Convenience is one word to describe 2012. Consumers are constantly looking for the next best thing and companies are constantly updating to fulfill those needs. Whether you are young or old, it’s gotten to the point that if you don’t own a cell phone, people will look at you like you are crazy. It’s a technology driven world, and we rely on it to get through our days.
But despite all the advances, one thing that has changed is that no one wears watches anymore, simply because people just look at their phone to see what time it is. And if you do wear a watch, it’s most likely an accessory to match your outfit (that’s certainly why I wear watches). Well, let’s just combine those two devices. I give you: the smart watch.
Brought to you at a price similar to designer watches, and about the same price as a phone, this is able to give you everything you need at a glance down to your own wrist. You can read emails, texts, and social updates from twitter and facebook. You are even able to use Bluetooth and call someone on your contact list on your cell phone.
Looks like a nano iPod too, but can do much more. Let’s just hope they come out with different colored straps so I can change them according to my outfits.
Cellrox Ltd. announced today the signing of a worldwide exclusive agreement with Columbia University to license certain mobile technology developed at Columbia that will enables corporate IT departments to securely accommodate the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend.
Using virtualization technology developed at Columbia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, Cellrox addresses the challenges of BYOD by allowing both corporate and personal individual “personas” to co-exist on a single smartphone. Employees have secure access to data and applications necessary for their jobs, while reducing security and compliance risks for corporate networks. This also alleviates the need for employees to carry two smartphones, knowing that their personal data and applications are kept separate.
As somebody who uses two phone, I like where this is going. Sold.
The Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad, produced by TechWeb (producers of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, the Web 2.0 Expo, and publisher of Information Week magazine) is a competition that lets companies present their innovative application (either in development and about to launch, or recently launched) to a community of their peers interested in business technology. The finalists will be invited to present their applications live to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference audience.
This year, most of the companies in the running have a focus on workplace communication and productivity–companies like CubeVibe and Flowr. Many also aim to help organize and understand costumer engagement. See all of their pitch videos here and vote for which company is your favorite. Odds are you will find one worth considering for your workplace.
White Bull Summits, ‘Champions of the European Innovation Ecosystem,’ has announced the60 finalists for the 2011 Bully Awards. These finalists represent Europe’s leading privately held technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) companies and will receive special invitations to present at the second annual Pathways to Exit conference October 3 – 5, 2011 in Barcelona, where they will have the opportunity to present to potential partners and deal makers who can help them reach their goals.
I say “Sweden”, you say..? Yeah, I thought so… Let me stop you right there!
Forget all about the obvious keywords popping up in your mind about this country as you knew: a lot has been happening in Sweden and you might have been missing out!
Many will have this overnight feeling, but the truth is, Sweden has been catching up, in this almost sneaky way for some time, and a city called Malmö (third biggest city in Sweden) is no longer only known as the 30-minute-ride-train to Copenhagen city.
Malmö has a bubble that is about to pop, exploding with creativity, young and fresh talent shaped as entrepreneurs, who are eager to create, deliver and change, at least a little thing or two, in an attempt to make the world better.
I’ve been spending some time at MINC – which I dare to call the hottest spot in Malmö for entrepreneurship – and to meet the cool, creative, making-it-happen kind of folks – and it’s not surprising to find so many interesting projects taking off.
I had the pleasure to hang out with the Media Evolution team this week for a couple of days. Media Evolution is in its seventh year and focuses on the future of media and discovery of new business opportunities. The Conference (formerly known as Moving Images) attracts people from film, games, web, publishing, learning, tech and music. The organizers have been preparingMedia Evolution The Conferencecoming up on August 24 and 25th and I’m nothing but impressed with the quality of the event in every single detail: from the speakers choice to the website design. I briefly interviewed Martin Thörnkvist, in between tasks, great music and crappy coffee, about the so waited event:
Maisa: You’ve been organizing Media Evolution The Conference from scratch. Carefully selecting the best speakers, location and the details together with the Media Evolution team. What can people attending expect?
Martin Thörnkvist
Martin Thörnkvist: It’s gonna be two days with 40 speakers divided in three tracks. The speakers come from all over the world to share ideas from their technological, behavioral and entrepreneurial experiences. It’s also important to not forget that we there will be 600 participants that will discuss the future of games, TV, music, communication and other forms of media.
Maisa: This year, the conference will offer three tracks: Who’s Next?, Man & Machine and Creation. How will these topics be approached and presented to the attendees?
