Huge crowd in eClub

More than 80 people arrived for Lukas Fittl's presentation this Thursday. The folks were excited by his “Actionable metrics” presentation.

It might be because of the great rooms in the middle of Prague, which is EraSvet kindly providing to us or it might be because of the snacks we are serving in the networking part of the eClub meetings. Who knows, but I believe, it is because we have attracted great speakers.

First we welcomed David Vavra well known Android applications developer. His presentation was a continuation of Tonda Hildebrand's presentation. David explained  the advantages of an independent developer, micropreneur.  He has step by step reviewed how he has been developing the “Dluznicek” alias “Settle up” (English version) mobile application. David was chronologically showing how he was improving and enhancing his application, how he was attracting users. All the development steps and actions were accompanied with many references to many interesting  sites, which can help you to advertize, analyze and sell your application. Watch the presentation.

It is most important for me that I met David first as my student and then he has joined eClub and entered one of the first competitions. It is great to see, he has not stopped working on his ideas.  And today, tens of thousands people are using his application. Great job! What more his application is earning money. See the presentation and get inspired, do something similar, this is the way to make dreams happened.

Lukas Fittl had attracted the largest crowd this year. We did not have chairs enough, the food was finished before we started, but it was a great success this Thursday.

Lukas is well known on the European startup scene. He is mostly pitching the Lean startup. This time he gave a very interesting presentation about actionable metrics. The presentation step by step analyzed how to quantitatively answer questions like: am I making progress in the right direction? Does my product fit the market requirements? How to increase revenue? He also touched the cohort analysis. In his presentation cohort is a group of people sharing common characteristic over a period of time. According to the Lean Startup theory he has shown how to deliver and measure value. The final part focused on how to take action, how to plan, run, evaluate experiments and quantify the goals. Look at the video recording and the presentation, I am sure you will find it very inspiring.

There are another presentations ahead of us, Lucie Havlickova will teach how to give a catchy presentation and Jarda Gergic will talk about organizing group of developers.  He runs the GoodData group of developers in Prague. But the most important event is coming just after that, the first presentation day of this year eClub competition.  Join us too and compete for interesting prices. Looking to meet you at the next eClub meetings.

Machine learning for Internet

I have a passion for eClub and startups, but I also do research with my students. I would like to share with you some thoughts about our strategy.

I have a team of doctoral, MSc and BSc students working mainly on Internet apps. Most of our projects are in machine learning, some in infrastructure (cloud), provisioning and the rest are mobile applications. We are lucky, because all of these are of high interest for many industries today.

What are the essential ingredients for our research? For machine learning we need data, actually we need big data. Big data needs big infrastructure.

What is the industry situation? The leading Internet companies have pioneered big data processing and currently are capitalizing on this success. Many have developed large data centers and many are offering them as a service, but the smart algorithms are kept in house. There are many medium and small companies generating large data, but without smart algorithms. They do not have the research resources, investments and know-how to develop them.

Our target is to develop useful applications and algorithms. For that we need to understand what are our customers needs. They are very different in different, sometimes the law requires physical location of data in the home country or in EU. Some want to keep all the data on premises. Sometimes the customer needs to use both public as well as private resources. Every company has the data in different format. Each company wants to extract different information from data.

What should we do at universities?  We have to find partners in the industry to get the big data and good problem formulation.

Who are the best partners for university? These are the companies who generate the big data, who already feel the need for smart SW and who want to differentiate on the market. We must look at companies with established internal processes, who understand that the university can deliver the algorithm but cannot be responsible for integration or product delivery.

We can research custom solutions for our partners. The open source is another important distribution channel for university  The open source smart algorithms must stick to standards. To make the algorithms useful for medium and small companies we need to offer the solutions along with platforms for building, provisioning, managing and monitoring. The tools must run on popular APIs, for example AWS, which is becoming a standard for cloud.

The companies needs for data location and processing will differ. Some will require keeping the data in particular locations on private or hybrid clouds. These requirements are best satisfied deploying to open source cloud operating systems (Eucalyptus, OpenStack, …), which can be easily installed on private clouds. But the provisioning and management systems are nonexistent or in their infancy. This is opening another track for research and development of smart algorithms along with provisioning, management and monitoring easy to deploy to standard clouds. In addition these offering must install on private, public and hybrids cloud too.

Here is the conclusion: search the partners who can share the big data with us and help them designing smart applications. For other customers provide smart applications with provisioning, managing and monitoring on open source clouds.

BTW I am looking for new doctoral students ...

Next week the eClub starts new series.

eClubbers suggested many projects, new, inspiring ideas, demonstrated good skills and it only remains to turn the ideas to a profitable business. Here comes the eClub again with a new series of lean startup presentations. 

