I can still remember my trip to Uppstart, a special tech startup conference in a castle in Uppsala. There’re startups giving pitches in the main hall from morning to night, also there are exhibitors advertising their showcases on the way to the hall. The whole conference is informal and relaxing.

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Some of the pitches are interesting, the one attracts me most is about Virtual Reality. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are the future pattern of our life, the research, products development and investments are accelerating day by day. With VR, we create new world that we can never imagine before.  People will have new experience or even easily to be scared. The pitch focused on VR gaming and gave us a live onstage demo of SVRVIVE. Also we are facing the problems such as the high price of VR devices .The conclusion is that VR is the new smartphone. It will be common in our daily life and change the world. I bought my own VR device recently, so I can tell how I’m shocked with my use. I believe VR is a new opportunity for startups.

The video of the whole pitch can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/uppstart.co/videos/1811385082442588/

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Except for the pitches of startups, people also talk about how immigration process for technical talents could be improved in Sweden, which is important to students of EIT. Anyone who focuses on these issues could watch the whole video: https://www.facebook.com/uppstart.co/videos/1811375699110193/

Uppstart is now a popular annual event for startups in Sweden, check the websites below if you want to know more

https://www.facebook.com/uppstart.co/

http://uppstart.com/

Stefan and me attended at a two-days workshop about design thinking that we would like to share with you. The name of the event was Design Thinking – Try It Out!. It was held on the 5th and 6th of December 2016, at the Impact Hub in Stockholm, by Neda Nordin.

The base idea of Design Thinking methodology is that one doesn’t need to be a designer to think like one. The workshop was created for people that are thinking about starting their own business, or run already but the growth is slow, and are not sure if they are solving the right problem. During the workshop attendees are expected to learn how to use techniques like human-centred interviewing, visual stories, experience mapping, ideation matrixes and rapid prototyping. This learning should be done in an atmosphere of radical collaboration and iterative learning.

 

During the two evening sessions – 4 hours each, attendees get an overview of the Design Thinking process in a mix of theory and practical exercises to:

  1. Understand – discover user challenges and desires
  2. Define – synthesize findings into insights
  3. Ideate – turn insights into ideas and evaluate them
  4. Prototype and test– explore and validate concepts.

 

On the first day we started the workshop with some fun activities to get familiar with the new people you have just met. It was not connected to design thinking at all – as we had to draw some portrait of each other – but it was perfect to get to know each other a bit. After this small intro, we listened to the first half of the Neda’s presentation. We formed groups and started working, because the great part of this workshop was really about to try out everything we were learning simultaneously. Every group got a problem as a task that they had to solve in the best way during this two days.

 

The first group work was a brainstorming session, called “the charrette”. We had 20 minutes to identify our problem and find the users, stakeholders who have influence and try to connect and group them. After this, to gather some data we had to do some interviews. We had an hour to go out on the streets and talk with people who might relate to the problem that we were trying to solve. These type of interviews always have to be planned in advance, but you always have to change your questions based on the actual situation. We got some guidelines from Neda: always ask open question, ask why, and again why, ask to define words that stand out, look for patterns and find what sticks out. It was interesting, how easy is to start a conversation with strangers in Stockholm, as they were interested in our questions and not afraid to answer our them. Even if they were in hurry a bit they had a few minutes to helps us out.

 

After a short break the next task was to understand what we saw and heard during the interviews. This is the “define” part of the design thinking process. Until that point we had had to find out more and more, the quantity had been the key word, but then we had to focus on the most important things and identify the problem. Neda was giving some great tools for us again about how to do it.

 

At the start of the second day we worked on the “ideation” part of the workshop. We used the data we gathered, and patterns we identified to brainstorm and ideate around the interviewees problems we could solve. We were asked to be visual, when trying to explain our ideas to group members. After brainstorming, where we generated a lot of ideas, we voted and identified the ideas that people liked the most. After first round of voting and finding three best ideas, we voted again among them and chose the one that we liked the most and wanted to work on for the rest of the workshop.

