Samsung and eClub competition demo day

We are approaching the Samsung and eClub competition demo day. It is scheduled for Monday December 3rd. eClubbers will present new applications for the Samsung mobile devices, join us for a great show.

In this season we have organized slightly different competition than before. In cooperation with Samsung we have asked eClubbers to create applications for the latest Samsung mobile devices Galaxy Tablet and Galaxy Note with the S-Pen. As of today, we have eight entrants. I have been working with most of them and I must confess they worked hard. eClub also provided to some of them testing devices. We have also been answering and helping solving questions concerning the certification process. Most of the applications are already approved by Samsung.

Currently we work with our friends in Samsung on selecting the panel of judges. The judges will focus on the graphical quality. They will evaluate how the applications take advantage of the unique features of the Samsung devices. Also it will be very important for the evaluation how inventive and entertaining the apps are. The stability and technical quality of apps should be already validated, since all applications need to comply with the certification.

3rd of December is the demo day. All teams will have the opportunity to introduce  their applications. The organization will be simple. Each team will have a ten minutes time slot to explain their application. We expect the teams to use the web apps pages, which are part of the competition rules. Certainly, a presentation in power point or a YouTube movie are welcomed too. We are all looking for a great show. Do not forget that a stunning presentation is at least 50% of success. Do you homework and prepare something interesting. The application also needs to be technically good. The judges will download the apps to the tablets and notes and test them before the demo day. We will leave one week to judges to deliver their decision. The winners will be announced 10th of December. All presentations will be video recorded and we will put them on the eClub pages.

Do not forget and make a note to your calendar the demo day is on Monday the 3rd of December, plan to join us, it will be a great show.

How are the eClub winning teams doing?

All three winning teams from the last run of the eClub were very busy during summer. They were happily developing their ideas and they have made significant progress.

The third team in the competition is smart2go. They want to develop a portal finding the nearest taxi and mange the interaction between taci driver and customer. The idea is simple: take your cell and with few clics order a taxi. The portal will inform the most suitable taxi driver and notify the customer once the driver commits the drive. Smart2go started with a simple mobile application Taxi guide for customers. It recognizes the customer location or alternatively you can enter the departure point and the destination can be typed in or selected clicking on a map. Pressing search returns a list of taxi provides starting with the cheapest one. One more click and you can call the taxi company. The application is very simple but provides the essential guidance. The real price is only estimated, but I still consider it very useful. Download it on the play market. The team has gotten over all the hurdles of putting an app on play. This is the basic exercise for continuing in the development of the full working application.

The second team Babywebik is focusing on a neat application for young parents. The server offers infrastructure for saving babies pictures, share them with family or friends and see the kids growing. Nice idea. The team was also very busy working from the Node 5 incubator. They are probably the most advanced team close to making the product running. They were already several times threatening with launching it and I am sure it is only few weeks away now. The team has also shown a strong business lead. They are busily discussing with the leading babies product manufacturers and resellers. The site is also offering an Internet store with babies’ products. All this is potentially securing reasonable income. Nice job!

The winning team the Techambition is also very dedicated and committed to develop good educational tools. They are focusing on high schools. During summer they have enhanced their basic web technology for creating interactive framework for easy content development. They have nicely designed goniometric functions class. Student can interactively learn what are the parameters and how they change the functions graphs. The goniometric functions are an ideal example for a graphical demonstration. This example really very well shows the power of interaction. The team has also got in touch with several high schools and received a valuable feedback. They have closed the first deal with a first school. Techambition is also discussing the development strategy with a similar team working from the Varick Incubator. The team still has a lot to do, the most difficult problem will be to develop more content and disseminate it to schools. But the team is on a good path to succeeded.

Join us next Monday Filip Molcan will share with us his experience developing and organizing his company.

eClub starts again next Monday

I am still at the airport in Glasgow returning from a short cycling vacation, but I feel it is time to reveal the next eClub series plans. We are making big changes in eClub and we have a lot of surprises. Do not miss the opening presentation by Steven Kuyen.

This semester we will open in a big style with a presentation by the Steven Kuyan the director of the Varick Street incubator. Steven’s incubator is closely associated with NYU Poly. There is a big similarity between our eClub and Varick street incubator and therefore I hope, it will be very interesting for us to see how they organize educational and motivational presentations, how they help their students and how can we work together. Varick street incubator also provides mentors helping the student’s teams to develop their startups. On top of that they also provide a hosting space for new teams. This is still a dream for us, but believe me, we are working on it and I hope, we will surprise you soon.

