Cambridge Innovation Center

I am again enjoying the smooth ride going down from Boston to NYC. I have visited the Cambridge Innovation Center. It is located next to the MIT campus. It occupies seven floors and the owners are describing it as a startup hotel. Indeed, it is hosting five hundred companies.

The proximity to MIT is attracting large number of technological startups. They share huge high-rise building. CIC provides the full infrastructure, furniture, electricity, connectivity, printers, free coffee, and snacks. The working open space offices are surrounded by meeting rooms of different sizes starting with one man calling booths. All are equipped with tables, phones and connectivity. Next to the door of each of the meeting rooms is an iPad for scheduling. Very useful, it allows you to find who is coming for the meeting, how long it is scheduled for etc. The cheapest space in the co-shared office costs $300 a person a month. The CIC managers do not need to advertise the demand is high. They are looking for extra space to accommodate even more companies. When the dot-com bubble burst the MIT owned building was almost deserted. This was the best time to rent the space at a great price and it is how the CIC started, twelve years ago. This was also the time when the new startups were emerging.

The attraction to build startpus is not only the Boston genius loci and the closeness to MIT. It can also be attributed to the technological advances. It has never been so easy to shoot a movie in HD professional quality. A band can put high quality recordings on the web and avoid the big labels to become popular. Everybody owns a PC and all the rest what you need to create an application is almost for free on the Internet. The easy access to technology is giving chance to everybody, it is democratizing, it is enabling and motivating to create something new. Of course everybody has the chance but not everybody will win, you need more than just the technology. The trick is to find the right idea to find the best strategy, be inventive, innovative. CIC is a good place to meet many people pursuing this path and start to socialize with them. This not only motivates but also helps to find new angles and views. Discussion and inspirational spirit this is the generic essence for making progress.

Jan a representative of Czechinvest for the east coast has arranged for me a meeting in CIC. The contact person was Christa, who takes care about the Czech starups coming to CIC. I was expecting a girl in oversized t-shirt, jeans and sneakers. To my surprise walked in through a glass door a real lady with an aristocratic touch. And I was right, I have discovered later during our long discussion that Christa is of an Austrian origin a descendant of the Czech kings. She gave me a very insightful introduction to the MIT business, what is behind the enormous success. First of all it is the concentration of the best professors. They can choose from the best students. The alumni are the best paid in the field and they are getting the top positions in the best companies. Also the MIT research results are attracting industry. Many worldwide companies are looking for the MIT researchers. MIT became an icon of the high technology design and many companies advertise their presence in MIT. The moguls buildings are nicely surrounding the campus. The top know-how and the concentration of the best researchers is attracting lot of funding. The large investments are visible everywhere in the campus. May be, the most amazing is the Gehry deconstructivistic building, very colorful and flashy? The building is also hosting the department of artificial intelligence with large spaces for experimenting. After that I had a lunch in a cafeteria. Inside is the building offering great space it is very fragmented with a lot of detail but very comfortable.

It was very valuable to see how many people try to create their own companies, what the spirit is and how it works around MIT. We are lucky Czechinvest has found Christa, the best person. The only thing remains, to get as many Czech companies to CIC as we can.

NYU-Poly Varick Street Incubator

I am sitting in a smoothly moving Amtrak between NY and Boston and it is a great time to share what I saw during my visit in the Varick Street incubator, NY. Beside offering space for startups, they do very similar things as we do in eClub. What is the difference: they are much more experienced, they have accumulated lot of know-how, they have developed the startup ecosystem with lawyers, mentors etc. Great place to learn how to proceed with eClub.


I have met with Steven who is running the NYU-Poly Varick Street Incubator. The incubator shortens the time from innovation to impact, and provides the guidance, expertise, and resources that start-ups need to grow into scalable ventures that bring economic growth to the greater New York area. Steven is running the incubator for eight years. They have two locations and all together they provide space and services for about 30 companies. I have visited the Varick Street part. The space is large and cheap and this is the main differentiators between the university and other pro profit incubators. One workstation place costs $400 a months. They allocate astonishing 100 square feet (10 square meters)  per person. The incubator was launched by the NYU-Poly and the City of New York. The initial grant was only $100K. The university does not take any equity in the companies, but still financially supports the whole operation. I have asked Steven why the university is not taking share. The situation is surprisingly very similar to our university. It seems to be too complicated to deal with university, we just operate as non-profit organization and it works well. Varick Street has many more companies requesting to joint than they can accommodate and this is their success metric. They also have to search for the industrial partners in the future to secure the future funding ads Steven. Very similar to eClub, we are also dependent on the industrial support.

