STHLM TECH Meetup (December 2015)

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I got a chance to attend the STHLM TECH Meetup that took place on 8 Dec, 2015 at Hilton Slussen. The event began with latest news and updates from Swedish Startups and what makes Stockholm an ideal place to start a new company. The event was organised and hosted by Tyler Crowley. Tyler Crowley advices early-stage startup founders and helps to create more momentum for the startup ecosystem in Stockholm.

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The main guests of the evening were Boris Golden VC at Partech, Willy Braun VC at Daphni and Pierre-Eric Leibovici Co-founder at Daphni.  20151207_185712All of them are based in France. They talked about the startup scene in France particularly in Paris. They also gave advice on how to give effective, efficient & to the point pitch to attract the attention of VCs. They gave some examples of common mistakes young entrepreneur make while pitching their products in front of the VCs and customers.

Then the pitching session started. The first startup to pitch was Good Times Media. They pitched their product “perfectbanner” which is the world’s first automated ad-enhancement tool. It Auto-enhance AdWords display ads’ creative elements; color, image, message and more.Their algorithm improves conversion by 30-179%..

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The next startup to pitch was banana charge, they provide people’s smartphones with nutrition and energy by offering rentable power banks at parties and night clubs.

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The last startup to pitch was by handiscover. Handiscover.com is the first community based Holiday accommodation-booking website dedicated to people with Physical disabilities. At the core of Handiscover lies a unique classification system, which allows users to select accommodations based on their level of physical disability. Handiscover was ultimately chosen as the best startup to invest in among the three through voting by the audience and the judges.

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The pitches were very interesting and I enjoyed listening to them. The guest VCs (who were also judges for the evening) listened to the pitches and gave valuable suggestion and feedback to these startup after they presented their pitch. Overall it was a good learning experience for me. I got to see practically how actual startups pitch their product in front of VCs and what are the things a VC looks for in a pitch. I gained a lot of knowledge on the art of pitching and also in the field of entrepreneurship and open innovation & user innovation. I got to know how crowdsourcing can be used to make a product better. I could relate practically to many of the theories I learned in class after attending this event. It was a truly amazing event and I would suggest everyone to attend the next STHLM TECH Meetup which will be held in January 2016.

Sarjo

“Save the world ICT Style”

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I with some of my fellow classmates participated in the Ericsson E-Hack
11045846_10154318747578356_4421491187311278141_nwhich was held on 3-4 Dec, 2015. I learned a lot of things participating in this event. The event was quite innovating and I got to network with many people from Ericsson and from the ICT community in Stockholm.

Event’s Timeline:

3 Dec Afternoon & Evening: The event started at 1 pm in Ericsson’s office in Kista. In the beginning there was a brief introduction by Ericsson. Ericsson employees talked about Ericsson spaces which is a light-weight collaboration service focused on messaging, real-time communication and online meetings. We were also told about the potential of ICT to assist in major disasters. Ericsson Response is a global initiative of around 140 specially trained employee volunteers which provides communications expertise, equipment and resources to assist humanitarian relief organisations in responding faster and more effectively when disaster strikes. Since its formation in 2000, employee volunteers have been deployed in over 40 relief efforts in 30 countries.

After the introductions were over I teamed up with my fellow classmates and started working on an idea that utilises the power of ICT to make the world a better place. After a lot of discussions & brainstorming in the group we finally decided to work on a idea called “DS Connect” which is a fitness band for Down Syndrome patient to monitor their health. The Ericsson employees who were our mentors helped us by giving constructive feedback on our idea and telling us ways in which we could make our presentation better.

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4 Dec Morning & Afternoon: We completed our presentation and business model and were ready to pitch. The pitching started from the afternoon and we pitched our idea in front of the other participants and Ericsson Employees. Every one liked our idea and they all felt the necessity of such a solutions was necessary to deal with diseases like Down Syndrome. 

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What I learned from this experience: 

The event taught me a lot of things. There were lots of important moments that increased my knowledge on entrepreneurship, open and user innovation. I got to mingle with a different people and learned a lot of things from them. My knowledge also increased by listening to the pitches from the other groups. Overall it was a very nice experience and I would suggest everyone to participate in such kind of events as it is a lot of fun working in teams, getting to know people and developing new and innovative idea.

