Thank You for a Great Tartu Event! The Summary
This years opening event in Tartu was a huge success. The presentations were very interesting, atmosphere was very open and constructive. We really enjoyed the event and thank all who came, who presented their ideas and of course our event sponsor Tele2.
This time we concentrated on the small scale business ideas and opportunities. We also had a change in our traditional event schedule. We replaced the Open Panel Discussion with a Workshop. Even to our amazement the workshop worked extremely well, generating even more fuzz, ideas exchange and networking effect than usual Mobile Monday Estonia meetings. We thank you for that.But first the presentation slides:
First to present was Andres Jõesaar, the Head of Corporate Sales and Content Services of Tele2 Eesti AS. The focus of his talk "Opportunities with Tele2: how to cash innovative ideas?" was on market situation of mobile content business and what kind of opportunities there are for small service providers. Andres gave a short overview on the structure of Mobile Market. What is the role of an operator and mobile service provider.
Andres Jõesaar, Tele2, Mobile Monday Estonia 23.03.09, Tartu
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Here is also link to the Tele2 Content Billing Client Protocol V4.31 specification for the people who would like to check out how to interface with an operator on technical level.
The second presenter was Veljo Otsason, one of the 5 Mobi Founders. He told us how Mobi started and got here in a presentation "Mobi - from student startup to leading mobile service company". The story of 5 random students meeting up at a university seminar, creating a small project group and succeeding with it, was just fascinating. Veljo also revealed what has been the growth of the company, what was and currently is their position on mobile services market.
The third presentation "Student business, mistakes we made" was given by Aigar Vaigu from AIESEC Tartu and a founder of Teadusmosaiik OÜ. He focused on the typical errors a startup (specially a student / rookie startup) makes, based on his own personal experience with startups. The main messages were these:
First, that a company and a business are two different but essentially interlinked things - in a startup one without another will fail. Second, don't try to figure out everything yourself - ask for advice. Third, you need to sell your product, without that, there is no product and for selling you have to know your customer and you have to have people doing the selling. Fourth - if you have an idea, give it a go, if you just sit on it, nothing will happen. Fifth - be persistent (also Veljos talk stressed that) and stay focused. And sixth - startuping is very very hard, but completely worth it.
Aigar Vaigu, Teadusmosaiik - Mobile Monday Estonia 23.03.09, Tartu
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Then we had a workshop, "Small-scale Mobile business: Ideas and Solutions". Instead of a typical open panel discussion we picked three topics, selected the experts for the topics, and people divided themselves up between the groups. After 20 to 30 minutes of discussions each group presented the ideas they came up with.
The guidelines and group 'leaders' were given in advance:
Priit Salumaa, Workshop - Mobile Monday Estonia 23.03.09, Tartu
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The results were great! The workshop generated much more networking and ideas exchange than we had expected. Also the people in the workshops were very happy.
The results of the "business building group" were presented by Asko Seeba, the CEO of DailyPerfect a fresh startup from Estonia. He made a quick presentation of a small mobile service idea describing the team needed to implement and market the idea and stressed out that the most important thing is the selling of the idea. He actually wrote a great summary about the work and it can be read on his blog.
The results of the "univesity symbiosis with commerce" group were presented by Ulrich Norbisrath. He is a post-doctoral researcher at the Computer-Science Department of Tartu University responsible for the PlayStation3 GRID and friend-to-friend computing research. The main points of this group were that universities should support PhD and MSc students to monetize their research ideas. There should be some kind of university related venture capital fund like the Fraunhofer in Germany. Also he writes a small summary about the results. He also encourages the Tartu start-up founders to start meeting up :) That we call a Mobile Monday networking effect.
The results of the "feasible / unfeasible mobile service ideas" group were presented by Vahur Mäe he is the Member of Board of AIESEC Tartu. This group discussed the main problems related to the mobile services market: like the size of Estonian market. The solution for that was to concentrate and find the niche ideas and services which would be more expensive. An example for that was the mobile voice aid services for vision-impaired people.
For me personally I found the most exiting two ideas of public services. First composing hundreds of volunteers like neighbor watch in Tartu, and the city government or police or medical services could use this SMS list to spread the word of hazards, missing people, stolen cars and crime in generally. This kind of list does exist already among the taxi drivers, but the idea could have much grander scale. The second idea was to have proximity based transportation information service. Where phone could sense instantly where are the nearest bus stations and guide you there, also providing you with the information for leaving buss and a ticket.
We thank you All for a superb Mobile Monday and will be waiting you to our next events!
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