As well as eClub they organize competitions. One of the very interesting forms is a short competition lasting for one week only. It is organized for students with one condition, there have to be students with technical as well as with business background in each of the teams. They face the same problem as us. Technical students love the technology but are weak in the business development. Business people are not that much emotionally attached to technology but have strong business drive. We need to learn how to combine these two worlds.

It is great to be located in NYC, says Steven. Compared to Silicon Valley NYC offers massive market opportunities, it is the main center of various businesses. What more once you get out of the building you are only few minutes away from Soho one of the most lively parts of NY.

It was a great meeting, I have seen the rooms filled with many geeks and I had a long talk with Steven. He had promised to serve in our jury in the next run of eClub. We have also discussed a possibility to Skype some of the presentations they give in NY to eClub in spring. We definitely will connect and discuss further possibilities. This visit was very interesting and motivational. Let's stay in touch with one of the busiest cities in the world.

eClub Demo Day

nine new teams have presented their business projects in eClub last Wednesday. The jury is selecting the top three projects. The winning teams will receive a scholarship and a mentor to jump start their business during this summer.

I have reported about the teams in one of the previous blogs. In addition we have welcomed also Babywebik team. This team has entered the competition in the last minute. They are together already for quite some time and based on the presentation they are getting close to start real business. I will not go to details about the projects and presentations in this blog, because jury is still working ...

Generally speaking the presentations got better. All the teams were much more focused. They had better explained the business ideas. The organization improved, we became also more efficient, everybody sticked to the time limit. The jury was giving great questions and comments. Overall the atmosphere was cheerful and productive. Lot of people interested in presentations joined us and they were discussing long after the end of the Demo Day.

We have started in 2011, it is only a short time. But I'd like to review how are we doing in the eClub? All together we have seen thirty teams and projects. We have prepared around forty presentations delivered by the top entrepreneurs in the country. We have started to stream to nine universities in the Czech Republic this summer. We have almost eighty recorded sessions in the video archive. We have attracted numerous students to the startup movement. Around 250 people were watching Karel Janecek, the most visited presentation. We have healthy number of visitors on our eClub portal and it si constantly growing. In cooperation with the Czech MediaLab Foundation we have provided financial support to wining teams in a total of almost one million Czech crowns. We work with several donors and I hope, the number will grow. I believe this is only the beginning. Tell your friends to join us too and enjoy the great spirit!

And how about the alumni? The first winner EasyWall did not survive too long but the members of the team created a new company MetaTV. After returning from Silicon Valley they have stepped on gas pedal and they really do good job not only recording the eClub meetings but helping other groups too. They are step by step building their startup. The next round winner Avocado is still pivoting the original idea in slightly different direction. The team is really dedicated to make things happened and I am sure, we still will see some good outcomes. City adventures is another team still hard working on their idea for taking tourists through cities and entertain them with short movies about the points of interest. I have heard a rumors: investors are interested in acquiring the them. Another interesting startup twist: the MallMania team. They have developed the original MallMania application but still trying to make it simpler before they get to the market. Alas, in the mean time they have derived from the MallMania a new mobile service for the Nejremeslnici.cz portal. This app is in pilot testing getting nice attention. I must not forget the InstantStorm duo, they have launched new free version of their product and they work hard with their mentors to offer payed version. They are great team counting the number of downloads in millions. Yes, we still have not generated a prosperous company, but we have set a trend and given the short track record I am sure we will soon see some of our alumni to perform well, creating new companies and new jobs.

The interest in startups movement is grooving in the Czech Republic and there are other signs about eClub securing its place in the newly forming startups landscape. First of all the media are interested to talk about us. Yes, startups are getting in and we have to take advantage of it. Try to search on google for CVUT eClub.