Sarjo

Start Up Days

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A few week-ends ago I participated in the EIT Alumni Start-Up Days, which was a week-end in order to work on their business ideas, focusing on sustainable development. Even if most of the participants were EIT students so our background was not that diverse, I believe that I have learnt a lot from this week-end.

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What happened in the event?

  • Friday evening: Meeting with the other participants, mingling and it was the start! We first listened to speeches from Entrepreneurs or people working in incubators. Then participants who already had ideas to work on presented it. I thought it was more interesting to start from scratch and go through the whole ideation process in just a week-end. In this way, we teamed up with another EIT Digital student (actually, Olga) and two students from EIT KIC Energy. Our idea at that time was to create a plug in order to save energy by avoiding electronic devices from staying on stand-by as it consumes more than what we think. This idea was very broad and not well-defined but I still thought it was interesting as it really dealt with sustainability.
  • Saturday: Work on the idea – Develop the idea by looking at the problem. From an initial view was to create a plug to “Unplug your energy” for private individuals but after looking at the possible customer segments, we decided to go for companies who have more to gain in terms of energy but also financially. Research needed to be done to see what already existed in the market to find how we could differentiate ourselves. Most of the ideas already existed and we got confronted with technological problems that could not be solved, for example a smart plug would consume more than a computer in stand-by mode. We completely changed our idea to a service agency calculating the consumption of energy of companies to then tell them which actions they should take. Thanks to the mentors and more work on the subject, we had a clear idea concerning our service and our customer segment at the end of the day.
  • Sunday: Last day to work on the idea – using the Business Model Canvas. With the help of mentors, we focused on several points and then worked on the pitch. After lunch, the pitch presentations were done in front of a jury composed of a business coach, an entrepreneur and a product manager fond of innovation. Even if we did not win, it was a great experience that I would happily live it again.

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What did I get from it?

There were many moments that were interesting, from which I increased my knowledge about entrepreneurship, open and user innovation but also, more generally, I was able to network. First of all, I think the insights from the Entrepreneur were very good, as it was the co-founder of Banana Charge and his start-up is brand new. In this way, it was interesting to see how he dealt with the launch and what were the very first issues they had as other entrepreneurs tend to forget them when they speak about their start-up.

Moreover I believe the mentors were of great help – not only did they give us help but they also shared their experience with entrepreneurship and gave us hints as to what works, what investors want to hear during a pitch, etc. As it is often said, it is very good to have more points of view regarding an idea and mentors are the “best” points of view: they have already got to know the customer segment, most of the time and they know what they do not need.

At the end of the each pitch, it was very nice to get questions from the jury but also from our peers. In this way, we could have an insight from expert people but also other people “like us”. Even though the jury was the only one to pick the winners, it made the result of the competition less controversial and it also gave a lot of credit to the whole event, from my point of view.

What can be concluded from this experience?

Try it yourself, you will like it and you will want to do it again. And last, a competition is all about collaboration so don’t scare yourself, everything is going to be fine!

Ending of Course with Superb Guest Lecture

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In this post, I am going to share my overall experience on course of Open and User innovation and my feedback on our Guest lecture ‘Anna Rosling Rönnlund’, founder of Gapminder.

First of all, the real reason why I have joined this course was that we had one lecture related to Entrepreneurship for Engineers course which was given by Mr. Serdar. In that lecture, I got really impressed by the way he interacted with students. He made us to participate in the class by calling us with our names which was very impressive and unique for me in this European culture of studies. So I made my final decision to attend the course on Open and User innovation, though I did not know the ABC of it.

Being an introvert by nature, I was a little shy during the first few classes. But Serdar was so kind and encouraging that I started to participate in the class. I have enjoyed learning in that class because everyone was so nice and friendly. I really thank you everyone in the class for being so kind and helpful. I have learned a lot from our classmates. They were very confident and informative. Some of you knew a lot about innovation which had inspired me a lot.

Mr.Serdar has a very different way of teaching and dealing with the students. He has answered all the questions very elaborately and clearly and I can say now proudly that I know the basics and core concepts of open and user innovation. It has widened my way of thinking and looking at things in a different way. Most importantly, it has given me confidence and helped me to improve my communication skills which I think would definitely help me in my career.