 

Now when we found our favourite ideas we had to proceed to the last part of the workshop, prototyping. The idea of the prototyping part was to bring our ideas to life quickly, making them tangible and get some feedback to improve these ideas further. To be able to create a prototype we had to start with pre-prototyping. This can include things as stories, theatre, role-play, sketches, mock-ups etc. We had to generate a storyboard. On the storyboard we had to break the idea into smaller moments over time. This could easily explain the problem that we want to solve and the “implemented” action and solution. After that we got a time slot to build a prototype. The main idea during the creation of prototype was to “Do – Think – Do”. Important advices was not to try to make a perfect prototype and not “fall in love” with it. After prototyping session, to be able to test the prototypes each group presented their prototype to the rest of the groups and the final voting was done where the winning prototype was selected.
In short, we had a great time in the two evenings and we could try the design thinking out in the workshop. We met with lot of new and kind people, and they have helped us to develop our innovative thinking process. It was a good combination of learning and doing as we had some presentation and we were able to do them immediately after it. We would like to thank to Neda and to the Impact Hub that they gave us the opportunity to attend at their workshop.

STHLM TECH MeetUp Dec 05, 2016

My friend and classmate Wuji Geng and I visited the STHLM TECH MeetUp with Axel Springer on December 5, 2016, 06.00 PM – 08.30 PM, that was hosted by Hilton Stockholm Slussen Hotel. STHLM TECH MeetUp is the largest monthly startup event in Europe, founded in 2013. To date it has 9.050 members, is organized by Tyler Crowley and looks back on already 41 successfully held MeetUps. It connects geeks, hackers, entrepreneurs, investors and designers around Stockholm.  Every MeetUp is shaped by special guests speakers and investors on stage who educate the audience; three pitching StartUps are showcased live on stage for inspiration and entertainment, but also for convincing investors. The pitches are followed by announcements that are relevant for the community, initiatives are being discussed and networking takes place. STHLM TECH Meetup also facilitates jobs. It is being sponsored by Great Works (creative agency), VINGE (provision of council), Deutsche Bank AG, Nasdaq, Inc., EQT Ventures (private equity), EY (global professional services), Amazon Web Services (hosting) and Swedbank AB.

 

Companies presenting @STHLM TECH MeetUp Dec 5, 2016

Companies presenting @STHLM TECH MeetUp Dec 5, 2016

 

The event was announced to look back at 2016 as „the best“ year for StartUps in Stockholm ever – as more companies received funding in 2016 than in 2014 + 2015 combined, whereas 2015 had been a record year as well. The program promised furthermore to take a close look on what the future in 2017 might bring by inviting special guests from diverse industries such as VR, Transportation, Media, Education, Retail, and Medical to share top predictions. Axel Springer SE was advertised to host the event as another prominent guest and known for the international StartUp accelerator Plug and Play.

 

Axel Springer SE 

Axel Springer SE is the market leader in the German print business (major competitors are the Bauer Media Group, Bertelsmann, Hubert Burda Media, and Holtzbrinck). The company is active in more than 40 countries through subsidiaries, joint ventures and licenses and is one of the leading digital publishers in Europe, with more than 50% of its revenues coming from digital media activities. The Plug and Play Tech Centre is an international StartUp accelerator founded in 1990 and located in Sunnyvale, California (USA). It has housed companies like Google, Paypal, Logitech and DropBox. Some of its shareholders are news papers such as the German BILD, or Business Insider. Some of the companies below its wings are Weps (AI chatbot website builder on any devices), TechSpaghetti (educational software focused on language apps for children aged 4+), Vertico (network for inspiration, curating products, creating video stories, making them shoppable), Wingly (flight sharing platform, connecting private pilots with passengers), Trill (location based language teaching application),  or Pivii (web based analytics tool for social media in a SaaS subscription model). The accelerator offers mentors, an expert network, EUR 25k in return for 5% of the company, workshops, introduction to investors, co-working spaces and ongoing support. Companies such as Accenture, Deutsche Bank or ERGO Group AG are among the „family-members“, partners and co-investors, besides Airbnb, Dropbox, or the German „BILD“ (among others).

 

Welcoming the audience and introducing the program

Welcoming the audience and introducing the program

 

Outlook into 2017

The outlook into 2017 was being held by representatives of Amazon, Swedbank, Absolut Vodka, MediaMarkt, Deutsche Bank AG, Axel Springer, Schibsted Media Group, Telia Company AB and Hyper Island.

