The company joins the likes of SoundCloud, Mozilla and 6Wunderkinder in moving into the Factory, whose main building occupies a former brewery adjacent to the former Berlin Wall death strip in Mitte.

The new Zendesk office will house the direct sales and ‘customer enablement’ teams of the DACH region and Eastern Europe. It will be headed up by Steffen Teske, Zendesk’s director of Central and Eastern Europe.

The move comes following significant growth in Europe as a whole and Germany in particular for the company, with the number of customers here doubling in the past year. Berlin sees the third new Zendesk office this year after Tokyo and Dublin.

In a press release sent out to media on Wednesday morning, Teske said: “We have experienced huge growth in the German market, and it makes sense to be physically located there to support our customers and partners. The digital heart of Germany is beating in Berlin, and we are very proud to officially be a part of it.”

The importance of Berlin as a hub of innovation was also noted by Mikkel Svane, founder and CEO of Zendesk, who said: “An ecosystem of innovative startups and established digital companies is growing here. Being in Berlin brings us closer to our customers and to talented entrepreneurs and professionals as we grow rapidly throughout Europe.”

Since its founding in 2007, Zendesk has raised around $85.5 million (€63.9m at today’s exchange rate). It’s one of the larger players in the crowded online customer support market, facing rivals including Salesforce and Desk.com.

Check out Silicon Allee’s weekly rundown of all the best events going on in our fair city: what’s happening, what’s coming up and what may be of interest whether you be investor, entrepreneur or hacker.

Tuesday

Founding a technology-based startup when you are not a tech expert yourself can be daunting. So how much do you really need to know about IT? What should you look for in a potential tech co-founder? The IT for CEOs event will help you define your IT set up with talks from the likes of Markus Kempkes, CEO of Auxo, Footstep Ventures CEO Weston Hankins, and Philipp Kandal, CEO of skobbler.de. There is also the possibility of pitching your idea – see here for further details and tickets, which cost €8 + fee. At Wooga’s offices at Saarbrücker Str 38, from 7-10pm.

Wednesday

The Startup Lounge, led by the Entrepreneurs Club Berlin, meets the Berlin chapter of the Location Based Marketing Association for a discussion about the state of location-based marketing in Germany, and the opportunities and challenges it presents for startups and marketers. Tickets cost €10. At the Franz Club, from 7pm.

Thursday

Allversity, a new e-learning platform, is throwing a launch party ahead of going live in more than 50 community knowledge centres across Africa and South-East Asia the following day. Students will be able to access courses about health, life and business skills, agriculture, human rights, math, science, history, applied sciences, the arts, and more. The event is free; sign up here. At the Mille Pezzi Mosaic Shop at Crellestrasse 3-4, from 7-10pm.

Futurice’s bimonthly Afterwork event is focusing this time around on how the Internet is enabling the transformation of the car industry. It’s an opportunity for you to get up to date on trends in car connectivity with the likes of Volkswagen, Aupeo, ConMotive and Hubject in an informal setting. There will be talks followed by drinks and networking. Tickets are free; register here. At Schützenstraße 6, from 6pm.

Friday

GeoMonday is a meet up dedicated to exploring the location space; be it geography, innovation or research. The next session takes place in conjunction with WhereCamp Berlin and the Berlin Pub Summit. Participants can expect insights into the geo space and plenty of opportunity for some quality networking. Tickets are free, sign up here. More information on signing up.

Friday to Saturday

WhereCamp itself, meanwhile, offers two days of presentations and talks about maps and geolocation. You can choose to present, host a debate or discuss a geo-topic. At Luxemburger Strasse 10, from 9am on June 21 to 8pm on June 22.

Applications are open now, but remember: participating startups must have been live for no more than three months, and they must launch to the public and media for the first time on the Disrupt stage.

It’s the perfect opportunity to gain huge amounts of exposure both to potential investors and to the media, not to mention end users – if you can fight your way to the final, that is. TechCrunch editors will select 15 companies from the hundreds of applicants to pitch to the big-name team of judges. From there, five will progress to a finals round to produce an overall winner.

The entire competition will be webcast live, while 2,000 people from across the globe will be at Disrupt in person at the Arena Berlin venue in Kreuzberg. It will mark the conference’s first trip to Europe, having previously visited San Francisco, New York and Beijing.

The preliminary hackathon takes place from October 26-27, with the main event – including the Battlefield – from October 28-29.