We have managed to attract an interesting bunch of experts to our jury and this is another proof of doing well. It became already a tradition Ondrej Bartos (Credo Ventures) is the chairman of the jury again. I am glad we were able to get to the jury some of the most startup influential people. Actually we were lucky Hubert Palan (Gooddata) and Jakub Nesetril (apiary.io) were in Prague and generous enough to help us. We also attracted the banking startup gurus Ladislav Dvorak (Sporitelna) and Petr Jaros (CSOB) who are both visionaries focusing on future solutions including startups. Pavel Zima (GM seznam.cz) and Stepan Burda (CTO centrum.cz) were representing the major Czech portals. We were also very happy to bring to the jury Radek Sazama (GM Fujitsu GM) and Zdenek Paskevic (Samsung.cz) representing the large global companies. Karel Obluk and Petr Ocasek (node5.cz) represented the startup enthusiasts and business developers helping generously to all teams. Dusan Senkypl (ePojisteni.cz) represented the Internet business segment. Nice team! Some of the jury members are helping us with funding and I am hoping other will chip in with their contributions too.

We are all waiting for the results. If you are interested join us on Wednesday May 23, we will announce the winners. Soon we will put the final presentation videos on the eClub pages, give it a try.

eClub Demo Day

We will run the eClub Summer Demo Day this Wednesday (May 9th). Teams will present their business projects and will compete for awards: scholarships and mentors. We managed to get together stellar jury and we are looking forward for this top event.

The presentations will take place as usual at the Czech Technical University at Karlovo nam. 13. See below the General rules and the Jury  rules for evaluating the projects. Currently, we have thirteen teams registered. Let's hope they all will show up and present great ideas.

How are we going to organize the event? First we will welcome jury and introduce all members. Then we will draw for the teams presentations order. Each presentation will be max 10 min and we will insist on being punctual. Few jury questions will be allowed but we will be strict in pushing all fast ahead. I am requesting all teams to show up well ahead and install the presentations on the local computer to save time while switching the teams. We need to keep jury busy! This time I am also hoping to have the results fast. We have larger number of jury members. Therefore the system will be simpler. Each member will select top three teams. The first team will get three, second two and third one point. The team with the largest number of points will be the winner. In case of a draw Ondrej the jury chairman will decide.

If you have a team, which satisfies the below conditions and you want to compete you still have a chance to register and join us. All of you who are interested in watching the competing teams come and join and bring your friends with you. Everybody is welcomed!

General rules

eClub is planning to award the first three teams with a three months scholarship for the academic summer semester 2012.

• Student members of the winning teams will receive a monthly scholarship of between 5-15 thousands Kc. 
• There has to at least one student of a Czech University or high school in the team.
• Maximum two students in the team will be awarded. 
• We will not allow winners of other startup competitions (1-3 place).
• eClub will try to get a mentor for each of the winning teams. 
• The scholarship is awarded to support work on the proposed project during summer. The mentor and the eClub will monitor the progress. 
• Teams receiving the scholarship must document the progress (github, code.google, blog, ...)
• eClub reserves the right to suspend the scholarship if the awarded team will stop or suspend the work on the project.
• The scholarship suspension will be a joined mentor and eClub representative decision.

Jury rules

The jury will evaluate the proposed projects based on the 5 P of an investment rules:

• Quality of a problem: how big is the market need of the proposed idea
• Potential: how big is the potential target market size
• People & Passion: who are the founders, what are their abilities and how big is their commitment
• Payment: how well is defined the monetization of the proposal
• Prove it: how well is defined the basic idea, what are the essential steps to turn the idea to a business, presentation quality.

Startup Weekend Prague

I have spent this weekend with around fifty enthusiast at the Startup Weekend in the new Node 5 incubator in Prague. I have enjoyed company of many interesting people and learned about their interesting startup projects.

Startup Weekend is a continuation of the very successful IPO 48. This time under the command of Petr Ocasek and his gang. Thanks gays for this event. It brought together many different people with different interests and background, from different locations or countries they have gathered together to work on new interesting ideas. I have served as a mentor. This role has one advantage, I get in touch with all the participants and I can learn what they are enthusiastic about. Let me give you a short description of the teams and projects:

KiddieQ App  is an iPad game for pre-school kids. The game tries to estimate the kids school maturity. The interactive game makes the kids decide what is right, what is left, what are the colors etc. Main point is, kids are not aware of being tested. The app generates a report at the end assessing their maturity. The team seems to have the right expertise, Orin is a psychologist and Martin takes care of the graphical design. On top of that they have two programmers. The trick will be to create a game interesting enough for kids, which will in the same time provide good data for reliable tests.