 

Hyper Island

The presentation of Hyper Island, after a call for more developers (as always), reflected on 2016 with an introduction of the European Digital City Index 2016 (EDCi) that describes „how well different cities across Europe support digital entrepreneurs“. It is produced by the European Digital Forum (http://www.europeandigitalforum.eu) and Nesta, and addresses StartUps and ScaleUps (strengths and weaknesses of local ecosystems), as well as policy makers (benchmarking tool for resource control), where Stockholm proudly occupies the 2nd place

 

EDCi European Digital City Index 2016

EDCi European Digital City Index 2016

 

following London @1st and Amsterdam @3rd. Credits for this, the presenter emphasized, belongs to the events’ partners (law firms, banks and big accounting firms).
For 2017 real life will be increasingly dominated by VR and AR technology, that, besides other things, will help to create empathy in populations facing increased migration of global talent; AI (as an assessor of real skills) together with microlearning (offering easy access and influencing deep learning) will improve the quality of education. Regulations for work force is being mentioned as one significant obstacle with work visas and „old-fashioned“ certificates being required – an aspect that needs disruption, according to the presentation. Finally, a „revival of truth“ is desirable: the presenter emphasized the importance of critical thinking and the courage to be sceptic.

 

Swedbank AB

A second presentation (Swedbank) focussed again on AI, but also on blockchains, banks that embrace FinTech and payment disruption; rg AI, AI bots will become more prevalent as voice or chat bots that will appear person-like in a non-noticeable way; rg FinTech and mobile payment EU legislations that allow 3rd parties access to personal financial information have to be considered (e.g., Directive on Payment Services (PSD)). In 2017 FinTech startups should show professional handling of data security as customers pose high value on this aspect (trivially).

 

Amazon Web Services

A representative of Amazon predicted Denmark to be the next big StartUp Hub in 2017, Finland will lead wrt AR/VR technology, FinTech will jump to 50% of Nordic investments and Alexa/chatbots will gain momentum. He reported from the recent Amazon (AWS) re:Invent in Las Vegas (Nov 28, 2016 – Dec 2, 2016), the largest gathering of the global AWS community, designed for current customers and cloud newcomers (topics: IoT, server less computing, databases, containers). Further aspects of this presentation were (again) FinTech and how it benefitted post Brexit, Amazon Echo and deep-learning, Text2Speech innovation, and 47 different voices powered by Amazon Alexa. He proposed to host a VR MeetUp due to the release of VR headset Google Daydream; there will be a fusion of AR and VR to Mixed Reality and a shift from the „Tech & Buzz“ to usability; storytelling will be disrupted by VR, also, there is a massive push from Hollywood and the Entertainment Industry in general towards VR; high-end super headsets will enter the consumer market and Apple will get into immersive experiences with its new iPhone 8; the VR giants will be defined by social mobile, see-through (aka smart) glasses, and geographical scanning is being picked up by all big players, VR will be accessible via mobile and will change the home experience, pushed by HTC Corporation and Swedish agents: while Facebook plans to include gestures, Google is working on a mobile headset, everything gets more interactive.

 

Deutsche Bank AG

According to the next presenter (Deutsche Bank), markets are doing well despite the new presidency in North-America, consequently, he recommended, not to always listen to analyst prognoses; for the free economies and market economies everything stays unpredictable and „one should not believe everything written in the newspapers“; there will be substantial growth in the USA that will spill over to Europe, the already strong US Dollar will be furthermore strengthened, equity will rise; there will be important elections in Europe (Germany, France and the Netherlands), and hence a certain nervousness in the markets.

 

Absolut Vodka

The next presenter emphasizes the role of the retailers as gate keepers – e.g. Amazon products will become services and services computerized, products gets connected and with this development behaviour will change; services will be increasingly AR based and with the introduction of AI chatbots (again!) jobs will change; as an example Starbucks Corporation @Arlanda airport was mentioned that never opened due to too high labour cost – AI could replace labour here. On the positive side for societies there had been the establishment of Norrsken Foundation by Klarna founder Niklas Adalberth which will work towards improving the social good based on Effective Altruism.

