Do you want to have fun in summer?

eClub wants to work closer with students teams in the eClub Summer Camp. We want to help creating startups or finding for you an interesting industrial project. I have prepared a short questionnaire to find out your interests.

I am planning with all the eClubbers new Summer Camp.  During the summer vacations we want to put together a community of students of  Czech Technical Universities. We are envisioning to incubate teams having their own plans as well as students interested in developing projects in various fields of IT. The project you can chose from are coming from our industrial partners. The reason is simple, we want you to deliver something what is real, what is solving a practical problem. We also want to work with startupers, specifically early stages.

The eClub Summer Camp will be located in the campus of the CVUT Dejvice in very well equipped rooms. The CVUT MediaLab will support us with scholarships. We will invite many industry experts to help you with your projects. You will meet your peers and have a great fun.

Right now we need your help. We want to know your interests. For this purpose I have prepared a questionnaire with few questions. Fill it in, please and join us for a wonderful summer!  

eClub Summer 2014 plan

The big news is we are preparing a students incubator for the summer season. eClub will again organize meetings and a competition for the best projects, we will deepen our support to industrial projects. Join us at the opening presentation on Monday Feb 24.

The eClub main endeavor is supporting students of the Czech technical universities. eClub started three years ago with a series of educational and motivational presentations. We helped putting together more than sixty presentations. We organized competitions for best startup plans and thanks to the CVUT MediaLab, we have awarded the winners with almost two million CZK in scholarships.   

The Czech startup landscape is changing. There are many more new startups at universities, new incubators, there are more opportunities for new entrepreneurs. eClub mission is to make the university teams more successful, we want to help them in the earliest most difficult phase on the road to success. To achieve this, I believe, we need to work with the teams more closely, bring in more mentors and this is one of the main reasons why we are introducing the eClub Summer Camp. Our plan is to offer the teams a unique opportunity to work in an in incubator just in the middle of the university campus in Dejvice with the benefits of  meeting other teams, discussing with industry leaders, mentors and etc. I am really looking forward.

I am meeting many students and I have noticed they are frequently complaining about useless scholarly exercises ending in a drawer. Many have great ideas and want to work on them. Other want solving real industrial problems but do not have the opportunity to find what is really needed. To react on this needs eClub is supporting the newly created the Industry Cooperation Portal working with industrial partners. The goal is to offer a large choice of projects in one place and connect companies with students. If you do not have your own project choose some from the portal. eClub will in a form of a scholarship support students working on these projects in the eClub Summer Camp. Stay tuned and follow the eClub web for the details.  I can promise,  you will get the best working environment, you will meet with your colleagues, experts, mentors and enjoy working on your projects. Do not hesitate and plan to join us.

We will go through all these news during the first eClub presentation in this season next Monday Feb 24 at 6:00 pm. Come and join us you will learn more, you can ask questions. Follow us on the eClub pages. 

Big Data course at CVUT

Thanks to IBM support we will open new course in Big Data at CVUT FEL. The course will offer hands on experience in using the standard Big Data methods such as Hadoop. To exercise the hand on experience we have prepared several text processing tasks. 

Why is important to teach Big Data? The size of processed data is constantly growing. Internet portals, insurance companies, banks, GSM providers, health industry, automotive etc. are accumulating enormous data on their servers. The data contains lot of various information. The new methods for processing the data, understanding the data are being developed at similar pace. It is clear that companies without a large analytical departments and access to the Big Data will not be able to make good decisions. They will not be competitive. This is leading the companies to look for a new experienced people capable of processing and interpreting the data. The role of the university is to be ahead and react on these demand.

The motivation for this course is clear to IBM and the university too and this was the reason to join forces.

The objective of our course is to teach the students the Big Data basics and offer some hands-on experience. The course will focus on methods for extraction, analysis as well as selection of hardware infrastructure for managing persistent data. In the second half of the course we will show how to process streamed data, such as data from social networks. As exercise we will introduce standard analytical methods for text processing.

