Author Archives: Yiming Yang

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.

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/

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/

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.

Although 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:

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/