 

Telia Company AB

A representative of Telia Company AB also mentioned commoditization and competition on price and how brand promise can be kept facing competition from American players such as AT&T, Inc. or Verizon Communications Inc., but also from Spotify AB; as Telia is not the cheapest provider of mobile subscriptions, something in the brand has to convince people to like it instead – if they love the brand they will charge more; hence, Telia works on further increasing their customer experience in order to stay a competitive local and global leader: it is essential to best understand what customers need, and want and then deliver accordingly, customer expectation has to be managed best; customer will soon ask „Are you on the Internet of Things“ instead of „the Internet“ and here Telia has to deliver customer value; although several mobile operators sold a couple of VR headsets already, Telia is not yet there with this use case, it has to first design appropriate use cases for VR; customer data are seen as s/th to be used in a reasonable way: e.g., big data can be used in cars to nudge drivers slowing down their driving speed and adopt a more environmentally driving style; big data is good for society; he reports from the STHLM TECH Fest in November 2016 where Telia and Ericsson AB had announced a coaching and mentoring program together with Stagecast, Airmee and BrandNewBrand.

 

Media Markt

The next presenter represented MediaMarkt, one or the biggest retailer for consumer electronics in Europe; the big trends for 2017 will be, according to him, the Apple HomeKit and other SmartHome and SmartLiving solutions – but customers generally understand little about IoT, only few are able to connect their phone with their car and GPS to their car using their Fedora Linux system. Other trends will be robots that help, for example, to turn on/off the iron, light or TV, similar to Amazon Alexa but specialized for the living room. Voice and face recognition will become more common, together with temperature recognition and with an improved proficiency to learn about user preferences. Finally, cybersecurity, a once geeky topic, will become more consumer friendly – ID cameras and sensors will enter consumer electronics.

 

Schibsted

The outlook into 2017 proceeded with a focus on wearables (Schibsted) that becoming smarter (e.g., headphones giving recommendations); above that, hardware StartUps understood that they should improve on developing products that really matters, e.g., by reducing water consumption – they will start solving real and more meaningful problems; to mention the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2017: VR will be a topic there too, as without VR 3D TV makes no sense – sensors even are getting build into TVs (reference to PrimeSense, that had been bought by Apple Inc in 2013 already).

 

Plug & Play Accelerator

A representative of the Plug & Play accelerator in Berlin praised the German capital for being an amazing ecosystem for StartUps; the Axel Springer organization invests in the digital scale-up of business models, one prominent example had been Schibsted. Axel Springer, after having sold all regional newspapers because they were not profitable concentrated on the market leaders in digital models and transformed its core revenue streams; the intention behind the accelerator for Axel Springer was to establish a German Silicon Valley. Participants of a 100 days focus program are being taken care of by mentors to exchange experiences with, they receive 25k in seed stage.  Stockholm is special as a connected European ecosystem and a StartUp should go where its market is. Interesting clients are retail/commercial clients, not the M&A business. The StartUp provides platform banking and likes to find partners within FinTech and InsuranceTech.

 

StartUp Pitches

After this outlook into 2017, the three StartUp pitches commenced:

 

OneMove AB

The first StartUp that pitched was OneMove AB (Stockholm), a company offering relocation services, similar to the StartUps from Germany, Movinga or Move24. They provide their service as a mobile application for local moves (different from the German startup Move24 that (also) serves customers with long-distance moves). The app allows first to check and compare prices, make a picture of what to move, and chose for a suitable time (now or tomorrow); the actual relocation will not take more than 15-60 minutes (including pickup, load stuff, unload) and is accomplished by two service people and one pick-up van; the app offers direct pay and after successful relocation customers can grade the service based on satisfaction criteria and general performance. With the companies’ app „sending a sofa is easier than sending a letter“. The StartUp has already 100 vans at its disposal, as well as a special license, plus adequate insurance. A widget allows to connect to Blocket, too.

 

PriceBeam

The second pitching StartUp was PriceBeam, operating in the FinTech market with the goal to support customers reducing pricing errors that often lead to StartUp failures. The company uses „data and science“ to help StartUps do it right. PriceBeam wants to disrupt the price consulting industry and support pricing decisions not based on gut-feeling or rough guesses. They offer „pricing-as-a-service“ (PaaS), are present in London (UK), Los Angeles (USA) and Stockholm (Sweden) and claim their service increases customers willingness to pay three times.

