eClub winners, great new projects

yesterday evening we have awarded eClub summer 2013 winners. The winners are Apeman boards, BlindShell and Mixturam. eClub and MediaLab Foundation awarded scholarships to support further work on their ideas.

The ApeMan team introduced plans for manufacturing cool long boards, which became recently again very popular. They started by creating a community of stylish enthusiasts as well as racers with distinguished taste interested in long boarding. This way they have learned what is the dreamed board, how to design it and how to manufacture it. They are bringing even a little more - great design, which is a very important part of their image, check their cool site. The team includes designers, long board racers, faculty of mechanical engineering PhD. students, and business people. The company manufactures a high-tech carbon based boards with a unique design and great shapes ranging from the middle to the high end.  I wish the team to get through the initial organizational problems as soon as possible and I hope, we will see many more enthusiasts and racers smoothly sliding their boards. I have no doubts, the main award is in the right hands, Apeman will effectively use the 40k scholarship to invest further to technology.

The second team called Blindshell are two students from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. With their tutor they are for quite some time researching user interfaces for disabled people. Blindshell is a launcher for touch based Android phones customized for visually impaired users. The latest smart phones are bringing many new sensors providing lot of information to enable new and smarter applications, but the whole interface is mostly visually intensive. For people with poor vision is sometimes very difficult to effectively take advantage of all the goodies. The whole idea is based on gesture, voice based interface allowing quick access even for visually impaired. The team still needs to turn the idea into a product and I wish we would soon see Blindshell on new Androids.

The third team is MixTuram offering custom tailored food supplement. Check the web, you can mixFDA to offer the products on the US market. I was lucky and I got the first box with the serial number #00001. I am looking forward to show it to my friends once Mixturam is a major worldwide company.
the right set of vitamins and other ingredients to make you stronger. MixTuram will mail you nice small box with 100 pills. Get one and boost your self for better performance. They have already received all the legal approvals in the Czech Rep. and they work with

It was a great evening and we stayed long having great discussion with all winners after announcing the results. All people were energetic and charged to continue working on their ideas. For the first time two of the winners have already running company and one company is already selling. Overall I feel happy - something good is starting and eClub and MediaLab is part of it. We all are looking for the next eClub season, watch us on the web and FB, we will start in September.

Final presentations in eClub

Eleven new teams met on Thursday to present their new ideas in the eClub. If you did not join us, see the video. All presentations were great. New teams are awesome and the international jury will have a hard time to select the best teams. We will award the winners this Thursday.

Let me share some of my observations. Karel Obluk opened the whole series of presentations in this semester. He talked about the pros and cons of entrepreneurship, the importance of education and the joy of building startup. This semester we have included new educational presentations. Thanks to Jan Vesely we had a great series of Lean Startup lessons.  He explained the steps of these days de facto standard methodology for developing startup. Lukas Fittl nicely continued with a great presentation about actionable metrics showing how to use and interpret the company data. Lucie Havlickova reviewed very well how to deliver the project pitch, how to make viewers involved and how to communicate the basic ideas. We have closed the educational part with an entertaining session about pricing delivered by Jiri Fabian (Vendavo) and Vaclav Lorenc (he calls himself a pricing idiot). They put together an insightful pricing guide for small companies as well as for corporations.

As usual we have been mixing in also motivational presentations. David Vavra an independent developer has shown how to develop a “lonely ranger” application. Working as a micropreneur is a great example. Following his example students can get in touch with technology make some money and understand how the business works. Jarda Gergic has presented some of the techniques for project management using his GoodData as an example. Finally, the business star Honza Rezab from Socialbakers shared with us some of his thoughts about entrepreneurship and his life.

Thanks to ERA Svet we have enjoyed the great space directly in the middle of Prague. They have great people who helped us a lot with organization, streaming and recording all presentations. This year we have been streaming not only to our friend universities we have made the streams freely available for everybody. Google Hangout technology proved to be excellent for streaming and sharing the video on Youtube. I am also very grateful to other sponsor ICT Alliance helping us with catering.

Overall I have the feeling we did very well and offered great speakers and valuable presentations with lot of know-how. We certainly want to continue starting in September. Let me know if you have some ideas for improvement or any comments. I also hope, I will be able to help students with starting their projects during the summer vacation.

Next Thursday, the jury will announce the winners and the CTU Media Lab will give away the scholarships. Join us on Thursday or watch the web for the winners.