You can apply for the contest until Monday, June 24 at 11.59pm EST – i.e. 8.59am CEST on Tuesday, June 25. Slides and a video are strongly recommended; you can check out more information here.

If you want to find out what it takes to win the Battlefield, you can check out some of the previous winners, including Enigma, YourMechanic and UberConference.

Berlin’s a busy town at the moment – we’ve put together a news round up from the past 24 hours.

The Scout24 group’s startup incubator You Is Now has added to the growing list of accelerators in Berlin with a new program featuring three teams. Warmmiete24, a platform identifying the extra costs of renting a place to live such as heating, event venue portal meinelocation.com and CleanBerlin, which allows direct booking of cleaners, will all take part in the three-month pilot project at You Is Now’s Berlin offices.

They will receive financial support and office space as well as access to mentors and the expertise and infrastructure of Immobilienscout24.

You Is Now’s Dr. Torsten Oelke said: “We are pleased to now also give founding teams the opportunity to develop their ideas and test their user and functionality concepts over a short and intensive period.”

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Language-learning platform Babbel has seen its apps top the 10 million download mark. English, Spanish and French are the most popular languages, with apps available on iOS, Android, Amazon and Windows 8.

In addition, the company says its products top the education charts in 35 countries, and CEO Markus Witte said the trend towards mobile would continue: “We’re enormously proud that so many people worldwide have elected for our apps. From the very beginning, Babbel was intended as a cross-platform learning system, and now, after six years, the time is ripe for this. The number of Babbel’s mobile users will soon surpass that of web users. This is a general trend that ties in perfectly with our product concept.”

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Uber has made Munich its second Germany city with Wednesday’s launch in the Bavarian city. Just as previously in Berlin, the luxury car ride firm has had ‘secret Ubers’ on the streets for some time to get the service off the ground.

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Following from an initial link up in 2012, DeliveryHero has now invested a further €5 million into its Indian partner TastyKhana. The food delivery platform has been keen to expand internationally in the face of strong competition, and the mobile market in India is especially attractive – TastyKhana, based in the city of Pune, has seen a 40 percent increase in sales in recent months.

DeliveryHero CEO Niklas Oestberg said: “The strength in our core markets allows us to invest in smaller, innovative companies like TastyKhana to accompany them with technological know-how and financial resources on their way to the top.”

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The first cook app built using appetico, the Vegan Nom Noms Cook App, has been launched in the App Store and Google Play. It was created by American food blogger Nicole Abramowski, who like appetico is based in Berlin.

Appetico is publishing software which enables independent authors and publishers of food and drink content to monetise their work by creating interactive and unique without any custom programming.

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The latest startup to come out of Neukölln, Quarterland, will join forces with a local arts festival to launch the beta version of its app. The app will feature the festival guide to 48 Stunden Neukölln, including a live map highlighting activities and details as they happen.

Quarterland founder Torsten Fischer said: “”We share a common cause with 48 Stunden Neukölln. The festival empowers a community by operating this platform for expression to anyone that has something to say. It fills a real need for purpose and connection amongst people. No wonder, it has grown to be one of largest arts festival in Berlin.”

The 2012 Techbikers taking a break

Some people will go to any lengths for a spot of good networking – but how about 350km? Some 40 startup folk will rely on pedal power when they travel from Prague to Berlin next month for Techbikers. The trip is designed to improve contacts between the two tech scenes as well as raise money for a good cause. This year, it’s dotHIV, which is trying to redefine how you can show your support for charities online – .hiv is the first top-level domain which is purely for good causes.

Last year, 40 people cycled from Paris to London over three days as part of the first Techbikers and raised €30,000 for Room to Read, funding a school and two school libraries in Nepal – and in 2013, organisers are hoping for a similar figure.

And it’s not only a great way to help out a good cause, but it’s also a wonderful chance to get to know some interesting – not to say useful – people and see a side of Europe that you would otherwise miss out on.

Lea Bauer, initiator of Techbikers Germany, said: “We are very excited about our collaboration with dotHIV – basically a Berlin startup with a background in social issues. DotHIV uses technology to do good in an area which has been out of society’s focus since the 1990s. The combination of a technology-oriented approach and a global strategy, which has also impressed the startup scene, makes dotHIV an ideal partner.”

The money raised through Techbikers will go towards funding the dotHIV platform, and specifically, allowing people to decide which other charities it should support.