 

StartUp Pitch of PriceBeam

StartUp Pitch of PriceBeam

The company is targeting product and marketing managers, as well as executives from industries such as consumer goods and services, as well as investments, and are offering their service already in 70 countries world-wide. In order to create a report customers simply have to fill in a form with information on their target market and within one week a market’s willingness-to-pay will be measured and analyzed.

 

Speakerbox

The third StartUp that pitched was Speakerbox, a mobile broadcasting platform for multi-channel networks. They offer a richer viewing experience and a toolset for influencers to build their own audiences and deliver value to sponsors and media companies. Speakerbox supports content sharing and let production teams live-stream content to an engaged audience that don’t has to be onsite. Speakerbox, based on a new business model (not a Software-as-a-Service), supports native advertisement of production teams’ own brands, e.g., sports teams can live stream without having their own production company, companies such as adidas can promote their brand and create content empires with Speakerbox platform.

 

StartUp Pitch of Speakerbox

StartUp Pitch of Speakerbox

Speakerbox supports ubiquitous connectedness and interactivity, all the time and with everyone – it wants to make everyone being a broadcaster and everyone being able to talk back. It is a toolset for influencers to build their own audiences. Influencers can broadcast from a mobile, a mobile viewing app and a production dashboard.
The final jury decision was in favor of Speakerbox, also because it was „well rehearsed“ and a rather professional pitch.

 

The best Things come in Threes

As an advice rg team compositions for successful pitches it is recommended to have at least three co-founders – one product expert, one tech and one business model expert; single founders are almost never considered within StartUp pitches.

 

Conclusion

Although the whole event stretched the planned time significantly we are now looking skeptically forward to a very mixed interactive reality in 2017, wirelessly  connected to a smart wall, and chatting with our talking bot in Swahili. We will not waste our time with reading a newspaper. Plug-Out and Pray, so to say. 🙂 Cordial thanks to Prof. Terrence Brown and Serdar Temiz for nudging us.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it, Slush is one of the largest assemblies of investors and entrepreneurs in the world. The event that hosts around 15 000 (and counting) guests annually is hosted in the cold and dark Helsinki, Finland each fall. The two-day event boasts dozens of world class keynote speakers and discussion on multiple stages. The talks usually revolve around the topics of entrepreneurship, business, society and technology. In 2016 Slush brought together 1 700 startup companies, 800 Investors and hundreds of journalists in one massive and international networking event.

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Along with thousands of others I decided to apply to Slush 2015 as volunteer and later took part in the event in something called the “demo area team”. In addition to aforementioned stages, Slush has areas for product displays and large companies have bought dedicated areas to promote their development. For startups there was the demo area, where the companies could rent a 2m by 2m booth for their own product displays and promotions. In an event that was just incredible as a whole, this area was in my opinion the best part. Here you could meet some of the most interesting companies both from Finland and internationally. Most importantly you could actually have a conversation with the people working for these companies. There were also specific areas for one-on-one meetings between startups and investors, facilitated by Slush’s matchmaking tool for entrepreneurs, food courts, one of the stages was dedicated to pitching (Each Slush has a pitching competition, where the winner gets contacts, partnerships and most importantly, investments).

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As a volunteer I got to see the buildup to this great event, the event itself and a lot of the behind the scenes action such a massive event is sure to provide. And the best thing? If you volunteer, you get into the event for free. It’s hard to describe this event in a blog post, so I strongly recommend applying for volunteer in Slush 2017 and seeing it for yourself. There is something for pretty much everyone and I actually scored a great internship in Slush

– Jaakko Söderholm

Due to the I get from the Open & User Innovation course, I got a lot of passion about finding innovation stuff. Wahen I went back to China during this Christmas, I went to Shenzhen, the most dynamic and innovative city of China. Fortunately, I have a lot of chance to get close to the new innovation environments. SZOIL is one of them.

 

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SZOIL refers to Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, established by SIDA(Shenzhen Industrial Design Association) and Maker Collider, is a space and platform for worldwide makers to communicate and cooperate. SZOIL is also the first Fab Lab in Shenzhen authorized by MIT CBA as a research and development partner of FabLab 2.0. SZOIL embodies four functions including Fab Lab promotion and FabLab 2.0 research and development, innovation and entrepreneur education courses for makers, global maker service platform, and industry chain collaboration service. The lab dedicates in exploring the issues and developing solutions to connect the massive production ecosystem to small hardware startups so as to promote the international standing of Shenzhen in the development of digital intelligent hardware and manufacturing and build a future intelligent hardware Silicon Valley by combining new open source method and current manufacturing system in Shenzhen.