Now let’s come to the great lecture given to us today ( 2nd December 2015) by one of the Gapminder’s owner Anna Rosling. We met her before the class and I found her very charming and inspiring person. Her colleague Jasper was also very nice. The nice thing was that he was also an EIT ICT student. J. Mr. Serdar introduced us with her by calling us with our names that felt very nice to me.

Anna Rosling started her presentation on Gapminder and DollarStreet Project by showing us very cool pictures and interacting with us by asking some questions included in one of their surveys. That really helped me to understand that our perception on world’s statistics and income or health of people worldwide in different nations is actually wrong. We should have an effective way to visualize the world’s economic conditions based on different nations. Vizabi project is also an interesting project to visualize the data in different forms. Anna showed us the data on different household items used by families of different income levels. I think that data can help us to locate those people and help them to lead a better life. The data generated by DollarStreet can provide opportunities to organizations and agencies to tackle the poverty and other problems in the world effectively.

Last but not the least, it was a great end of the course. This course has provided me a lot of good memories and knowledge and I will cherish those precious moments throughout my life.

Thanks a lot everyone J

Images may worth a thousand of words

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Today’s guest lecture by Anna Rosling Rönnlung has received great attention from the ME1033 audience. The ex-senior UX designer at Google and co-founder of GapMinder Foundation has presented the main vision of her company : fight devastating ignorance. It sounds like a huge entreprise. But they seem to be on the right track. In short, their core value is to give access to knowledge using images, pictures and good visualization.

Dollar Street is Anna’s main focus at the moment. This GapMinder startup gathers pictures of items and houses from all around the World. The idea is to make “everyone’s standard of living understandable with pictures”. There is no point of trying to explain it with words then; the following TEDx video will speak by itself.

Anna invited Jasper to join the lecture. Employee at GapMinder and just graduated from KTH two days ago, he gave us an insight of their visualization platform. The open-sourced tool converts data into bubbles, mountains or different sort of charts that render access to statistics more enjoyable. He pinpointed their wish in improving their service using collaborative and open innovation among the users.

After the two presentations, the students asked many interesting questions. Some of those were critical and challenging, which also showed Anna’s skill to be able to bounce back and give reliable answers. Dollar Street will be released by the beginning of next year. There are a lot of ideas and projects when looking at the future. The main one is to create a Dollar Street community that would share pictures and add content in the database. Another – and this is the one I like the most – would be to gather data over years to create a chronicle of GPS-coordinates.

I deeply think that visual have great impact on people. Convert numbers into nice charts help to understand the data. But Dollar Street goes even further: by using pictures, they manage to compare and analyse the social and ethnological diversity in a very creative way. Images may worth a thousand of words. As long as it is well used. I guess this will be the main challenge for Dollar Street in the coming years: keeping integrity in all the data they will collect and stay unbiased in the way they’ll combine them.

Céline

Google Meetup on Game development

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On 26th of November, I got a chance to go to a tech meetup organised by Google at the King office on the topic : “How we slashed the time and still develop awesome games?” This meetup was about a new public game engine Defold released by King. The main aim of King was to make the developers aware of this new engine and demonstrate some cool features of this gaming engine.

King is the company that created candy crush and recently got acquired by Activision for $5.9 billion. This information was my main motivation to go to the meetup and the get the chance to see the King office.

I would first start with the King office. Being a gaming company the office of King was really cool from all standards. The whole office seemed like a digital playground with slides, swings and great environment. Here is an image of their lobby that looks like an amusement park.

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As for the meetup, it was highly technical. The participation was primarily from game developers. 2 of King’s in house developers of the gaming engine presented the “cool” features of their new gaming engine – Defold. The crowd participation was also good and there was a lively discussion on the advantage of this gaming engine over conventional and more more accepted ones like Unity. The overall crowd was filled with industry professionals with a very few participation from the students (5-6). For me as a designer, it was really cool to see how the design philosophy changes for the developer as they were more specific about the crash reports, debugging, etc.

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Key Take Away

These meetups are great way for the companies to showcase their new technology to the specific target crowd. At the same time it is a good opportunity for the people interested in this topic to get information from the developers of the technology.

However for me it was the experience of going to the King’s office, getting a chance to see the technical side of a game development company and lastly free beers and wraps. 😉