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Today we have the pleasure to introduce you to an exciting festival of Deutsche Telekom, our longtime partner. It’s about fun, about community, about equality and about female empowerment – and these are all topics that are of course also very close to our hearts.
The Equal eSports Festival, which takes place this coming weekend from October 29-31 at the Telekom Hauptstadtrepräsentanz, is dedicated to equality and diversity in the eSports and gaming scene. “eSports is a mass sport in which there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of equality and diversity,” reports Antje Hundhausen, initiator of the festival from Deutsche Telekom.
But supporting women in this otherwise male-dominated scene is just the beginning. It is also important to the festival to include non-binary players, for example, as well as people who otherwise have no access to the gaming experience due to their origin or social status. Everyone should be able to play and be part of the community.
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by Frank | Events
Innovation in fashion has always been a designer’s pursuit; mixing the primitive purpose of clothing with new materials and techniques, to combine functionality with unique design. On the outset of this Berlin Fashion Week, concept shopping mall Bikini Berlin opened its doors to an innovative exhibition by ElektroCouture, the Berlin-based fashion technology powerhouse, representing the future of self-expression and style.
ElektroCouture, a leading institution in fashion technology, works with companies in both consulting them, as well as offering active technological support to designers to realize their visions. Natasha from ElektroCouture was there to explain to us all that we were seeing: 15 elaborate fashion concepts, each of which incorporated technology – from glow in the dark designs, to 3D printed materials, the creations were all astonishing and inspired.
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by Stella | Fashion
photos: Galya Feierman
Wear It Festival, unfolding the world of fashion tech in Palais Kulturbrauerei, offered a profoundly engaging and mind-expanding platform for wear it, discover it, produce it, believe it and network it, and provided a tremendously insightful two-day journey into the nature of IT. Gathering an incredible populace of participants ranging from inventors to fashion designers, from software geeks to academics, from cutting edge international companies to multimedia students, from start-ups, investors, government representatives to colorful wondering fashionistas in bling and synthetic fabrics, among others. The continuous flow of lectures in the auditorium added a few credits to your future masters degree while the foyer provided a trade fair-like exhibition of the latest merchandise and prototypes attracting future producers, collaborators and consumers.
Throughout the building the conversation continued and the visitors were drawn like moths to the numerous LED lights of high tech, brought together by workshops and free coffee and cake breaks and entertained by music and visuals. Kulturbrauerei’s scraped old walls joined in a familiar Berlin recipe with neon lights and synth sounds, but also counterpoised the sleek and refined appearance of future technology that is already happening now.
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by Guest Author | Design, Fashion, Photos
Berlin is a modern, contemporary city like any other, but in one respect it has an awfully bad reputation: Credit cards – let alone any other modern-day form of payment – not accepted! You will read this as a warning in any guide book or hear this from any visitor of the city who complains that they had to pay in cash in the restaurant, couldn’t pay with credit cards in a big electronic stores or with any card whatsoever at the cinema. Germans really seem to value cold hard cash…
But this is changing right now, we just haven’t noticed it yet! With my last visits to the IFA consumer electronics fair I have come across new forms of digital payment multiple times and I wondered, how these are already implemented in Berlin so far. I investigated a bit and made some practical tests.
One of the technologies that I found especially intriguing is the so called mobile wallet that you have on your smartphone. They exist on multiple platforms, the one being interesting for me as an Android user is called MyWallet and it’s available for free at the play app store. What it is is a digital version of your wallet that includes your credit cards, right on your smartphone. Another technology that I tested is the mobile app of Paypal that let’s you use your Paypal credit to pay in stores. More about that and my favorite stores, cafes and restaurants that offer mobile payment after the jump.
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by Frank | Bars, Cafés, Kreuzberg, Mitte, Neukölln, Prenzlauer Berg, Restaurants, Shops
After we featured local products such as molecular popsicles, geometric handbags, home-delivery cocktails, and many more in our series Berlin Goods we have a new one for you which was “born in Kreuzberg, raised in Schöneberg and is now grown-up in Charlottenburg”. It’s probably the most cutting-edge one in our series and we are excited to talk about it here.
RAUMFELD began life as a Berlin startup back in 2008. Led by the motivation to improve the quality of digital sound the founders, Stephan Schulz and Michael Hirsch, developed a high-end wireless speaker system with multi-room streaming. Wow, that goes clearly far beyond the average hand-made design object that you normally come across here in Berlin. Since last year’s opening of the Bikini concept mall Raumfeld presents their pride and glory in their first showroom and boutique inside the new contemporary shopping paradise. We visited them in their store and talked about their impressive systems and speakers and what role the Berliners play in their work.
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by Frank | Products, Shops