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They do four kinds of things. First is Fab Lab establishment and solution, second is innovation and entrepreneur education courses, third is global maker service platform and the last is industrial chain collaboration service.

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So what is Fab Lab? Fab Lab, advocated by MIT CBA, is a low-cost laboratory for people to make whatever they want by applying digital and simulation tools in it. In June 2015, SZOIL formally signed an agreement with MIT CBA, which became the first Fab Lab in Shenzhen jointly developed with CBA. In Fab 12 held in August 2016, Fab Foundation and SZOIL jointly displayed FabLab 2.0.

 

SZOIL provides the makers with standard digital manufacturing environment and innovation courses according to the needs of clients and links with the global Fab Lab network, and it designs the blueprint for the maker space in the aspects of space planning, standard equipment, innovation course, etc.

 

Open innovation is the future of innovation, building open labs to the world makes a great benefit not only to the creaters but also for all the people who use their product.  It can reduce cost of conducting research and development. At the same time, make potential for improvement in development productivity and incorporation of customers early in the development process. Open innovation also increase in accuracy for market research and customer targeting, has a potential for synergism between internal and external innovations. I believe that both China and Sweden would benefit a lot of their openness to innovations.

 

In Stockholm, there are also quite amout of open labs.

kth open lab: https://www.kth.se/en/samverkan/arenor/open-lab-1.523140

oepnlab: http://openlabsthlm.se/

 

 

 

What’s the future? We, the youth, will shape it, but how it’s gonna look like?
Not only intellectuals, politicians, business leaders, artists but also your friends, family and the man in the street will give you their opinions on how the future will look like. That it will be different, that’s certain, but how it’s gonna look like in detail will nobody predict right. Still it’s topic which interest many students, as we could see on December the 5th when the lunch lecture with Stefan Hyttfors reached full capacity.

Stefan Hyttfors opened with the shocking truth that we don’t know the future, but it doesn’t restrain us to use the sources of the future. From 08/08 this year, we are borrowing resources from the future until 31/12. If we continue this trend, we will use more than 3 times the yearly available resources available in 2050.

He continued with critics on the current solutions proposed to battle the current and future problems. Economists focus on the importance of economic growth. But we have seen that the consumption pattern in Sweden, as a result of the high economic growth, gave Sweden a place in the top ten of countries ranked by ecological footprint per capita(http://www.footprintnetwork.org/ecological_footprint_nations/ecological_per_capita.html). Politicians focus on job creation, but only 13% of the people worldwide say that they are engaged in their work (http://www.gallup.com/poll/165269/worldwide-employees-engaged-work.aspx).

So, what’s the solution? Stefan Hyttfors argues that future solutions must be based on innovation, creating more value with less resources and finding new ways to solve old problems. Still following Moore’s law means that change will never be this slow again and we will need this new technologies to create a better future. Stefan Hyttfors told us that it is predicted that 700 of 1000 biggest incumbent firms today, will disappear in the next 10 years. Mainly because they are not able to change fast enough and disruptive innovations will harm their position. The risk of ignorance, focusing too much on ROI when judging new technologies, is one of the reasons. A well known example is KODAK who didn’t listen to its employee Steve when he came up with the first digital camera, and we all know what happened after.

Stefan Hyttfors argues that the best method of creating more value with less resources is digitalizing. Digitalization means dematerialization and decentralization and involves power shifts. Technology is borderless and more powerful than Politics (limit to a place), money and an idea. It’s likely that technology, especially artificial intelligence, will replace a lot of people and so jobs in the future, another part of our jobs will change drastically.

Stefan Hyttfors gave us an interesting lecture about the innovation part of the future. But as much interesting for me is the social part, will the society be able to deal with this exponentially growing rate of innovation and changes in social structures. And will politics have enough power, courage and knowledge to create the right frame for this?
That’s the topic for another lunch lecture!

The CISMOB Interred Europe conference was held at NOD building Kista and the theme was about Smart Cities and how ICT and openness(Figure 1) could help to improve cities’ transport infrastructure. There were many speakers from various industries and governmental organizations who shared valuable tips on how they are working towards their own smart cities. There was much emphasis on allowing data-sets to be openly available so that developers can leverage on them to create useful applications for the people.