The course is split in to 13 weeks. We want to cover five main topics:

1. Hadoop overview - all components and how they work together. Install Hadoop, HW requirements, SW requirements, how to administer, introduce to the basic setup of our cluster.
2. MapReduce, how to use pre-installed data. The bag of words notion, TF-IDF,  SVD, LDA. 
3. HDFS, NoSQL databases, HBase, SQL access, Hive,  How to upscale-downscale HDFS. 
4. What is Mahout, what are the basic algorithms. Run random forest classification task using the Mahout algorithms.
5. Streamed data – Storm or InfoSphere, real time processing using the Twitter data, simple sentiment algorithm

We will put all the presentations on the web with public access, they all will be in English. You can follow us on the course web pages. Keep the fingers crossed for us, it will be a lot of work but we all are looking forward to play with the latest technologies.

eClub Demo Day

The eClub Demo Day starts on Tuesday at ERA Svet. Join us with your project. We will award scholarships in two categories: the best Technology Transfer (TT) and the best Startup Plan (SP). First place 30k, second 20k, third 10k CZK in both categories.

Everybody is welcomed see the conditions for participation. How to prepare:
First of all register, we need to know how many teams will compete to plan properly.

The Google presentation manager format is welcomed. Presentations with an Internet link will save us time while eliminating the hassle with PC or flash memories. We have Internet connected iPad, which you can share. Certainly, if you chose different format we will handle it too.

Some more advices. The presentation must not be longer than 10 minutes. Be crisp, explain the most important points only. The first page should contain the project name, the team members names and the category (TT or SP).

How to put together the best presentation? I usually recommend the NABC approach:

• Explain the NEED. What problem do you solve. Is it for industry in the TT category or for customers in the SP category.
• APPROACH. How do you suggest solving the problem? What technologies can be used, how complicated it is, what is your experience in solving such problem, what is the trick!
• BENEFIT. What is the benefit. The best approach is to quantify benefits. For example: how much faster is your solution, how much cheaper, is it easier to use. In TT what is the benefit for companies, in SP how would your startup benefit.
• COMPETITION. Tell us who is your competition, how they solve the problem today and how much better is your idea.

If all goes fine, we plan to announce the list of winners at the end of the Demo Day. Bring your friends to support you during the presentation. I am looking forward to see all of you on Tuesday.

Win scholarship for your disertation

The eClub competition will have two categories in this semester. The first, for the best startup idea and a new category for the best students project idea with an industrial impact. We will award scholarships in both categories.

The main eClub target is to introduce students to entrepreneurship. Show how to turn their ideas to successful products. There are basically two ways how to achieve it. Startups for those who are interested in business and technology transfer for those who are more interested in inventing new stuff and less interested in business. Both must have strong vision and need to keep in mind their customers. To invent a new product is a process of matching the product hypothesis with the customers. Startupers have to do all. The company receiving the technology will become responsible for the customer search. Startup is bigger bet but you can earn more money.

Our students impact and cooperation with the industry is still very small. We want to help. We have been so far funding statups and neglecting those who have good ideas but are less adventures. We will fix it in this semester. We are introducing a new category for students working on industrial ideas. It can be a BSc, MSc, PhD theses or any other school work, but it must be aimed at solving some practical problem. This means during the presentation you will have to prove that your idea is practical and useful for companies.

We will award projects in both categories. The first startup team or student work with industry impact will collect 30k, the second 20k and the third 10k. Contrary to many competition for the best theses we want to support students in both categories during the development, while working on the new idea.

How to enter the competition? Simply go to eClub pages, read the rules, and fill-in the registration. Prepare a ten minutes long presentation explaining the main idea. Do  not forget who are your customers and why they need your solution. Then show up for the dry run session on November 12th. Test your presentation skills and gain a valuable feedback from your peers.  Before the dry run, do not miss the opportunity to learn how to write a good theses or technical paper. Tomas Pajdla, an experienced researcher will share with us how to do it in the next eClub session. Join us! Do not miss your chance, there is nothing to lose!

CVUT Students get cheep phone with school timetable

CVUT student’s team has developed KOSeek showing the school timetable on your Android. You do not have an Android phone? Currently, Samsung is offering deeply discounted cell phones with preinstalled KOSeek at CVUT, Faculty of Electrical Engineering.