Drawing pog attracted seven people to work on a web based drawing package. Michael from Bochum is the inventor, who has programmed almost the whole app in JavaScript. At Startup Weekend he has put together a team helping him with purifying details, testing the market, inventing differentiating features, monetization schema etc. At this point the unique factor is the way the lines are put on canvas. No straight lines. The app imitates hand drawing giving the lines a touch of uncertainty, looking very naturally on the screen. 

Blame it on the fish is an app and a team of four. They have a very interesting idea resulting in a nifty application. You would have notice them in the room immediately. They had an aquarium with a fish on the their table. Users can ask in the web app about their future and the fish will decide for them. A camera connected to the server is following the swimming fish and depending on its movement an answer is generated. Forget the oracle, ask the fish. Nice app. @biotf

SunsetHill team has attracted eight members, the largest crowd of the Startup Week. Even if the idea is not very optimistic in its nature. Vaclav has suggested creating an on-line pet cemetery. The app lets the users create a memento for a loved pet. The grief can be shared with friends also by Facebook.

Four people make the BarkBuddy team. They say: your dog deserves friends too. It will be an HTML 5 application taking advantage of geo location finding where to walk the dog out. Practically you turn on the app, you'll find all the dogs around and you can get in touch with them, discuss the location, dog food etc.  They have done an extensive customer search, they questioned 35 people. 15 questioned had smart phone, connectivity and have express their interest to connect with other dog owners. What more they were also OK to pay for the service.

Three people stared with the idea of collecting the medical information over cell phones. Soon they have pivoted to a business card exchange app. The business model is simple. Users will create a business cards and the team will collect money for each exchanged card. Business card customization, fancy design will be also available for a small charge. They want to achieve the variability by paying for passing collected card to third person.  The initial feedback is very good. It is very similar to eClub CloudCardz.

An article a day is a one-man show project. Luka is designing an app to learn foreign languages. The idea is to link interesting articles to a web. The app will rank them by difficulty and serve one a day for reading. The application is for people who already have basic language skills. The supports translation too.

SingSomething is a four members team. They got inspired by smashing success of DrawSomething. Great idea. I am sure, there are other teams in the world already working on the same idea. Lets see who will be the first on the market. 

CssHat has four members on the team. They have demonstrated a wonderful performance. Over night they have developed a Photoshop plug-in generating a css from a Photoshop drawing. Nice job. The app aims at Macs an will be offered through App store. Watch out. 

CrowdStudies met at startup week first time. They have a project trying to solve old problem, break the barrier between students and teachers. They are designing an app for publishing and commenting courses presentations and study materials. The audience is clear, the idea is clear, but the solution is difficult. I keep my fingers crossed and wish them success, this app is really needed. 

If you read this and are part of the team send me a URI to update this blog.

3c Projects

we had a great meeting on Friday discussing several projects in the CTU Cloud Computing Center. The projects are ranging from Android to Internet SaaS application. Some of the projects are just before starting pilot testing other are still in a research phase.

Martin has presented his application developed with a portal nejremeslnici.cz. This portal helps their customers find mainly small craftsmen companies offering household fixes, but sometimes even a construction company for building full houses. Currently the craftsmen are job biding in the evening when they get to their computer. The new app will allow immediate reaction, sending an offer as soon as the customer requests a service. The application runs on Android and interacts with the portal using REST API. The messaging is based on C2DM Android protocol.

Tomas has explained his location verification application. He is developing a GSM finger prints technology to verify a GSM user’s location. In other words the user claims a location and the algorithm verifies it. Verification works without GPS, finger prints require only the GSM cell towers, therefore all works indoor as well as in cities within little streets and between tall buildings.

Vratislav originally started to develop a helpdesk application, but soon has found much more interesting app called MallMania. He is addressing teen aged girl fashion freaks and provides a simple platform letting them exchange pictures showing what they wear today. Currently, he has a working version using the Facebook to spread the information. The application is still very simple and will be used to verify the customer interest before he proceeds.

