“Our brand, Wayra, is an institutional asset that promotes all areas of the business. That is our vision, and our objective is to focus on more mature startups that make us grow and keep the growth within Telefónica,” said Wayra Co-Founder and Telefonica CIO Gonzalo Martín Villa in Madrid yesterday.
Bulgarian-born Ingen.io, which uses Big Data analytics to unveil context in unstructured text, has announced that they have been selected as one of 20 startups for the Building Global Innovators accelerator.
The Lisbon-based program divided the startups for their fifth batch into four target verticals of five – Medical Technologies and Health IT, Smart Cities and Industrial Technologies, Enterprise IT and Smart Data, where Igen.io are competing, and Ocean Economy. An intensive acceleration program, which started on July 21st, will culminate in the selection of one startup from each group for up to €500k in investment from Caixa Capital and over €1 million in in-kind support.
“We don’t see [the financial support] as the biggest benefit,” Ingen.io COO Martin Linkov commented, “It will be nice of course, but I think that the recognition and the synergies we can form with MIT Portugal and Boston and from there with potential US clients will far outweigh the monetary prize in the long run.” His company, which passed on an acceleration opportunity in Bulgaria, is currently part of the Wayra CEE accelerator in Prague.
Tough competition
Judges at the fifth BGI accelerator program, sponsored by MIT Portugal, had the challenging task of selecting five startups for each of their four categories, among 130 applications from 31 countries, including China, Nigeria, Turkey and Ukraine.
“[This] was a huge challenge, considering thehigh quality and record number of submissions received, making the job of the jury ever more stringent – the jury had to conduct close to 50 interviews to make sure that BGI was picking the fittest teams” said Prof. José Paulo Esperança, head of the centre for Entrepreneurship at ISCTE-IUL – Audax and one of the judges.
“This year we carried out an audacious realignment of the accelerator (BGI’s) target verticals and were expecting a drop in applications,” BGI Executive Director Gonçalo Amorim commented. “Namely we launched a brand new track dedicated to Ocean economy, an area where we are looking at a ten year horizon impact. We were surprised to see this year’s accelerator candidates consistent with the previous editions.”
Although 47 teams were invited for a video interview with Amorim, Ingen.io’s team was fairly optimistic of their success: “Numbers don’t scare us, after all, we work with Big Data,” Martin Linkov said. “It doesn’t sound humble, but we were expecting to make it. We choose very carefully the competitions we enter and prepare extremely well.”
A winning concept
Ingen.io offers an unorthodox automated approach to analyzing unstructured text, based on World Knowledge Graphs and mimicking the neurological processes of the human brain. Their solution maps out all entities (people, companies, products, etc.) in a text, whether they are explicitly stated or implied, outlining their relationship type and weight of importance within the text.
Normally, this is done through manual analysis and is a key added value in non-automated products offered by companies in media monitoring and analysis, online publishing and contextual advertising. Ingen.io will offer to streamline this process at a freemium model – charging service providers and companies for access to the API and offering free unlimited web access for personal use. They aim to have their first paying customers by September of 2014.
In the meantime, juggling competitions and two accelerators is taking its toll on the team of two. Martin Linkov and his partner, CEO Atanas Youroukov, admit that it would be hard to find the balance between the competition and their product: “Events are nice and useful as they might be, unfortunately, they are still a form of distraction, a disturbance in the rhythm. The hardest part will definitely be focusing on the product development and devoting time to BGI simultaneously.”
Photo credit: LingoutOur one-line pitch is…
Lingout is a mobile app localization and translation platform for developers which significantly accelerates and simplifies the whole process.
Introduce your team, and tell us one interesting thing about each member. We are…
Michal Lenik – founder and CEO and visionary executive with entrepreneurial spirit and passion for technology startups. He has rich experience in product development, project management and customer support. Marek Szanyi is a head developer of our desktop app. He is a C++ and Java guru. Furthermore, he developed android apps for Eset and Slovenska Sporitelna bank. Adam Ciganek is a head developer of our web app. He is Ruby on Rails and a JavaScript specialist with more than 10 years of experience.
We received our initial capital through…
We were self-funded for almost a year and a half and then we got into the accelerator Wayra CEE in Prague.
The real pain about starting a business in Slovakia is…
Instead of making entrepreneurial life easier, especially for startups, the Slovak business environment has worsened in the last two years. It took us almost a month to start our company.
The person that inspires us is…
Everyone who decided to do something with his/her life, wasn’t afraid of taking a risk, solved painful problems and now is mentoring young entrepreneurs to succeed in doing the same.
The one app/service that we couldn’t live without is…
It’s hard to name only one app because every app we use is very important for us. If we had to choose only one, it would be BitBucket.
The one thing we would save from our burning office is…
Ourselves. We have all data in the cloud, and hardware is replaceable; but Lingout without us wouldn’t be Lingout anymore.
