!

Uzi Shmilovici is an internet entrepreneur. He co-founded Netcraft - an Israeli web agency in 2003. Over the years, Netcraft set the tone and became an industry leader in Israel, setting standards in user experience, design and development for the web. Those achievements were recognized when he was named one of the Top-40 Israeli Internet Startup Professionals by TheMarker Magazine in 2008 (the most prominent business magazine in Israel). Netcraft was later acquired by Tapuz, a leading Israeli internet company.
In late 2009, Uzi moved to Chicago where he embarked on a new challenge to change the boring and obsolete world of business software with Future Simple. Future Simple creates exciting online business applications with breakthrough designs and user interfaces. The mission of Future Simple is to free business owners from the tyranny of the old age software companies.

Dear busy bees,  

We're very happy to announce that the first Hive meetup will take place on Thursday August 25th at 6pm at Betel. We've created the Facebook event page so feel free to click "I'm Attending". The first round of speakers - our honey to lure you in - whom we will group-interview consists of 3 great entrepreneurs with different career paths: (alphabetically) Rafał Han, Piotr Konieczny and Kuba Krzych, more about them below. We also want everyone attending Hive to say a few words about what YOU do. Get your beeesiness cards ready and see you on Thursday!

Rafał Han
Serial entrepreneur, coach and investor in innovative projects and extraordinary teams.
Founder and CEO at HanBright – Kids edutainment projects such as ciufcia.pl – largest polish website with edutainment games for preschoolers. HanBright is currently focusing on foreign markets, mobile app and merchandising. Founder of BrightBerries – Angel Seed funding group focused on mentoring, advising, sharing business knowledge and promoting early stage startups from eastern and central Europe (webshake.tv, futbolowo.pl, lingapp.com, heartpick.com and others). BrightBerries is especially interested in web and mobile projects.
Rafal works with startups on their ideas,  strategic directions, entrepreneurial skills and marketing.

Piotr Konieczny
For the last 7 years Piotr has been helping the biggest Polish and international companies in securing their networks and web applications. After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University he started working in British division of Philips Electronics. Few years later he founded Niebezpiecznik.pl, a consulting company and the biggest Polish portal about IT security. Within Niebezpiecznik.pl Piotr manages the team responsible for penetration testing and security audits of ICT systems. 
He also runs a series of popular web application security workshops for programmers.

Jakub Krzych
Creator and Co-Founder of AdTaily.com, a self-service advertising platform acquired by Agora SA. In 2009 the prestigious magazine CNBC Business considered AdTaily one of the 25 most innovative European companies. Jakub is currently holding position of the Board Member of AdTaily, leading product team of 12 people in Krakow. Prior to founding AdTaily, he was a strategy and technology consultant in a Norwegian agency based in Oslo, working on design and technology projects for the Norwegian Government, airline companies and large corporations.
Jakub graduated from the Jagiellonian University in Applied Computer Science and Computational Physics.
He is passionate about meeting new people sharing startup visions and entrepreneurship experiences.