Martin worked during his studies in several professional companies as a freelance Java developer. He is using his experience designing a professional programming framework. As a sample application to test the technology he has again chosen a helpdesk. The whole application uses the server, fat client architecture. The server part is in Java running on GAE. It is designed around Spring framework with REST templates for API. The fat client leverages GWT. He has spent a long hours orchestrating all these technologies together. He had to go over many undocumented and always changing details and I am really interested to find out what are the advantages compared to old-fashioned but much simpler solutions based for example on Wordpress or other simple frameworks.

Tomas #2 and Tonda are for almost one year developing a simple application for mobile devices allowing users exchanging business cards. CloudCardz will allow fast exchange of the basic data residing on the Internet. The acquired contacts are listed and ordered alphabetically or in time. Important contacts can be moved to the Android contact list. Currently, graphics needs some improvements before starting to find the customers and their needs.

The purpose of our meeting was to put all the developers together and exchange the experience and help each other. We are accumulating lot of experience, we need to documented it and spread it to make the development of our future applications simpler and faster. I will soon announce next meeting. Come and join us in our effort. 

New eClub Projects

last Wednesday we have met in eClub to see eight new business projects and proposals. You can review the short annotations in this blog or watch the presentations. We follow up next Wednesday. Lucie Havlickova will review the presenters style, skills and advice them how to better communicate their ideas.

We always organize the dry run presentations for the eClub competition. The purpose is to give a chance to the teams to test and communicate their idea to the audience. This time we have attracted eight new teams. You can read below the short annotations or thanks to Vojta and his Meta TV watch the presentations. Lucie promised to watch them too to help improving and pointing out the major presentation problems. She will join us next Wednesday. Join us too to find out how to give a great presentation.

Plans and awards.

The best news is: new teams are emerging. Overall the quality of presentations is improving. Students are discovering the problems and advantages of trying to convert their ideas for useful products. The final presentations are scheduled for May 9.

Currently, I am busy trying to attract potential local and overseas jury members and mentors. The list of jury members has to be complete and announced well before the final presentations.

Even more challenging is raising money to fund the winners. I am discussing with major Czech companies to make donation to the MediaLab Foundation - our source of funding. Keep the fingers crossed. The more money we will leverage the more teams will be funded during the summer. Even if you have not participate in the dry run, you can still sing up for the final presentations. Try to get the summer scholarship. Summer is the best time to convert your dreams to something useful, our mentors will help you.

Check our web pages, I have managed to update the whole eClub site. All the presentation videos are on line. I have made some small changes in the program. Join us!

New projects

The InfyAD team has opened the session. They have presented a simple system estimating analytics for outdoor, billboard advertisements. They want to help advertisers to choose the best location for their ad and particular customer segment. Good idea!

The CitySmartGo has presented a very interesting idea with an international focus. An auction-based system finding cheaper and smarter transportation, such as taxi, cab or shuttle. It will be a free mobile and web service for travelers and transport providers matching the best quote-price.

The project ServerSense is a new web server logging and load controlling portal. The team is aiming at individuals and small providers. Their market differentiation is integration of many different tools for managing and monitoring web servers.

Techambition is an project focusing on technical disciplines as chemistry, electrical engineering, machinery, civil engineering and science in general. The innovation is graphics and animation presenting the basic principles.

Avoid hangover use the DrinkMachine – no, this is not the point. The DrinkMachine team has very ambitious plan to design and market machines serving drinks in bars around the world. Their product will serve drinks faster and cheaper than the bartender. Sorry to say, I will miss the  bartendress

Bzumo is a very committed team with a very interesting project. They try to improve the ease and speed of accessing information from various Internet services. Effectively, they want to bypass the Google search results and jump directly to the information page of the service provider, such as wikipedia, yahoo, ...

Very useful, very simple! TransportAlarm is a small mobile application. It wakes you up before reaching your travel destination. It provides simple scheduling tools.

MindSpy is a visionary project maybe even a research proposal. It uses biomedical signals, such as EEG etc. With the help of AI algorithms many different information can be derived for users. The presentation suggested many applications specifically for mobile phones. Watch the presentation.