Monthly Archives: December 2016

Stefan Hyttfors, a well-known Swedish public speaker, gave a presentation at KTH a few days ago. The main topic of his presentation was the future: What shapes the future and what does the future bring? I had high expectations of this presentation, not only because of the free lunch.

The presentation started with how mankind has dealt with change over time. In the beginning –  when everyone still lived in little villages – people didn’t really deal with changes. When you were old, everything was still more or less the same as when you were born. Nowadays this is quite different. When the youth of today will be old, completely new technologies will exist compared to when this generation was born.

Even though the world today is dominated by change and innovation, people don’t really handle change well. Change causes stress. In order to cope with the stress, everyone yearns for the illusion of control. The same goes for companies. Companies think they know the future and try to create prospects. All this in order to predict the future. However, we all know it’s impossible. No one can guess what is going to happen next.

An example of a company that thought it knew the future is Kodak. For years Kodak was the leading firm in photography. The company was really innovative and owned tons of patents. However, when the market changed abruptly, it failed to adapt (to digital photography) and lost all its power. Stefan called this the “Risk of Ignorance”. It’s the reason why the current big players in the market might disappear in a few years.

In the end, the presentation didn’t teach me anything. The talk was somewhat incoherent and only mentioned things I knew already. But I did get a free lunch!

A guy called Stefan Hyttfors was giving a lecture on Monday at KTH. The lecture was called What’s The Future and I thought it would be useful to know that, so I went.

Quite a lot of other people went too actually, but I can’t tell if they all went to know the future, or just to get a free lunch.

Stefan wasn’t very specific about what future brings, but he made a few interesting points. He first talked about different paces at which our world was changing. Since humans appeared on earth around 20,000 years ago until the beginning of agriculture, 10,000 years ago, the world was very slow changing. Since then things have been speeding up. Nowadays every year the change is faster then it was in the previous year, or to put it in different words, the change is exponential rather than linear. The main line of the lecture was to adjust our thinking accordingly to this change.

Fast change is both good and bad news. It’s bad, for example, because of lower job security; you could be doing something for years and be very good at it, but still one day you can become useless because the environment has changed. It’s good, for example, because it is easier for an entrepreneur to emerge among established players.

In the picture above you can see Stefan pointing at the graph. The blue line is the linear progress. The business example given was Blocbuster, a DVD company, who ruled the entertainment market for years, but suddenly went bankrupt when online movies joined the game. The red line represents visionary movements, like the beginnings of aviation. At first no one ever believed that it’s possibly to leave the ground and the first attempts were very unsuccessful (the low on the graph), but once it happened, everything changed forever.

The good about this lecture for me was the relaxed atmosphere and not too much attempt of motivational speaking. The bad was some not always relevant stories about politics, job engagement or catching pokemons, which were funny, but I think it was the main reason for telling them. Main thing I carried out from this lecture was to accept the fast change and to try to be flexible and visionary, rather than acting according to a safe and steady plan.

I checked some of  Stefan’s online videos and in each of them he tells what he told us today. I recommend listening to Stefan for 45 minutes of your lives but probably not longer, because he would start repeating himself. Have a good day!

More than 17,500 people went to Helsinki, Finland for the annual Slush event that gathers startups with investors, and this year there were more than 2,336 startups present, 1,146 investors and 610 journalists, made possible by the great organizing team that was supported by over 2,300 volunteers as well.

Slush CEO, Marianne Vikkula and President and Executive Producer, Nicolas Dolenc opened the first day of the Slush event with welcoming remarks coupled with jaw-dropping displays of fire eruptions and leaping flames.

Throughout the event, ingenious speakers wowed and impressed the packed crowds gathered within the six themed stages. Some of the founders, CEOs, and partners that spoke were: Lowercase Capital’s Chris Sacca, Spotify’s Daniel Ek, Sherpa Foundry’s Lisa Barnett, Kleiner Perkins’ Arielle Zuckerberg, and StackOverflow’s Joel Spolsky. Prestigious appearances were also seen on stage at Slush, when the Crown Prince of Norway Haakon and Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands bestowed their presence among excited guests.

A jam packed schedule of events one after the other and to make it more interesting, this year Slush Music had a separate venue. It was extremely interesting to look at the music industry this close with meetings with artists like Imogen Heap, who is a tech entrepreneur and investor herself. Yousican created the greatest impact as they were able to attract almost every participant there was. They must have distributed around 10,000 ukuleles. People were in line to all three days to grab hold of one and in return got to know everything about the company.

There were startups and established companies alike having the same platform. I personally found VR to have the most number of companies and still wondering if VR is actually the technology of the future but only time will tell.

I had the privilege to respresent Stagecast and KTH Innovation with the team at the Stockholm social event and experienced live pitches from the greatest of the industry.

According to Atomico there are 4.7 million professional developers in Europe compared to 4.1 million in the US as Slush and Atomico  published an extensive study on the current state of European tech.

Overall the experience at Slush 2016 was humbling, eye opening and gave me a realization that even though running a startup is a difficult job yet it is exciting outmost of all I just loved my display card which I am definitely framing 🙂

 

Last weekend, I joined an event called EIT Alumni Startup Days by accidently. Actually, I did not register their websites to enter in as an official group partner. I went Kista Campus to study my own interests’ areas while I met my senior who I met for 2 times before. He told he come here to do a small project and also asked what is my major and what I am interested in. After the talking, we are getting familiar with each other and he asked me if I do not mind I can help them to design the style of their website about their project.