We start next Tuesday, join us. The invited speaker Is Karel Obluk. He is an investor and long time AVG CTO. He will specifically focus on the role of high education for building successsf startups in the opening session. His speech will come in a very specific moment. You may have noticed it too. The Cognitive Security startup was sold to Cisco and Karel was one of the team members who helped with the exit. Great success, congratulation to the whole team. In my view, this sets the best example for all eClubbers. Cognitive Security was originated by CTU PhD students and their professors. The principal know-how comes from a CTU PhD dissection. CS is a high-tech company created by real scientists with smart ideas and great enthusiasm for research. This is the kind of companies we all should shoot for. The top quality of their ideas and solutions is proved by the fact that they were bought by an Internet communication leading company such as Cisco. This exit is a great win not only for CS, but for the whole startup community in the Czech Republic. The initial investor was Credo Ventures, who also helped to start eClub.

What to do now? eClubbers we have to copy it. The know-how comes from CTU doctoral study and research. And the business part? Here comes eClub, we want to help all of you who are interested in high-tech to complement the top professional skills with the businessk know-how. We want to help you with the basics of how to create a company and repeat the success of CS.

How to do it? We have decided to follow the leabn startup movement pioneered by Steven Blank professor at Stadford university. It is a proven system. The lean start up movement has many followers all over the world these days. It is introducing the required steps for creating successful business. The most attracting for me is that the theory is based on the scientific approach. The same approaches as we use in research. First we have hypothesis then we need to prove it by an experiment. Our series will show what are the business hypothesis and what are the right experiments to prove them or pivoting. By the way if you do not know what is pivoting, join us we will explain. During the course we also would like to let you simulate or test your ideas at the end of presentations. In the middle of the course there will be a dry run presentation in front of your peers to test how well you can communicate your idea. We plan to have tutors to validate your steps. We assume you will work in teams. If you do not have team, do not get nervouse join us you will meet new friends in the networking sessions to create a new team. We have a simple advice: Follow lean startup steps, join us for the presentations and we quarantee you will avoid many mistakes and get much faster to a match between your product and customers. 

On top of all this we will organize a competition for the best idea with great prices. The final presentation is planned for May. Join us Tuesday Feb 19th at 18:30 in the Era Svet Jungmannovo nam. The following presentations will be on Thursdays in the same place.

eClub Summer 2013 plan

The fifth series of eClub meetings starts in February. eClub wants help creating new teams and introduce them in the essentials of building new business. The teams will compete for the best startup plan awards in the middle of May.

We will surprise you with a lot of changes. We are moving out of the CTU classrooms to new Era Svet rooms at a really distinguished place right in the heart of Prague at Jungmanovo nam. It is also a great place for networking and enjoying coffee after each presentation. The meeting rooms are equipped with projectors, speakers, and cameras connected to Internet. This will simplify streaming and recording. We plan to stream our sessions to cooperate with people from the whole Czech Republic.

Currently we are putting together a plan, see the eClub page. This year I am not alone. I am happy, that Jan Vesely is joining me in preparations. He is bringing in the economical and marketing perspective, which is important for technologist. We had a lot of discussion about what should be the presentations directions, what are the hottest problems or question. Finally, we agreed we will concentrate only on two observations. The first observation is people want to get connected.

We have decided we will try helping all eClub friends, students and young graduates to meet, create new teams and starting new business. Mainly we will focus on in the IT segment, but other segments are welcomed too. Most of the students of the technical universities have good programming skills. but they are lacking the business insight. The schools of economy students are on the other hand searching for example for programmers. All of them need graphical designers and many other skills to work on new ideas. eClub is the place to get all of you together. The networking will be an integral part of this year events.

The second observation is, students do not know how to systematically work on creating startup. We have been discussing how to change this. Finally we have decided to loosely follow the well known lean startup strategy.  Not a big surprise, but lean startup works.

We hope, people will meet and form at least preliminary teams during the initial networking. They will come up with some business idea. The eClub meetings then will walk them through the basic steps of turning their idea to real business. The presentations followed by exercises. Between the educational presentations we will throw also motivational presentations by some of the successful entrepreneurs. We wish and hope the teams will finish the whole course with a plan for making things happen. They will show what they learned in the presentation day. in front of a panel of judges. The best teams will get a great award. We work with several industrial partners raising money and we hope, we will collect enough to send the best team for a stay in one of the US incubators during summer. We also plan to award the second and the third team. We are happy to invite everybody who wants to be part of a new team as well as those who already have teams. Basically there are only two simple conditions. The teams need to have at least one student in this academic year at any Czech university. Teams already awarded i other competitions are not allowed.

