eClub winners

The jury sent the votes, we put the results together and we have announced the winners in the winter 2011 series of eClub. Join me in congratulating to all the winning teams.

The first price summer semester scholarship of 15k CZK goes to the Avocado team. The second price goes to InstantStorm with the summer semester scholarship of 10k CZK. And the third price is 5K CZK and goes to CloudCards team. All teams will receive a mentor to help them in starting the entrepreneurial career. The CVUT MediaLab will provide all scholarships.

Big thank you goes also to all the jury members. They have done great work in evaluating all the teams. And I am concluding with inviting you for the next eClub, which will start in the second half o February. Watch this blog and eClub pages and join us.

Final presentations - eClub

eClub is finishing. We met for the final round of presentations on Monday 12.12. Twelve teams were presenting their projets for startups and competing for prices. We will announce the winners next Monday 19.12.

The crowd was huge. At least sixty people gathered for the finals. The atmosphere was great. We started with introducing jury. Next we drew the order of presentations. We also had to add two last minute teams to the competition. This time 12 teams were competing and it is four more than last time. Also, based on the first reaction of jury, the quality of presentations was higher. We watched several short YT movies. The graphical appearance of presentations was great, we have seen several very interesting and eye catching shows. Also the content was according to the recommended format: team members’ introduction, the problem statement and suggested solution. All of them paid close attention to monetization, marketing, addressable market etc. It is clear that all participants have learned how to present. All presentations with short annotations are on eClub pages. Thanks to the Meta TV, who worked with us the whole semester, we will soon have on our pages the presentation videos. They will hlep to the jury members who did not make it to the final presentation. It is also for our overseas members.

The number of new emerging competitions is growing world wide as well as in our country. Some of the teams had already tried their luck elsewhere. We probably should allow competing only teams with no award from other competitions. Next time we also need to watch closely the clock some of the presentations were too long and the whole meeting took almost three hours. At 9:30 the university concierge kicked us out reminding us on the closing hour (9:00).

The best news: CityAdventures team competing in the last eClub is close to launch their product. The EasyWall team has pivoted and it is now running Meta TV company. Some other students, who were competing last time are part of new startups. Great, and I hope we will see more and more startups growing  from the university environment. Watch us next year, currently we are preparing the program.

Overall, the final presentations were big success: lot of people, good quality of presentations, more projects, better focus. Come next Monday we will announce the winners. Misko Hevery from Google Mountain View will follow with a presentation about the Trends in IT. I am looking forward to see you on Monday!

Barcamp Prague

Yesterday I joined the Barcamp Prague. Over hundred developers from the whole country got together to discuss development of mobile applications. People were giving short presentations along with discussions in the nearby rooms.

The series started with NFC and the Google wallet discussion, very interesting and very important for the contact-less payments. The typical problems in mobile UI development were discussed and demonstrated in several presentations. One of the focus groups discussed the difference between native and web based mobile applications. Developers presented different views with a lot of details about the progress of browsers capabilities on iOS and Android. Phonegap framework seems to be the best choice for developing a multiplatform applications. Many discussions focused on HTML 5 details. We have also seen some sort of promotional presentations such as Toast masters presentation. I also liked an overview of how to use mobile phones for advertising with examples of SMS and augmented reality usage. There were many more interesting applications, this is just a sample of what caught my attention.

During the day I have met lot of interesting people including some of my students. I gave a short overview of the VIA classes and the eClub. It definitely was worth of the time and I will try to join next time again.

Misko Hevery, Google, Trends in IT

Misko Hevery, top Google developer is coming to talk about future trends in IT industry. We will meet at the CVUT, Karlovo namesti 13, KN:E-301 on Monday, December 19, at 18:00. 

Misko is leading the AngularJS project. It started as a one person 20% project and it turned to a Google official project today. The project is growing also thanks to other two fellow citizens Vojta and Igor from Slovakia. All of them are very passionate about their project, just look at what is the AngularJS mantra: "What HTML would have been had it been designed for web apps". See the tutorial and examples.  Misko already gave two AngularJS presentations while he was visiting us in March. In this Christmas time he will share with us his visions of the future trends in IT.

Before the presentation we will award the winners of this year eClub competition. If you are interested in seing the competing teams join us on Monday December 12, at the same address.

Samsung Galaxy Projects Review - class 10

VIA is an Internet applications development course introducing to mobile web applications. VIA class number ten. We are slowly but surly approaching the end of this semester. 

This time we had a class about security. This is one of the most important topics for any web apps developers. Unfortunately there is no special course on security in the curriculum and we could not afford to spend more then one class on it, too bad. Tomas Charvat prepared very condensed class reviewing the security. He has approached the first part from the point of view of a company CIO. Their  main concern is the disaster recovery strategy and security. What is the security role in a company? What are the principal security guidelines and processes? The company CIO needs to answer these questions precisely and we have learned the basic approaches. Then Tomas listed the main security standards and explained briefly the history. Next we have looked at how to conduct security audit, penetration test and vulnerability scan and what are the differences.

The last part of the presentation introduced the most common types of attacks. Examples of DOS, SQL injection and cross scripting vulnerabilities were explained along with graphs of security incidents. Overall this was a great class covering the most important security aspects.

In the next class we are going to look at how to select the right hosting site based on the type of application, which will be pitched by Tomas Vondra. After that we will follow with the project presentation.

It is sad, but I have to report two of the fourteen teams broke. The teams stopped working on the projects. On the other hand there are signs that some of the teams will create nice working demos.

Final presentations in the eClub

The winter 2011 series of eClub talks is slowly ending. On Monday 12.12. we will meet for the final presentations of students projects competing for the best business proposal. The jury headed again by Ondrej Bartos (Credo Ventures). will select the best projects. The jury members are the entrepreneurs, investors and technologists. The main sponsor is the CTU Media Lab Foundation and it will grant the students scholarships.

The eClub and Media Lab Foundation goal is to provide students with seed money to start working on a projects and commercialize them. The general rules are quite simple. eClub is planning to award the first three teams with a scholarship for the academic summer semester 2011/12. To start the business they will receive a monthly scholarship of between 5-15 thousands Kc. The eClub competition is designed for university teams and only students will be supported. We can afford to support maximum two students in each winning team. In addition to the scholarship eClub will try to get a mentor for winning teams. Mentors will help the teams to work on the proposed project, will help keeping focus and concentrate on the key aspects of the business. The second role of the mentor will be to monitor the progress of developing the idea. eClub will work with mentors and evaluate the progress.  If the awarded team will stop or suspend the work on the project the schoolarship will be suspended.

For competing teams it is very important to understand the jury rules. They will evaluate the proposed projects based on the 5 P of an investment rules. For investors is very important the quality of a problem. They are looking for big scalable problems. They want to understand the size of potential market and the impact of the proposed idea. Very important is the team, the people and their passion for business, their experience and the commitment to turn the idea a prosperous business. Last but not least is the payment. The teams need to explain soundly how are they going to make money. After all this is the main idea of any business. The presentation needs to prove the basic idea and introduce the basic steps to make things happened.

I am looking forward to see all the teams and their presentations. eClub and Media Lab Foundation we are ready to do our best to help turning students ideas to success.