eClub Winter 2011

soon the school will start again and this is the right time to begin planning for the next round of the eClub. They eClub sessions will start from September and they will be again supported by the department of Cybernetics and the CTU MediaLab foundation. Last year most of the students were from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. For the winter 2011 we want to attract students from the whole CVUT.
What is the current plan? I am preparing a series of 13 sessions. As usual I will open with an introductory presentation announcing this year competition for the best startup project. I want to put together again an international jury selecting three to five best projects. The winners will be awarded with a scholarship to start their projects.
I am in the middle of putting it all together and there still will be some changes, but let me introduce first speakers and sessions. In the last week of September we will take advantage of Hubert Palan visiting Prague. He will share with us his experience of studying at UC Berkeley and then creating his own startup. He works for GoodData now. His presentation will be an introduction to Silicon Valley, the center of startups. In the next session I am planning to give the opportunity to the winners of the last competition, the EasyWall team. They spent three months in the Silicon Valley Plug And Play accelerator and there is a lot to report. They have taken many videos and made lot of interviews. The next winners went to the Technical university of Copenhagen and took Innovation and Creativity “In search of the Blue Ocean” summer school and I am sure they have a lot to discuss too. I want to have one presentation focusing on the “soft skills”, particularly on organizing your work as well as your life. Jan Matejka will be teaching you how. I also hope we will attract Jakub Nesetril, the founder of apiry.io. He will share with us his experience from the SpringBoard accelator in Cambridge (UK) and will also tell us how to get the initial funding. Jan Sova owner of the WorksWell company will present his experience in starting a company in the CTU incubator and will come up with a list of initial problems you should avoid when starting a company in the Czech Republic. I am personally looking forward to meet Karel Janecek CEO of RSJ Algorithmic Trading who promised to join us for one session. The most important for those who will compete for the scholarships are the presentations of your business plans and then the final demo presentations.
I am sure there will be still some more surprises but this is the first draft of the winter eClub sessions. Stay tuned. I’ll be back soon with more messages, ….