Steven’s presentation starts on Monday 24.9. at 18:00 again in Hub Prague. As in the last semester we will be streaming to our usual locations. (Brno, Hradec Kralove, Olomouc, Ostrava, Zlin) This also will be our first overseas session. The students of the NYU-Poly will join us, too. Get ready and invite as many viewers as possible, it will be great. I also hope, we will remove all the technical problems we had encountered last time. We plan to have another two sessions in HUB in this semester, each last Monday in the month. Regularly we will meet as usually at Karlovo nam 13, K9 room.

I will deliver the second presentation (Karlovo nam. K9, 1st Oct). I will present the organizational details for this semester, this time for the whole academic year in the eClub. There will be some changes. I am planning to select the winners of the eClub competition only once in the academic year, in May before the summer vacation. The reason is simple. Based on the last year experience students had to focus most of all on exams in January and beginning of February and they did not have time enough to work on their ideas, to work on their startups. This does not mean there is no competition before Christmas. Instead, we will organize the ideas presentations, which we have been running in the middle of the semester. A panel of reviewers will select the most promising teams. The winning teams will get a working space, and mentors. The reason is simple we want to work with the most promising teams throughout the summer semester and prepare them for the final competition. Before summer the jury will select the teams with the top entrepreneurial potential in the final competition. The best team will get the grand price: two months stay at the Varick street incubator joining  their summer program. Imagine working for two months in the center of the world business, in the middle of Manhattan. Fantastic, do you agree?

The list of speakers for this season is not completed yet. We have some empty spaces. But check the eClub program pages, the first presentations are already confirmed. I will get back to you with more details soon.

Do you want owning company in the US

I was not idling during the summer. I worked with my friends from Varick Street Incubator (NY) and the University of Tomas Bata (Zlin) and we have put together an competition with an amazing award. If you win you will own a US based company.

How it started? Bob from TBU wrote me an email saying: hey, I have a bunch of talented designers interested in multimedia and web design and they do not have the right programming skills to make them live. My reply to his email was immediate: we have a different bunch in eClub Czech Technical University, Prague with complementary skills. Why don’t we try to put them together?

In the same time I was visiting incubators in the US and thanks to Jan (CzechInvest Director for the East Cost) I happened to get to Varick incubator and I met Steven who is the director. The Varick street incubator hosts mainly NYU-Poly students teams. When we met I asked Steven simple question: I have lot of skillful programmers and they want to get access to the US market, what can we do about it? His reply was quick: lets try to create a competition for mixed Czech US teams and let’s see how it would work. Great idea!

The things clicked together immediately. Bob's students have put together a portfolio of great game graphical designs. We have eager programmers at NYU-Poly, Varick street incubator and in eClub CTU. The remaining question was how to get our student together? How to make them cooperate? How to create international teams? This is a difficult task. We have immediately started discussions to find a solution. We have reviewed many different ideas, but the outcome is not surprising: we have chosen the famous BaseCamp. The BaseCamp selection is probably obvious, but it took us quite some time.  Clearly, it is one of the most popular project management web tools used in many startups. I hope, it will work for our students too. Of course, it will very much depend on the student’s activity and imagination too. I am looking forward to see emerging teams of programmers and designers.

How to start? If you want to enter the competition fill in the registration form and we invite you to the BaseCamp. Then you can browse between various projects and virtually meet your future team members. I am sure the teams will find more web communication tools, let us know what works best.

The competition is aiming at games for mobile devices, phones or tablets. You can chose from the list of graphical designs but we made the topic selection open to let other developers use their imagination and come up with something interesting. Submission date is November 5th and we will announce the winners a week later.

The competition rules are quite simple and the award is awesome. The winners will own a US company to start their business career on the most interesting market in the world.

If you have any questions let me know. If you want join register. I wish to all participants good luck and I am looking forward to see the first emerging teams.

Samsung and eClub competition

I am happy to announce Samsung and eClub competition. The main sponsors Samsung and eClub will award students of the Czech universities for the best Galaxy tablets and the Samsung S-Pen devices applications.