Last week we have officially introduced the KOSeek application during the eClub meeting. We also have released new version displaying the school timetable. We reacted to students demand - the timetable was the most requested feature by many users. In addition, we list peers attending the same course allowing easily starting a discussions, helping each other, etc.

Some caveats:  We apologise, but we support only the Faculty of Electrical Engineering (FEL) and Information Technologies (FIT). Some of the faculties and students are still using the older versions (2.3), but the latest version of KOSeek supports only Android 4.0 and newer. Based on the number of requests we do not plan the older versions support. There are some additional reasons, such as the 4.0 simplifies the tablet version development.

We were very lucky CVUT financially supported the development. Smart decision guys! These days we can observe the growing number of downloads. As of today, we crossed 10% of the total population of FEL+FIT.  We do not have exact numbers but we know that Android is the most popular smart phone operating system at CVUT. Currently, we are closely watching the discussion to carefully select the additional features we will implement. If you have any preferences or wishes send me an email or comment this blog.

Samsung is helping us a lot. This and the next week at the entrance of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Dejvice you will find a small exhibition of new Samsung mobile products. You can run KOSeek on any of the phones or tablets. You can also play with the very new Note 3 with connected Samsung watch. Pay attention specially to the latest watch, this is a device of the future. You can also enjoy the latest tablets and test the screen quality and agility.

Samsung has also prepared a great offer for those who still do not have an Android phone. Stop by and pick a leaflet with a discount code for S3 or the Node 3. Great devices!

Keep us posted, place a comment, request new features for KOSeek and stay tuned, we will introduce other new surprises.

New eClub competition

eClub is preparing a new competition. This time we want to support students of the Czech technical universities interested not only in creating a startup but also students interested in solving industrial problems.

So far eClub focused on early startups. During the five competitions we have attracted around fifty teams competing for scholarships. We have invested around 1 million crowns in scholarships. Some of the teams had a very short life. Some of the teams created a company and are on the market till today. Some teams had dramatically changed their business ideas but are still on the market.

The Czech startup scene is also changing. There are many different competitions supporting starting entrepreneurs. Some of the teams are joining them one by one competing for the prices to get support for further development instead of asking VCs to invest. Other teams are engaging to various contracts to fund their favorite project. Neither is ideal but the entrepreneurship is not an easy road. We want to differentiate, the eClub ambition is supporting technical universities students and the high tech projects. We are also want to support students long term, creating conditions for continuous development. Sometimes good stuff takes long to develop. Ideally we would like to support the top students researching new technologies and converting them to industrial products. There are two ways to a product:

• Startup
• Technology transfer

So far eClub was supporting just the startupers. This semester we want to make another step ahead and support also the technology transfer, support students working on great projects with clear industrial impact. Therefore we will have two categories in the competition:

• Startup projects
• Technological projects. 

We invite all students working on PhD, MSc or BSc theses or other school projects with a vision of a clear technological impact to the technological projects category. The startup rules will be the same. The rules for the technological projects will be also very simple. I will publish the exact rules on the eClub pages soon. The panel of judges will select the best projects based on the following criteria:

• Innovation
• Feasibility
• Industrial impact
• Special points for existing industrial partner
• Existing supervisor - extra points

To balance the university and industry views we will select the judges from industry as well as the university faculties.

The competition will have two stages as usual. First the entrants will meet during the dry run Demo Day planned for Nov 11, which is a chance to test the ideas in front of viewers and learning to mediate the ideas. To deliver the best results there will be a presentation by Tomas Pajdla about how to write a technical document giving you some hints on how to put the structure of presentation together. The second presentation will be shortly before Christmas presenting your ideas to a panel of judges.

The judges will select top three projects in the startup as well as the technological projects and the MediaLab will award scholarships for the three winners in both categories. The total of the prices will be in the order of hundreds of thousands. Talk to your friends and get ready. It will be beneficial and will help you in the competition if you get good supervisor and contact in the industry. If you are already preparing your theses think about the industrial impact. Everybody is welcomed! Our aim is to help shaping the ideas and people who are willing to take new challenges and develop new technologies.