This is the first information, if you have any question contact us. If you have a suggestion let us also know. If you have some friends in a company, who can help us funding our events let me know too. Sent this blog link to all your friends who may be potentially interested in our endeavor, especially those outside Prague. Everybody is welcomed to join. We want to put together programmers with economists, marketers, graphical designers, there is a place for everybody. Stay tuned there will be soon more on our pages. In the mean time look at our new YT video. See you in eClub.

How we build a cloud Android applications

I would like to present a tutorial for building mobile cloud applications, which we have developed with my colleagues during the three month Internet Application Development course at CTU. I will overview the selected technologies and why we selected them. If you like to build our sample application, refer to the details in the final presentation.

Customers as well as industry are demanding stable and robust mobile/cloud applications with user friendly UI. Mobile applications are taking advantage of the sensors in terminals, computational power and all information in the cloud. Number of smart phones is rapidly growing as well as the number of mobile apps. These trends were for us the key motivation for the course and for the selection of a sample application. It is a Android app storing the client data in the cloud.

There are many different technologies to choose from. What are the key components of the sample app?  Here are our choices. The Amazon EC2 API is the de facto standard in the cloud API. The educational accounts on Amazon are free, but students are required to pull out the credit cards ... Thanks to centrum.cz we can use for free several servers  in their infrastructure and it made our decision simple. We have decided to use the Eucalyptus cloud operating system. Its API is very similar to EC2. Application server is Tomcat 7 providing the java sandbox. An obvious choice is the MySQL as a database. We run all on Ubuntu 12.04. The client side is a native Android client also in in Java. The Android SQLite is used as the local storage. Client and server follow the REST architecture.

Our students are running different operating systems on their notebooks – Windows, Linux, OS XW, therefor we had to make some decisions to unify the development. We have decided to leave the code development IDE on the native OS. We recommended  the Eclipse, which coves all our students variety of OSs. The run time unification is not that simple. The reason is that we wanted to provide a step-by-step command description and they are OS dependent. The virtualization is the answer. We will use the Virtual box and an image of Ubuntu 12.04.

We sticked to the most widely used model the REST architecture for the sample application. The source comes with a Maven pom file to build and deploy the final war file. The code can be downloaded from Github. It provides the simplest CRUD functionality accessed through the REST API. Students cloned this code to their workstations as a starting point for testing and debugging their own modifications

To further simplify the development we have chosen to use Vagrant nicely managing the images in the Virtual box. Vagrant installs the Chef solo in the VM, which takes care about the provisioning. Chef proved to be a very simple and useful saving us lot of troubles. It uses cookbooks and receipts.  The whole provisioning process is reasonably fast and simple. Vagrant ssh, and IP forwarding allows to further tweak the installed components from the command line and executing some configuration and initialization scripts for MySQL before starting the app war.

To test the server part we use a simple Chrome plug-in HTTP client. It enables us to test the whole REST API, modifying headers and having the returned data nicely displayed. Excellent not only for demonstrations and teaching!

The final step was to move the application war file to cloud, to Eucalyptus. For this purpose we have installed the Eucalyptus command line utility euca2ools. After exchanging the public keys all commands for instantiating VMs in the cloud are at hand. Eucalyptus provides the IP address of the VM instance. We have again used the Chef solo to install the same pair of Tomcat and MySQL and we used the same process for provisioning and testing as in the local VM.

We have decided to design the client on the Android platform. All tools are available for Eclipse. The applications apk files are easy to distribute. Second, thanks to Samsung we were able to give to our teams bunch of Android tablets for development and testing. The Android application development compared to the server part is much more self-contained. The only non standard action is to install Samsung drivers on Windows to run the debugging and testing on the target tablet. The Java code and development are well described with programming examples at Google pages.  For our purpose we have provided a more complex sample of code. For most of the web applications storing data in the cloud is  essential to use data cash on the client to handle connectivity problems, therefore we have shown the use of the basic SQLite. This time  the DB configuration etc. is part of the code. You also will see some threads handling the background operations in the example. If all works fine, you should be able to run the whole app from your Android device.

At the end of the course students delivered 10 demos, pilot working applications. Most of the teams used the suggested technologies. Some of the apps work on both tablets and phones two.

If you are interested in details or follow the sample development look at the presentation. It provides links to the sample code and shows step by step the building commands. You can cut and past them and follow what we have done. You should be OK except for the Eucalyptus part, which requires creating an account. You can instead use the AWS with almost exactly the same set of commands. This sample application is only a bases for building real applications. We show the installation and usage of development technologies, which are state of the art and useful for serious design. Many required details are missing, but you can start your project with something running. We will continue improving the presentation and add more functionality, other front ends etc. The course took three months and we have been step by step introducing the technologies to our students, therefore take your time and enjoy the details to gain full understanding.