 

Figure 1 Open Government approach

It was interesting that all the representatives of their own countries said that their own cities were aiming to be the smartest cities in the world. Ann Hellenius, the CIO of Stockholm shared Stockholm’s aim to solve issues related to smart traffic control, parking spaces, lighting, car pooling etc. Another speaker, the Chief Information Officer of IDA Singapore shared similar efforts being done in Singapore. Being a Singaporean, I have seen that having open data has greatly improved the livelihood of the citizens.

One of the speakers, Brendon Clark, Studio Director of Interactive Institute, also highlighted the importance of bottom up approach in creating a smart city. He explained about using various methodologies such as collaborative design, generative prototyping, and exploratory research. All these allows to look at problems from the user’s perspective thereby reducing designer bias.

With hyper fast internet connectivity, the prominent cities in the world are competing to become the world’s smartest cities. Knowledge transfer and collaboration is the key ingredients(along with others mentioned in Figure 2) to achieving this goal. Overall, it doesn’t matter which city becomes the smartest city first, it is about solving humanity’s problems using ICT.

 

Figure 2 Ingredients for creating a Smart City

 

More information about the conference can be found here:

http://www.egovlab.eu/cismob/blog/

 

Figure 1 from https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/ict-enabled-public-sector-innovation-horizon-2020

What is the STC about

Each year, Spotify organizes a tech challenge for students around the world where they can collaborate and hack on new ideas and/or problems that they, or the Spotify technical team faces.

It is not a competition and the focus is more in having fun and trying things rather than trying to win. And of course one aspect of the event is to scout out for new talent in the field who are in the finishing phases of their studies.

This year it was held between 25.-27. November in the Spotify headquarters in Östermalm area of Stockholm, Sweden. The office space is very nice and they actually occupy all but one floor of the building.

Spotify HQ in 61 Birger Jarlsgatan, Stockholm, Sweden

Spotify HQ in 61 Birger Jarlsgatan, Stockholm, Sweden

Getting started

Once we got the office we were met with the Spotify Street Team, a group of employees consisting of students themselves, and on the tables there was some snacks and drinks which was nice as it started quite late. The street team act as a link between the company and the university world. They actually organize these events and were with us during the whole weekend. They had already split us into teams of 4 people with a sticker in our visitor pass informing which team you belong to. Mine was a red star, my other teammates were Nadja from Germany, Mert from Turkey and Jakob from Sweden.

My visitor pass

My visitor pass

Also present were the SDK (Source Development Kit) and API (Application Protocol Interface) teams, who handle the development of mobile development tools and opening Spotify data to outsiders respectively. They were there to help us in any technical problems we might have in using the tools that they were offering. During the intro, which was held in what I consider to be one of the most awesome private auditoriums(it was sadly forbidden to take pictures inside), they also encouraged us to apply for internships during next summer, and to top it off, there was a power bank on each seat.

The evening was concluded with beers and a nice dinner waiting outside the auditorium. After we finished the dinner, there was a concert upstairs in the social area of the company, where we met other employees of the company and at 10 there was a surprise concert by Thomas Stenström.

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Thomas Stenström with his band

Putting the work in

Next morning at 9 we met again for a nice breakfast and started discussing about the ideas we have for the challenge. After the breakfast there was a short presentation by the tech team, where they described some particular problems they would like to solve, as pointers for the teams.

We had discussed on the previous evening about what to do for the weekend and we decided to tackle the problem of how to handle who chooses which songs to play in a house party for example. Our solution was a playlist that can be edited by anyone who knows the name of the playlist and does not require the people who want to edit to own a Spotify account. The music then plays from one device which is connected to the sound system and has Spotify installed.

Pretty much all of saturday went along developing the app, which we decided to build with Meteor.js-framework. Our work was hindered a bit with the fact that Nadja and Mert had not used JavaScript before. Nevertheless, we managed to get the work rolling in such way that they handled back-end development and I did front-end, while Jakob focused on the visual design of the app.

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Mert and Jakob working hard

In the afternoon, we had a paper plane competition which was really a lot of fun and a good break from the hard working. Later in the evening they brought some beers and we continued to work and socialize until 23, while some people even managed to squeeze in a game of pinball in there.