Martin Thörnkvist: They will all be introduced by a keynote speaker (Moeed Ahmad (Al Jazeera), Amber Case (Geoloqi) and Bill Drummond (The KLF etc)), then there will be four 45 minute sessions led by a curator that has invited two more speakers to dig deeper into the specific subject. Also, for the for the participants that feel like they already know quite much about the topics in the sessions and we will arrange round table discussions that dig even deeper into the subjects.
Maisa: As I understand, for the first time, The Conference will be completely held in English. Why this change?
Martin Thörnkvist: Two reasons. (1) we feel that there’s a lot of Swedish companies and people with great ideas who we wanted to build a platform for; and (2) we felt that our conference, after seven years, was better than many we visited in Europe or in the US and wanted to enable internationals to come join us.
Maisa: Which professionals and from which industries would you consider to make the best out of attending this conference?
Martin Thörnkvist: Most of the participants at the conference are either executives or creatives at media companies. They’re representing all kinds of media industries, everything from games and TV to web agencies and mobile.
Maisa: And last but not least, why Malmö? What is it about Malmö that is getting people curious enough to travel from all over Sweden and Europe?
Martin Thörnkvist: The city is big enough to be home of a great music and art scene and small enough to have a start up scene where you bump into people by accident who are always willing to spare an idea or share experiences. It makes people want to found media companies here. There is a lot of them for a city this size: http://www.mediaevolution.se/en/members
Ready to enjoy all the fun? It’s not too late to register, here!
See you there!
About Media Evolution The Conference – Malmö, Sweden (24-25 August)
For the seventh year we invite you to come to Malmö, Sweden, to explore the future of media and discover new business opportunities. The Conference (formerly known as Moving Images) attracts people from film, games, web, publishing, learning, tech and music.
During two days we will discuss who our future audiences are, the technology we communicate with, and how we create and consume media. These matters will be treated under the headlines: Who’s Next?, Man & Machine and Creation.
The list of speakers include Moeed Ahmad (Al Jazeera) Bill Drummond (The KLF etc), Amber Case (Geoloqi), Naveen Selvadurai (Foursquare), Yancey Strickler (Kickstarter), Björn Jeffery (Bonnier), Luke Williams (NYU / frog design) and Måns Adler (Bambuser).
The Conference puts you right in the flow of the present media evolution and points an inspiring finger into the future.
Our guest blogger is a social media and blogger who hails from Brazil, but finds happiness in Sweden. Maisa Dabus and you can follow Maisa on Twitter @maydbs
Davorin Gabrovec is the Co-Founder of Flowr, a communication service meant to encourage true collaborative work flow.
This week, I exchanged emails with Davorin regarding collaborative productivity and the orgin of Flowr.
Tattletech: I assume that now, if your office, you use Flowr as your primary tool for organization. Before you founded Flowr, what was your project organization like? A mess of emails and shared documents like the rest of us, or were you always ahead of the game?
Davorin Gabrovec: Before we built up Flowr, we used email, skype and scheduled meetings as our major communication tools. However, from the moment we wrote first few lines of code, we started with using Flowr for the development of Flowr and then evolved it based on our needs and our first beta users.
Tattletech: Wow. Using Flowr to develop Flowr, very Inception of you. When was the first time you had an idea that you wanted to create something like Flowr? Was it in a dream?
DG: Haha, it was not in a dream. It was came from thinking about improving our communication/collaboration issues within the small (20 employee) company which I funded before Flowr. We had been using several tools such as wikis, intranets and blogs to manage our internal information along with tons of emails and meetings, all of which were time consuming. At the same time, I was looking at social networks, which provided good examples of how you can easily get an information flow about your network, even amongst people you have never met in person.
Then I started to think about making a very easy “twitter-like” 140 character message box, where anyone inside our team could share a new idea, ask other some questions or just pass on an interesting link, without spamming the rest of the team–this would be great! We could reduce meetings, colleagues could interact when they will had time and all the information and knowledge would stay in one place. When I started talking with few of my colleagues from other companies, they loved the idea. That was the moment when two of my colleagues and I decided to build such a tool.
Tattletech: What was your biggest challenge in development?
DG: Our biggest challenge was making the product beautifully designed and as simple as possible. Our next biggest challenge was scalability from the tech perspective where our CTO Vlada played his role very well.
Tattletech: Have you had to change anything major from your original design to Flowr’s current iteration?
DG: We changed the user interface two times to make the product perfect (from our perspective). After the first redesign we put several analytics in place to start measuring how users actually use Flowr. Now we are much closer to what we want Flowr to be.
