The 25 master students of the Future Cloud Summer School experienced the wild nature of Northern Finland spending two weeks in Oulu and the Oulanka national park. During the first week of the summer school the students learned among others about cloud technologies and big data. At the public Cloud Symposium they heard from the challenges that cloud brings as well as the ways to build and keep users’ trust on cloud services.
Andra Lungu, a student majoring in Distributed Systems and Services, appreciates the summer school especially for facilitating the encounter between science/academia and business people/venture capitalists. “I am among the ones who have a pure technical background, so having the opportunity to transform my knowledge about scalable algorithms into profit seemed an excellent idea. Also, I would not trade the cross-cultural experience for anything in the world. I am now working with people I never thought I could even meet so it's wonderful to combine different perspectives and I hope we can come up with a successful product”, explained Andra on her expectations and experiences after a few days of the summer school.
After the hectic days of building their business ideas the students went hiking and river rafting at the Oulanka national park. As the students came from different universities the time spent on working in teams and socializing was much appreciated.
Winning business idea: the IoT test-bed Cloud:ception
For the last day the students flew to Helsinki to join the Smart Spaces Summer School. Before pitching their business ideas the students visited F-Secure, a partner of EIT ICT Labs. At their security lab the students saw real live view of malware found on the globe and were impressed by Sean Sullivan’s speech on digital crimes.
The summer school ended with business idea pitches by five teams. Cloud:ception, a cloud-based Internet-of-Things test bed, was chosen as best. The students’ idea is to combine the potential of IoT with cloud computing to provide a test-bed service to growing businesses in the IoT field. The team even had already a first customer acquired at the public Cloud Symposium the previous week, which the judges valued. "My motto is that always use all your chances, never waste an opportunity. This is how we were able to get our first customer even before we had really started to work on the business idea,” explained Mustafa Elbehery from the winning team.
Tua Huomo, the Action Line Lead for Future Cloud, was very satisfied after the hectic weeks. “It was great to see how committed the students were all the time to learn and work for their business idea. This was a really talented group of students and I was very proud of all the teams after the pitching session”.