Michael Trautmann from dotHIV said: “We are thrilled and very, very grateful that Techbikers chose dotHIV. I believe that the two ideas are a perfect match.”

The ride takes place from July 26-28 and registration is open now. You need to have a reasonable level of fitness and be an entrepreneur or part of the startup scene. It costs €280 to take part, which includes transport to the start point in Prague, accommodation, food and technical support for any problems with your bike. Techbikers is a non-profit event; every penny raised will go to the good cause. In addition, each participant commits to raising €750 in donations.

The winning team from Excalibur

A Slovakian startup which turns your mobile phone into a universal authentication system has won the Telekom Innovation Contest – and with it up to €500,000 of Deutsche Telekom resources to develop the product. Excalibur saw off 11 other teams – including three from Germany – having emerged out of a total of 444 entries from 45 countries.

Its founders’ argument that the trust between a customer and their telco could be leveraged to allow multiple layers of authentication using phones won over the international jury at the DT building at Ernst-Reuter-Platz on Monday.

Excalibur boasts a single sign-on system where users just need to scan a QR code once to be automatically logged into every website, single click logout, cookie sandboxing and a host of other security features. The four founders – Ivan Klimek, Peter Luptak, Tomas Korenko and Marian Keltika – say their unique crypto-scheme makes your sensitive information all-but invulnerable to attacks.

Ivan, the CEO and CTO, said: “Excalibur is a big solution to a big problem. We solve not only existing problems with authentication, but are prepared to serve the authentication need in the world of tomorrow – where everything is connected to the Internet.”

The winning team will develop a development and business plan together with DT experts, using resources of up to €500,000 including business coaching, hardware and software and access to infrastructure, and will present the final product in December at the Innovation Day in Poland.

Hungarian startup Cubilog claimed second place with its cloud-based ultra-modular universal measurement, data acquisition and control system, while one of the German teams, Homee, from the startup Codeatelier, claimed third with its smart living assistant. Both won iPads and will work with Telekom in future, with the telco giant also keeping tabs on three other finalists as well.

The competition was organised by T-Mobile Poland, Magyar Telekom in Hungary and the Telekom Innovation Laboratories in Germany. It was also supported by Deutsche Telekom’s international incubators – hub:raum Germany and Poland, UQBate and Kitchen Budapest – which took part in the selection process and the final.

Other German teams in the running included Janus-Device, which allows you to connect to a trusted Internet access point – for example your home connection – from anywhere in the world, and Six-Dot, which helps blind and visually impaired people to do everything by themselves and their social network.

The event was hosted by Telekom Innovation Laboratories’ Cem Ergün Müller.

Berlin cityscapes: Ernst-Reuter-Platz

Check out Silicon Allee’s weekly rundown of all the best events going on in our fair city: what’s happening, what’s coming up and what may be of interest whether you be investor, entrepreneur or hacker.

Tuesday

The Silicon Allee meet up is back – Berlin’s biggest and best networking event takes place as usual at Sankt Oberholz. It’s completely free and open; just turn up from 9am. More details here and on the Facebook page. At Rosenthaler Platz, from 9am.

Wednesday

Some 25 entrepreneurs and other tech movers and shakers are visiting Berlin from the Polish city of Gdansk. They are in town to learn more about the startup ecosystem here as well as to connect with new people – and Berliners in turn can learn about one of Europe’s up and coming cities. The event is being hosted by the Berlin Startup Academy; more details here. At Sankt Oberholz on Rosenthaler Platz, from 7pm.

Thursday

There are still a handful of tickets left for Berlin’s first dedicated startup jobs fair at Supermarkt, organised by TechMeetups in association with Silicon Allee, both for job seekers and for companies looking to hire a kickass team. More details here. At Brunnenstrasse 64, from 6-9pm.

Silicon Valley-based cloud content management company Box is in town to hold a developer meet up having just opened an office in London. The event will include talks from Stefan Apitz, VP of technical operations at Box, and Dr. Martin Boehringer, CEO of Hojoki, a Box partner based in Berlin. There will be food and drinks, and there will also be a chance to network afterwards. At Sankt Oberholz, from 6.30-9pm.

Saturday

With the ongoing conversation about the transition to sustainable energy making headlines in Germany pretty much every day, there’s no better time for a hackathon to work on ways to reduce consumption and increase efficiency when it comes to energy. Energy Hack will look at what devices and applications can help achieve this as well as making the abstract issue of electricity supply and infrastructure better understood. At Supermarkt, from 12pm until the evening.