Tattletech: What is the next step for Flowr? What can we look forward to in the fall?
DG: The focus for the next few months is integration with third party apps such as customer relationship management, helpdesk and project management tools, as well as further development of mobile apps and an iPad app. We hope that Flowr will become a major communication tool for every small and medium business, with basic social features and notifications from the different applications companies usually use. That way, Flowr will become a major internal collaboration and information hub.
– Jason Oberholtzer
Follow Davorin on Twitter and take a look at Flowr.
White Bull Summits, ‘Champions of the European Innovation Ecosystem’, yesterday announced its official call for the 2011 Bully Awards, honouring Europe’s leading privately held technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) companies.
Submissions for the 2011 Bully Awards are now open, and nominations will be accepted through July 31, 2011.
The 2011 Bully Awards will honour 30 TMT firms as winners in three categories:
Yearlings: firms that seek or have received angel/seed rounds or equivalent; classic startups
Young Bulls: firms that seek or have received Series A financing; early stage companies
Longhorns: post Series A firms; growth stage companies
White Bull Summits will shortlist 60 firms as finalists, and these finalists will receive a special invitation to present at its 2nd Annual Pathways to Exit conference October 3 – 5, 2011 in Barcelona, where they will have the opportunity to present to potential partners and deal makers who can help them reach their goals.
The Bully Award applicants will be carefully reviewed and selected by White Bull’s panel of industry experts based on the following criteria:
Market Opportunity: How large is the opportunity? Is the ‘problem’ compelling enough to build a substantial business?
Competitive Landscape: Does the business have key sustainable competitive advantages over the existing and future competition?
Business Models and Revenues: Does the business model, existing revenues and growth forecasts present a compelling story?
Execution: Strength of milestones reached, customer base and progress?
Management Team: Is the existing management team and structure in place sufficient to drive the company forward?
Sector Activity: How competitive is the sector, and what is the strength of the exit market in the industry?
The 2011 Bully Award winners will be announced and celebrated at the 2011 Bully Awards ceremony on the evening of October 5th at the close of the White Bull Summit, Pathways to Exit, a three-day, invitation-only, conference forum for entrepreneurs, innovators, investors, and visionaries in the TMT and clean tech sectors. Learn more about White Bull Summits or request an invitation to attend here.
So, send in your worthy submissions for the 2011 Bully Awards now!
We’ve been saying this for years, now it looks like others are finally starting to notice the genius coming out of Europe‘s young tech community. Milo Yiannopoulous starts us off with his top ten list of innovative European companies that are blazing the trail in taking on Silicon Valley‘s reputation. We think there are a lot of others (I see a future post here), but he’s got a pretty good start with his WSJ Europe article, naming our client – PrimeSense – as one of them doesn’t hurt.
We said it here first – Europe is comin’ for ya, Silicon Valley!
This just in.. someone actually means it – one-click file sharing. Mashable today interviewed the Danish start up Ge.tt today for its Spark of Genius series and exposed the fact that ….. wait for it… that simple is better. Most often, simple is overlooked and in the flurry of new technology, open API’s, mobile blather, # of handsets in the market, Android v Blackberry v iPhone clutter, we miss the simplicity of things. And what do we do the most of these day? Share and send files – music, video data.
Read for yourself, but we think Ge.tt is onto something.
So yea…. we have found ourselves at the head of whirlwind tour starting on December 5 that takes us to Dusseldorf for e-Unlimited’s European Venture Summit. This is the last stop for those hoping to go onto the finals in Barcelona also known as the Eurocan European Venture Contest. The reason we like being a part of this VC/Tech ecosystem, is that despite its buttoned-down atmosphere, it really is a place where VCs – seed and upwards – come to shop. We will be there as a mentor and coach on the prep day, but also as a judge to select those that will move on to the final and have their dreams come true.
So here’s one we want to tell you about. On the move from Nordic Venture Summit to EVS is Defendec, a new start up out of Estonia. And guess what they do? They are a low-power wireless detection system for vulnerable borders which detects infrastructure sabotage or asset thefts, illegal crossing at international borders and monitors tactical operations areas. Ok, that doesn’t sound too sexy does it? But think about all the millions of miles of borders on this big old planet and think about everything from drugs to people to power stations to well, just about anything that is critical infrastructure. If you are living in a cabin in the Alps with only candles or are that Hermoine Way chick who claims to live out of one suitcase, you might not care, but the rest of the planet is a bit vulnerable and remote and gee, can’t be monitored remotely in an energy efficient way. Thus Defendec.