The worst piece of advice we ever got was…
“Do not look for investors, do it on your own.”
The one thing that will make us quit is…
We don’t accept failure. If somehow Plan A or Plan B didn’t work, Plan C would. But we never quit.
Our inside joke is…
“If I don’t do it until tomorrow, please kill me.”
You might not believe it, but we…
Like walking the road nobody has walked before and we believe that nothing is impossible.
We’ll call ourselves successful when…
When Lingout becomes a standard for mobile app localization all around the world.
The startup we really want to see on inventures’ Startup Pick is…
Staffino – an excellent app for getting feedback on staff.
Check out Lingout.com to get in touch.
Pioneers Unplugged rolled into Prague again 24 April for their fourth visit, with a twist. The event, which is partnered with scene stalwart TechSquare, was actually hosted in the Wayra Academy as “shared” amongst the community. This event is just indicative of the startup scene here in the Czech capital – there are close relationships amongst the players, and this genuine camaraderie is a win-win for everyone.
Petra Hubacova, who is also a Pioneer’s Ambassador, and her team from TechSquare have expertly overseen the event, and it’s fair to say it gets more slick (and more catered!) with each incarnation.
Innovation in banking
A spokesperson from Raiffeisen Bank presented first, discussing how they, as an organisation, are seeking to incorporate innovation into their business unit. The bank currently solicits for one page of ideas and ultimately chooses projects to experiment with to the tune of one million Czech crowns (or 36.000 euros). The bank has been very “forward-thinking” in the choosing of projects to pursue – a new product whereby customers can pay for extra and better banking services, and a product that helps people choose real estate. Someone at Raifeissen needs to google “innovation”. Raifeissen were also a sponsor of the night.
This is a drone, or one “of these crazy things flying around”
Next was the very entertaining drone presentation by Tomas Meiser – think Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride crossed with a mad scientist. Meiser is a researcher and developer from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Charles Technical University in Prague. He was discussing other uses for drones in in the 21st century beyond those of the military. Perhaps someone should tell the US Government. UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) can also be used in mapping, transportation, 3D modelling, inspection, and filmmaking, for example. Meiser believes that now the military has had its turn, the startup world should get on board with drones and develop better real world applications for the technology.
Current limitations for drone tech are electrical and legal. The biggest hurdle is battery life and that will hamper wider implementation until it is overcome. Ironically, Meiser himself said he was scared of, “all these crazy things flying around”, and he believes that drone tech will be best utilised for the farming industry in the near future as opposed to built-up areas where they can hit people, power lines or, as he warns, “get shot down by gangs.”
Getting medieval on the gaming industry
The main speaker for the evening was gaming developer Daniel Vavra, the creative director of Warhorse Studios which is making the most ambitious medieval RPG ever. Vavra (creator of Mafia and Mafia 2) was excellent in outlining his gaming studio’s journey and how they hacked their own industry. Daniel and his co-founder detected a hole in the market and low competition in the Czech Republic, so the plan was simple – get funding from a VC or a publisher, develop a prototype game to sell to a publisher, develop the game, establish new IP, then develop sequels. The plan quickly came unstuck when they realised you can’t start a company without money, and you can’t get money without a company. Fortunately a friend of a friend was looking to invest and the project started in 2011.
Over the next 18 months, Warhorse struggled with development, funds and publishers, and it wasn’t until early 2013 that they had a fully functioning prototype. Problem was, they still needed more money and a publisher. Publishers liked the team but there was a general thinking that gaming on next generation consoles was over and nothing but free-to-play MMOs on tablets would sell. Warhorse needed validation for themselves and their nervous investor. By this time though, the crowdfunding landscape had developed around them and so they took their game to Kickstarter. They wanted 300.000 pounds and validation, they got 1.1 million pounds and 35.000 people offering them money was pretty good validation.
Being able to self-publish meant that they could do everything by themselves, with a little PR help along the way. Vavra sees crowdfunding as the death of publishing as we know it, and he seems very proud of the fact that his studio managed to prove the naysayers wrong and end up exceeding all expectations. “We were pissing in the wind, and it worked for us, everyone we met along the way wrong. We just kept going our way,” said Vavra.
Life’s a pitch
Finishing off the night was a pitch by Brno-based startup Citis.cz. Founder Tomas Kroner pitched and unfortunately failed to grab the audience’s attention. The app allows users to see special offers and discounts around them on an interactive map. Businesses send the deals to the server and they are pushed to the map, with Citis taking 1-15% commission. It seems like a good idea and there were questions ready to be asked, but time was up, and unfortunately for Kroner there was the pressure of the mountain of pizzas behind him and a hungry audience.
Pioneers Unplugged has hit upon a nice formula as the little brother to their main offering of the festival, and it seems to be getting tighter and brighter. The evening was the most entertaining Unplugged event in Prague yet, there were lots of laughs, and Meiser and Vavra were definitely worth the entrance fee.