Yes, why not! It is a good experience more than learning by myself. Since I joined them in the half of the project, they shared their projects ideas with me and I give some suggestions from my view. Our project calls AItalk. To solve the problem of having too many communicational applications with diversified information people need to check and remember accordingly. This app can categorize the messages from different topics perspective, different sources, and the combination of them. It can connect all the communicational platforms which you want to add according to your personal preferences such as facebook, wechat, twitter, and e-mail and so on. Except this function, the app can also help to receive the messages as the third-party platforms. The purpose for you if just chat with others, there is no need to switch among different apps. The only think users need to do is inserting the keywords to search for the specific information they want. This means you do not need to struggle to think of which app contains information you want and then go through to check almost everything.

I joined the questionnaire part which we used the google document to make the questionnaire then share it in the wechat group and facebook group. After 10 minutes, we received 152 respondents and at the end we got the data: more than 50% of users have 3-5 communicational apps and near 20% have 5-7 apps so they support our project.
Also, the charge of my another part was designing the high prototype about this app. In the beginning, we use some software but finally, we decided to use a website called Mix to add all the information we need and then make it is clear, charming, and user-friendly.

There are 5 teams in total. We are the third one to give the presentation, I have to say our team is considerable as we were also considering the process of making this app and the time of launching the app. We try to deal with every part of this project to make the leaders clearly. Finally, we are the winners!

After this, the leaders give us some improvements about every project. This part is so wonderful. They can make us clear about our project and we can learn a lot from them since we have less experience.

I learned much from this event, except the friendship of partners and the knowledge of developing the project, I noticed that we need to be careful in our daily life. It is better for us to figure out what the problems we are still facing now and which one should be solved immediately. We need to always talk with others, users to understand their complaint about their life. It is a big source for us to get important information. We also need to work with others who have different strengths. Individual effort can never be bigger than a group. This is some kind of open innovation I think.

 

Stagecast is a startup at KTH Innovation pre-incubator that creates a whole new experience for the audience by integrating them into the fabric of a concert or event. The startup creates experiences and moments in live events and comprises of the following core values;

Stage Moments – enables integreation such as being a part of the illumniation by using various lighting functions.

Cast Moments – the audience can take photos from specific angles or at certain times to capture, for instance, a confetti rain, and then add filters. The pictures are tagged and only other members of the audience at the specific event can access them.

Message moments – allows organisers to send specific information to the audience and opens up for potential commercials or advertising.

Recent changes in the music industry, such as the establishing of Spotify, force artists to view revenue and concert experiences in a new light. In the past, concerts have been a way for artists to market a new album but today it is the live experience in itself that can bring the artist revenue and create unforgettable moments for the audience.Today, artists can take control of the way audiences use their mobile phones during concerts so that it does not become distracting but rather an opportunity to guide fans in how and when they should ideally interact, and when they should not.  This will enhance the experience for all involved.

 

A Hackathon was now planned in order for the team to expand. There were a total of 13 candidates that took part in order to innovate and produce moments that could create amazing experiences. I developed a moment called the “Groover” which listened to live music and based on the high and low wavelengths of the sounds produced vibrations in the phone so that the audience may enjoy with the tune and not on their phones.

I met developers, founders of a startup, mentors , business specialists and tried to implement something that would actually make sense and not worry about the technology itself.

I ended up winning the hackathon and ticket to Slush 2016 with the Stagecast team to represent the team as a startup from Sweden and obviously enjoy the three day event in general.

In my next blog I would write about my experiences at Slush. They say it themselves that “No one in their right mind visits Helsinki in November”.

Honestly, I chose this course because it was required that we have to choose one optional course. Except this reason, It is in the second semester if I want to have a relax and easy in the later half semester. So I am not clearly about what I was expected from this course, maybe just finish and pass it at the end.

But when I realized the teacher is same with that of the entrepreneur course, I abruptly have a big interest since the teacher is so funny and the class is so active. Through writing down our own calling card, the teacher can easily interact with any student and do not leave or ignore some silent and shy students. So I have a huge passion for it.

Two days ago, I went to join the Armada community event, I met lots of companies and professional experts, and most of them I never heard before. After collecting the information about the different companies, I checked their official websites after backing my apartment and acquired lots of news about open and user innovations.

I asked lots of companies and they just look for full-time workers rather than internships. Only except the company SCA which sells some forest products such as baby diapers and feminine care. We talked a lot and she told me that the most important method for them to modify the products and improve the quality is through users. The user’s feedback is the most direct and important to reflect the problems of their products. During their research, they always interview different target groups and ask their suggestions, through analyzing these data, they can get a very good way to improve the reflection of the products. Meanwhile, they always share their good ideas with their partners, Also, when companies are looking to develop technologies and products, they always try to use external research capabilities as well as internal research capabilities. There are many ways of achieving open innovations such as Industry-university research cooperation, enterprise technology alliance, technology M & A, technology purchase, and technology outsourcing, external development model of internal technological achievements etc. The user innovation matches the different patterns of open innovations which are a better way to come to some fantastic ideas and high-quality products.

In this course, I kindly realized the importance role of users in the process of products design. It is not just about the manufacturers business, users modification are not minor but qualitative and important in the near future. So it should be better if we ask the users to be the participant of the design process or after the design, we can solicit their opinions.

Additionally, from this event, I realized that I have to learn more skills or professional knowledge to improve myself such as the graphic design software and should be proficient in one particular programming language. This is the best way for me to join the future open innovation world.

However, it would be better if the teacher can give us some conclusions about at the end of this course so we can clearly notice what we learn from this course. And this is the direct way for us to remember in the long term.