With 38 demonstrations from three innovation areas, 13 start-ups pitching, 300 visitors and coverage on the Finnish MTV3 evening news the Results Day Helsinki held on Thursday 4 December was truly a successful event. "I was proud to see the breadth of outcomes we are producing: brilliant students graduated, key European opportunities addressed, many innovations going to the market and startups being accelerated", stated Marko Turpeinen, Node Director for Helsinki.
Smart retail solutions raised a lot of interest
The Smart Spaces innovation area showcased a lot of cool things ranging from augmented reality app for tourist attractions, smart office chair and mobile search solutions for real 3D objects like buildings to different tools for virtual collaboration. Smart retail raised a lot of interest since many of the solutions are already in the market or piloted with real users. For example Bitsign, a way finding solution for indoors, is being piloted at the Kamppi shopping mall in Helsinki and Internet of Light at the Gant flagship store in London during Christmas.
"We saw concrete products and services that show how the best elements of e-commerce and physical retail stores can be blended together to create a new shopping experience. The services help the shopper to discover products and their information easily, and do easy shopping. Also the retailer gets more sophisticated analytics services than can be obtained in the web stores alone. These are the key elements when new retail concepts will be introduced to the market, " explains Petri Liuha, lead for Smart Spaces.
The Finnish MTV3 evening news did a story on how shopping is changing covering RetailerIN analytics tool, Bitsign and Internet of Light. See here (in Finnish)
Europe a trusted region for Cloud and sensitive data
In his keynote speech, CEO of F-Secure Christian Fredrikson discussed security and privacy in the cloud. Recent cyber-attacks, hacking of people's private data and content stolen are just few examples how vulnerable the cloud is. The development of a cloud that is safe and secure has thus become of the utmost important and the European companies have skills and competences to do the work. "Who else?" Christian Fredrikson asked.
"And that's why EIT ICT Labs has launched a High Impact Initiative (HII) and a call for SMEs as part of its Future Cloud action line. In simple terms, the HII will create a platform giving companies both large and small the ability to offer their customers the kind of trusted cloud products and services they just cannot at present," stated Tua Huomo, lead for Future Cloud.
See video of Christian Fredrikson's keynote
Student's goal never to have a boss
Students Adam Kapos and Berkay Taskin shared their experiences on the EIT ICT Labs Master School. Berkay, who has just graduated, talked highly on the Service Design and Engineering studies at Aalto University. He enjoyed working as an intern and doing his thesis in a Finnish start-up 720 Degrees. Berkay's long term goal is to move back to his home country Turkey and deploy the entrepreneurial skills he acquired during the Master School by starting his own company.
Adam is doing his second and final year of studies at ELTE in Budapest. He wants to do his thesis as a company project since he already has entrepreneurial experience and is a co-founder of SongArc. SongArc is a music game app, which is highly popular in number of downloads. But Adam's long term goal is clear - never to have a boss.
Surprise on start-up stage - a robot pitching
Thirteen start-ups from the EIT ICT Labs ecosystem were presenting themselves to the audience with 3 minute pitches. The big surprise was when start-up GIM, doing mobile robotics, was presented by a robot. Check out the video on EIT ICT Labs Facebook.
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