I have been promising to the graduates of eClub and my students a great competition for summer 2012. It took us long time. It is middle of the summer, but finally today everything is tuned and perfected and I can invite you to see the rules. The competition is giving great chance all the students to compete for the best Galaxy application. In cooperation we will reward Galaxy applications for Android tablets and recently introduced new S-Pen. We all already know the famous Galaxy tablets, the next version 2 is soon out. Also the S-Pen deserves a special attention, its unique screen size and a stylus are giving developers special opportunities to design new type of attractive applications.

The awards are awesome! The winning teams will be awarded with 20, 15 and 10k CZK scholarships and each member will also get Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 Wi-Fi in the tablet category and Samsung Galaxy S-Pen in the second category. All registered competition participants will have free access to selected Node 5 accelerator events and to the shared working space. eClub will also try to provide the testing devices in both categories. All of you are certainly also invited to next great season of eClub where we also will try to help all of you to achieve the best results. eClub program will be announced soon.

What do you need to do? You need to have a good idea for an application and put together an actionable team. You need to register the team, create great application and submit it before November 1st.  To make sure the applications are well written and satisfy all commercial requirements they need to obtain the SamsungApps certification.  The Samsung experts will give you a valuable and free feedback discovering potential application problems. You also need to describe and advertise your application on your web pages. We will invite you to present your application at special Demo Day in the eClub before a panel of judges from Samsung and eClub. They will select the winning applications.

The awarded apps will be offered to the Samsung customers for the first six month after the jury decision. After the six month period the authors are free to market or sell their application as they wish.

The Samsung and eClub competition extends the fantastic cooperation with MediLab foundation, which received 50 brand new Galaxy tablets last year. Thanks to this donation our students enjoyed great hands-on experience in designing the Android applications. We are happy to continue this effort this semester again.

If you are a student and you like developing mobile applications help me to spread the word and let your friends know. I am looking forward helping with all eClub members to all participants to achieve the best results. I am also happy to provide contacts while creating teams. Keep up the fingers crossed and let’s look forward for the best applications.

How we organize research in the Cloud Computing Center

I have explained how to find a topic for a research project or dissertation in the last blog. Today, I want to comment on some of the best execution rules, which should help you in achieving the best project results in our Cloud Computing Center (3C). 

Our ambition is to find and research new ideas and use the new results for creating useful applications on Internet and for mobile devices. Check the first batch of projects completed in May this year or the new projects we are starting now.

First things first. I believe that every member of our team needs to understand what is the target of his research, what needs to be researched? The problem formulation needs to be crystal clear. The best way to accomplish this is to ask all new members to write a simple essay. I always conduct an initial interview with candidates applying for a project and I try to introduce possible interesting ideas, but leave space for creativity and innovation. The discussions may take quite some time but the result is an essay describing briefly, without any technical details what is the research good for, why we should pursue it. The essay needs to answer the following questions: what would be the impact of the research, where it can be applied, is it going to improve people’s life, why we need the solution?

Once we understand the problem we start the papers search - how to solve the problem. We again are answering a set of questions: what are the known approaches, what are the possible solutions or directions of new research, which of the described or published approaches may lead to best results, how are we going to improve the current solutions and what are our chances for succes? By the way sometimes it is very difficult objectively measure what is success. Finding the right direction takes a lot of work. The systematic paper search, learning and understanding and collecting them to a document or blog takes quite some time. The blog with notes not only helps in learning the basics but will come very handy later as a list of references. While reading the articles we will soon discover who are the competing researchers or companies and what is the state of art in the field. Very helpful is to network with researchers or groups working on similar problems and I encourage everybody to socialize as much as possible.

There are also some formal requirements in the 3C. Every member of our team has to prepare a short CV and place it on our pages along with the essay describing the problem. I ask all members to point their private Facebook and Linkedin, Google and other profiles to 3C pages, this attracts visitors. We want more traffic to our pages, because we want to advertise our work, we want to attract people with the same interest. Certainly, every person in the team has also a link to a personal blog tracking the project progress on 3C pages. For the everyday progress tracking each member needs to share with me also a document with a list of tasks and their completion. Recently we are also in some more intensive projects using Asana a simple work flow management system.

Our team is growing and we need to have common vision and strategy. The team members need to communicate and help each other to select projects from the same or similar fields to effectively cooperate. The best place for exchanging ideas are the weekly meetings. We summarize the recent work and plan the next steps. I am also envisioning to organize reviews of interesting articles. This will help us to stay on the technological edge.