If you want to submit your event for inclusion in the Big Berlin Breakdown, just drop us an email at team [at] siliconallee.com.

If you haven’t been before, our event is completely open with no registration required. There are no talks – the meet up is all about networking, be you entrepreneur, investor, designer, developer or anyone else interested in Berlin’s startup scene.

The event runs until the last person leaves and always attracts a good mix of people. So get down there and grab a coffee before heading into the office.

Check out the event’s Facebook page – and we’ll see you tomorrow!

A screenshot of what DELIGHT can do

Who says Berlin doesn’t do new technology? The DELIGHT engine is a next generation HTML5 3D technology which has been launched by Berlin-base xymatic after more than three years in development. It enables 3D games and applications directly in your browser on any device without plugins and its creators hope it will encourage a new generation of web content.

Developers worldwide can obtain early access to work with the HTML5/WebGL-based engine, with the lack of plugins improving security and inter-device operability. The idea is one application, on all devices, instantly, and xymatic co-founder Timo Bolse said the ultimate aim is to bring out the best in the web.

“We want the web community to be able to build first-class applications that truly leverage the power of the web,” he said. “We want to get rid of all the hacks, workarounds and greedy shortcuts that are out there. Our vision is a web that is the superior platform – and DELIGHT engine aims to pave the way reaching that goal.”

For example, using DELIGHT a game can be played on an Android device, a MacBook, a PC and so on without installing it everywhere; you could also pause a game on one device and resume it from where you left off on another.

Frederik Maucksch, CTO and fellow xymatic co-founder, told Silicon Allee that he believes in the future, applications developed on the web will outpace native applications, and that DELIGHT’s ability to allow integration with existing websites and web services can be crucial. He said: “The rapid advance of web technology and web standards such as WebGL, WebRTC or WebAudio is just stunning. But with these possibilities also comes added complexity. DELIGHT engine greatly reduces this complexity, allowing web developers to focus on groundbreaking solutions, rather than implementation details.”

Founded in early 2011, previous products from xymatic – which is currently in an open investment round – include the award-winning reflow, an augmented reality puzzle game for iPad and iPhone, and xycall, an app acting as a broker for smartphone calls within a peer group, thus enabling users to get more out of their mobile service contracts.

The latest product also boasts a redesigned user interface enabling users to monitor their inbox while writing messages as well as new features such as a Media Gallery. It is hoped the new Moped will prove attractive to users with its view of the world through the lens of a web service rather than as just another closed messaging app.

The platform’s features also include an open platform approach, giving users the ability to send and receive messages via email, and enabling them to find contacts through Twitter, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn. Other integrated services, meanwhile, include web of things platform IFTTT – connecting to Evernote, stock market alerts, weather updates etc – Google Chrome and Foursquare.

Users can access Moped, which utilises a Twitter-style functionality, from the web, mobile devices or via email, with no need to manually update each one. Schuyler Deerman, the founder of Moped, said: “Accessing your messages on several devices, this ‘multi-screen experience,’ is an imperative for our users, as is integrating with other web services. Messaging needs to integrate with apps and services our users use, and we’re building Moped with this in mind.”

Keeping the target audience of small businesses and working teams in mind, Moped has been designed as a private and secure platform. Messages can be one-to-one or group and can involve people outside Moped by using their email addresses, thus keeping the amount of information needing to be swapped – such as phone numbers – to a minimum.

And the integrations with services that colleagues frequently use anyway, such as Dropbox, means that Moped can offer easy preview, access and sharing of rich messaging content on any device. The new Media Gallery will ensure that such content shared on Moped will be easier to capture and access than before.

Moped is also opening up its API for third party developers, the first being IFTTT, to show off the benefits of its open platform approach. Linden Tibbets, CEO of IFTTT, said: “Moped is a Swiss army knife. Not only is it elegant and fun to use, it’s incredibly functional. Especially when combined with IFTTT. Moped is great for teams too – you can share links with groups, view rich media, and send yourself alerts. It’s a must-have app.”

Moped closed a $1 million investment round last year involved leading European and American investors including Earlybird, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel and Betaworks. After announcing it, Schuyler said: “Moped gives you universal access to your messages, like email, but it’s much lighter weight.”