Good luck and let me know about problems you have encountered. I will also welcome suggestions.

eClub awarded the winners

eClub awarded the top mobile applications in the Samsung and eClub competition this Monday. If you own a Samsung Android phone or tablet, test them, they are great!

The panel of judges have selected the top applications in two categories Samsung Galaxy Note and Tablet.

Note category:

1. LearnToWrite   
2. Puzzloid    
3. Easy Coloring  

Tablet category:

1. Prettymeter      
2. Abalone    
3. Activity

The awards were given away by the Samsung president Mr. JinHwan Kim and Prof. Vladimir Marik, the chair of the Department of Cybernetics of CTU FEL. The winners in both categories got not only the scholarship provided by MediaLab Foundation and supported by Samsung, but also the great Samsung devices. I hope this will be an inspiration for all participants to create more awesome applications.

The winning apps are currently for Samsung customers only, they will be available on the Android Play market in the second half of 2013. If you own a Samsung phone or tablet download them and give them a try. If you do not own a Samsung device, get one. I had a chance to get my hands on the latest Galaxy S III mini for a few days and I must admit it is a great and inspiring device with a lot of nifty additions to basic Android.

All of us in eClub are happy to see new finished and working applications available for users, that is the best achievement  Currently, we are trying to put together plans for the next semester and the lesson I have learned: we have to put more emphasis on finishing stuff, to not wait, try to make things happening. I am also hoping we will even extend our cooperation with Samsung and other industrial partners. I am looking forward to meet all of you for the next eClub starting middle of February.

Awesome Demo Day in eClub

Eight teams have presented great mobile applications for Samsung Galaxy tablets and the Note devices. Currently, the jury is deliberating. eClub will announce the winners and give away the prices next Monday.

This year eClub has organized a different competition than in the last rounds. We have worked with Samsung and prepared interesting prices for new mobile devices applications. Mainly student’s teams participated. We were very lucky to see programmers and designers from CVUT and the Tomas Bata University in Zlin forming teams. The top three will be announced next Monday (Dec 10) and will receive 20, 15 and 10k Czech crowns. The winning team members will also be awarded with the mobile devices. There are two sets of winners in two categories tablet and note.

We have met for the apps Demo Day this Monday (Dec 3) it was simply an awesome event. The presentations of All teams were very well prepared and gave excellent presentations in a great style. The Demo Day also attracted a big crowd of friends who created nice atmosphere with a lot of jokes. Check it out on our web. We saw eight presentations in two categories for tablets and the s-pen. Here is the list applications:

Abalone designed by Tomáš Veselý, Kateřina Ondrušová.  This is a simple strategy game for one or two players. It runs on tablets as well as on phones. The goal of the game is to push six opponent's marbles out of the board. The game has a very nice and clean graphics.

Memory Animals Ondřej Hrabal, Marek Polčák, Martin Chloupek  This is a simple memory training game authored by a group of CTU students. The game is known under the name pexeso. It is a guessing game, the goal is to match cards faces. Very nicely done.

One of the most technologically advance applications is the Prettymeter by Pavel Šimurda, Tomáš Vahalík, Jan Plešek. It answers the ever lasting question: mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most beautiful one of all? Yes, this is the technology for estimating the beauty. Very useful.

The Social Puzzle by Michal Knizek, Jiri Balcarek, Martin Curda explores the Facebook photos in a new exciting way. The users are challenged with putting together pictures broken to puzzle pieces. Play puzzle with your friends photos!

Fall Detection designed by Jan Pechan aims at seniors or people with handicap  It is very useful in case they fall down and need help to stand up.

LearnToWrite by Vladimir Blazek, Vaclav Podlipny, Lubomir Helcl android.asgards.eu is a simple game for kids teaching them how to properly write characters. This application takes advantage of the unique features of the Samsung Galaxy note. Their presentation was great, the team has done a small usability study and filmed kids using the application, which was part of the presentation. Worth to see it, very entertaining.

Easy Coloring by Ondřej Hrabal, Marek Polčák, Martin Chloupek is another game for kids. As you would guess it offers kids tools for coloring set of pictures. This is a very advanced application with a nice set of brushes and pens.

Activity by Tomáš Sixta, Christian Jánský created a remake of the well known game Activity. The main goal in this game is to get to the end as fast as possible.

The applications are available on the Samsung market and we plan to put them on the Play market in the second half of the 2013. Some of the apps are already so successful that they have hundreds of downloads. Let me conclude with inviting you for the award ceremony to meet and talk to the winning teams.