To make sure we grow, I ask all the PhD students to supervise one or two BSc or MSc students. These students are helping to test or implement some of the research ideas and this way contributing to the work of the whole center. I also expect the undergraduates to help us with writing applications demoing the research results. Demos are the best way to promote the results of our work.

I also pay close attention to promote the research results to the industry. Technology transfer is one of important roles we need to play. Every member of the center is asked to constantly think how to use the research results in the industry. All members should think about creating startups or spin offs. The number of students creating startups is still very low at our university and in our country in general. On the other hand startups are the best form of organization for converting the latest technological results to successful products.

Research institutes and schools are frequently supported by governmental grants. Part of the work therefore must aim at effective grant submissions and search of partners for cooperation.

This is the list of rules and common practices we apply in 3C. If you have different rules or suggestions for improvement, let me know. If you want to join us let me also know. We also look for research and industry partners ...

How to chose the dissertation topic

All PhD or MSc students are asking the same questions at the beginning of their career: how to select the best thesis project? Indeed, there are many ingredients required to cook a good dissertation. Let me share some of my thought.

How to find the research topic? Where to start the search? The synonym for search is Google today. Yes, Internet is the source of great knowledge but there are also other sources. Our university diploma works are available on line and all dissertations are available in our department library. I would suggest to start here. Go through them and read especially conclusions they include lot of suggestions for further development. Starting with the works from our department has one advantage: they are focusing on what our faculties are interested in. Understanding the research in our department will result in better, more efficient follow-up search on the Internet.

Work systematically. Record all what you have read and try to identify what was each work solving. What was the contribution and conclusion? What are the open problems. I strongly suggest to write a blog.

While selecting a topic consider the added value. Once you solve the dissertation problem what is the benefit. I also will suggest checking the business value of the topic or research. Do you think someone will buy the solution? Is the created intellectual property good for creating a startup?

What other considerations can help you in selecting the topic? During the school years you were good in some of the courses, you liked solving certain problems. These are the areas to search for a good problem. It is very important finding something you are passionate about. Passion is an essential ingredient of a success in any project. Do not forget there is a long way to solve even a simple problem and you need to stay focused and motivated. Motivation drives great performance and leads to the best results.

As soon as you get closer to the problem formulation write an essay. It should not be too long, one up to two pages are enough. Try in simple words explain to someone who is not an expert in the field what you want to do, why are you passionate about the problem and what will be the benefits. Even if you are going to focus on a fundamental theoretical problem you better know what is your contribution and who is interested in the results. The larger is the group of people who will benefit from your solution the better.  Do not do anything just for the sake of research ask and answer real practical questions.

Once the project is at least vaguely formulated go to the Google scholar or other research databases and identify the major journal focusing on your topic. Collect relevant articles and sort them out. Cluster the topics in major groups. This will help you to find out the state of the art in the area of interest. You will also learn who are the major leaders in the field, where they publish and what is popular. Do the same for the major conferences. Do not forget you need to publish to prove your competencies in the field. The journals and conferences are the targets for publishing your results.

What is also important? Your chosen topic needs to align with the interests of your advisor. Choosing the right advisor and aligning your topic with his interest is essential. You are in fact looking not only for the advisor you better search for a group of people researching similar topics. The reason is very simple, you need to regularly discuss with your peers and the advisor too. The discussion is the best way to improve your views, to get further motivation, to have someone who will argue with you, who will ask you to get deeper to the problem. Group of people working on the same topic will also help you to stay focused not to loose the direction. Your peers are the best listeners and advisers to your research interests.

Last but not least. Research work is not very well paid and you need some funding. Therefore I recommend looking for all the grants, funding or granted projects in the area at the very beginning while deciding about your project. Identify the possible sources and constantly search for funding. Proposing a new research or asking for funding for your research is also not simple, you need to learn it. Think about it also as soon as possible. Think about the best way to present your project, research and its results. Find the most persuasive ways how to demonstrate your research results. Understand who can be your customers, who needs the results of the research, these people are the possible candidates for funding.

Good dissertation is a result of a hard, long time effort and requires lot of ingredients. This year we have been very lucky and we got three new doctoral students who decided to take this path. I hope, we will do great job and come with exciting and new ideas. Follow us on the Cloud Computing Center pages and check how successful we are in completing all the above steps.