Paper plane fun

Paper plane fun

Results and conclusion

Work started again on Sunday morning at 9, and we had some trouble as we could not get an important feature of the app to work, which was the actual playing of the playlist. However, the API team was really helpful in this and we managed to solve it while finding some bugs in the API along the way which the team really appreciated.

Screenshot of the app

Screenshot of the app

The SDK & API teams

The SDK & API teams

The app was functioning just before the “exhibition” which started at 13 and we were quite happy with the result. The other teams made apps like: a playlist generator from an image, GLIP, a .gif music video generator based on the lyrics of the song and geotagging the songs you are currently listening just to name a few. I really liked the music video generator, it produced some really hilarious results from time to time.

All and all, I had a really great time, the atmosphere during the entire event was super nice: cool people, good food and technology makes a great combination! Although the focus was on the challenge, we ended up talking about so many other subjects over the course of the event and exchanging ideas & thoughts about different cultures. While there was the aspect of recruiting involved, it did not feel forced at any point. Also when considering the gifts and servings, one must also think about the value of the innovation we produced for them during the weekend. To conclude, it was a great, enriching and joyful experience, highly recommended!

Our team!

Our team!

The competition is based on Stockholm’s vision of providing a city that can be shared and enjoyed by all. In order to take to the vision closer, an award is set to invite companies and individuals. We can use the City of Stockholm’s open data to create a digital service, such as an app, web service or product.Stockholm is a city growing fast and full of innovation. The whole city produces a lot of valuable data because of its high-tech management and the developers hope to have an opportunity of proving themselves.

That’s how open innovation works here. The data from different organisations are opened to public and more people are involved to the innovation. Setting an award attracts participants even more. And the final propose is to create value for Stockholm.

There are two tracks of the competition, the first one is ‘A financially Sustainable Stockholm & A Climate-Smart Stockholm’, the second one is ‘A cohesive Stockholm and A democratically sustainable Stockholm’. I focused on the second track.

As shown in the picture, I’m shocked by the coverage of the kinds of data. What a chance for developers to make full use of the resources and show their talent.

1Although it’s beyond my ability to actually implement a software. I tried to come up with some ideas. For example, in order to implement the function of wide selection of sports, culture and leisure, a new service is needed. Using the method I learned from ‘Finding Your Innovation Sweet Spot’, the Multiplication, I try to combine a map with booking service. With the help of the new service, we may search the nearest place of sports or leisure, then check the schedule of booking or status of occupy. So now we may easily know where’s the nearest available ideal place to go. And for those public filed without a booking function, we may announce to others when we are using it, so others can know that before come and leave with despair. Also we can set alarm so that we can know the place is available as soon as possible. There are lots of open data to support the function of our service, such as:

2

After I know more about the competition, I realised the importance of open data and how it may contribute to the development of our lives. I’m looking forward to the day that I can use the open data to create my own app.

Related website:

https://www.openstockholmaward.se/

http://dataportalen.stockholm.se/dataportalen/

On the 5th of December, Stefan Hyttfors gave a lunch lecture about the future. Hyttfors mission is to inspire as many as possible to embrace change. He started his story with what was going on at the moment. Nowadays we use to many resources, that means that we borrow them from the future. In other words, in the future there will be a lack of resources. So, it is important to make a change. To create more value with less resources.

In the working force only 13% of the employees are happy with their jobs. The rest suffers from a lot of stress what makes them unhappy. This stress is caused by the not knowing how the future will look like. We have to learn how to live with this uncertainty. One thing is sure, that the future will be different then it is now.

But a risk of ignorance exists. New technologies for old problems are not always what companies are looking for. These new technologies do not fit in the business model of the company, this can result in not using or developing the technologies. Often start-ups or different companies will develop the technologies further and will bring it to the customers. This result in companies going bankrupt, because they are the best companies offering the wrong, old fashioned products.

A good method of creating more value with less resources is digitalizing. Digitalizing means dematerializing and decentralizing. For example your mobile phone now a days is able to make calls, send text, play music, take pictures, etc. 20 years ago all these features were different products.

We live in a world of virtual reality. For example Pokémon-Go, but also your bank account. These products make you think something is actually there, while it isn’t. A great possibility exists that artificial intelligence will replace a lot of people and jobs in the future.