Last events reviews: BetaGroup & DMF

As a first article on Getyoo’s blog, we thought it would be interesting to write about the last events we’ve participated in for those who weren’t there to get a grasp of what it was.

Recently we had a really exciting week for Getyoo because we had to present the project at two big events: the BetaGroup on October 21st and the DMF (Digital Marketing First)  on October 22nd.  Doing two presentations in a row, followed by the networking that comes with it, was a bit hectic but we were so happy to see the audience reaction and to hear people thoughts about what we’ve been into that we didn’t care at all about being exhausted.

Betagroup presentation:

The BetaGroup describes itself as “a group of 1.500 Web Entrepreneurs in Belgium passionate about Internet, Software, Mobile Technologies and Online Media.” They aim to connect Entrepreneurs, Creative Thinkers, Software Developers, Digital Marketers, Web Designers, Web Agencies, Advertisers, Publishers, VC’s and Business Angels to innovate together. As they want to provide a platform for people to meet each other, present their projects and foster new collaborations, they organize free monthly meetings at the ULB.

That BetaGroup meeting was exceptionally held at the Mirano for the launch of Café Numérique which is a free weekly event happening every wednesday at Mirano aiming to be a convivial place for exchange and discussions between people, newbies and experts from the new technologies and digital world.

For this short presentation, we’ve asked Marc Zinga aka “Kam the peas” from the pop/funk band “The peas project” to help us. We did a kind of small theatre play with Marc playing his own role. Check out the video here (it was recorded from a mobile so the quality isn’t that good). Our little actors play received a warm welcome from the audience. We had a really positive feedback and it made a good impact on people as we presented our concept in an unusual way. Usually people at BetaGroup are presenting by doing a live demo of their product or a slideshow but we decided it would be more entertaining to present it as a small dialog between two people (Marc and Geoffroy, co-founder of Getyoo). It was also very funny for Getyoo’s staff to see Geoffroy, who had no experience at all in acting, on stage playing his own role. You should have seen rehearsals, we had a good laugh praticing for the presentation ;-)

Another entertaining presentation that night was a Microsoft Surface demo of the Belgian Beer Café Application. Microsoft surface is a multi-touch computer that responds to natural hand gestures and real-world objects. It looks like a table with a touch screen on which you can place objects and interact with them. The Belgian Beer Café is an Application around Belgian Beers like Hoegaarden, Leffe & Stella Artois that will be used in some Belgian cafés. People will be able to place their beer on the surface and the application will recognize which beer it is and give people information related to it. They’ll also have the possibility to post on twitter or share stuff on other networks such as facebook directly from the café. Check out a demo video here.

To conclude about BetaGroup we can say that because user benefits have always been in the center of our priorities, it was interesting to hear people thoughts, ideas and questions about Getyoo. Face to face discussions are really helpful to understand better what people needs are in order to try to answer to them in a useful way. Thanks to BetaGroup events, we’ve met experienced people coming from different fields who are always keen on helping and giving advices. Amongst them was Charles E. Crouch, an eBusiness course lecturer teaching at the Boston University in Brussels. He gave us advices on how to present our project in an effective way and gave us tips on how to make a presentation remembered. We’d like to thank him for his help and useful advices! We’ve learned how to behave on stage, grab the audience’s attention by surprising them and showing something different than what they’re expecting. We have also understood how hard it was to try to go straight to the point in 5 minutes and we hope we succeeded in doing that. Please, don’t hesitate to let us know what you thought so that we can get better for the next one!
Check out the pics of BetaGroup 13# on picasa or watch a small slideshow on the event page.




DMF:

The DMF presentation was in front of a totally different audience with people involved in communication, marketing and advertising. Thus, the speech was longer and more orientated towards advertising and business models. We had been invited by Emakina to present in their Emakina Academy 2015. Again, we would like to thank them for having invited us as we met so many interesting people and learned a lot.

The Emakina Academy 2015 event is described by Emakina as followed:
”Interactivity has already taken an important part of marketing budgets in the past decade. Today developments in data storage, transmission, connection and interaction hold out the promise of new interactive tools to create multi-dimensional relationships between customers and brands. How will interactivity manifest itself in the coming years? What will interactive marketing look like? And what will it mean for customers and for companies? Whether you realize it or not the possibilities of interactive technologies for marketers are endless. The 19th Emakina Academy Session invites you to discover those possibilities and capture what could by the highlights of interactive marketing in 2015.”

There were very inspiring presentations during this session which consisted in four workshops to discover an exciting future that closely interlinks the physical and virtual worlds and have a look on the new innovative ideas for the future. The presenters were: Sophie Graillot (Digital Strategist - Emakina/Think), Cédric Brandelard (Experience Designer - Emakina/Think), Rolf Verlinden (Managing Director - Keystone), Toon Coppens (Founder of Touchatag, an Alcatel-Lucent Venture ), Geoffroy Simon & Alexis Tinel(Co-founders of Getyoo)

The intro presentation “Imagine 2015” “There’s no real life, no digital life: just your life” made by Sophie Graillot (Digital Strategist) & Cédric Brandelard (Experience Designer), both from Emakina/Think, pointed exactly what we were going to talk about. They played a very nice video summarizing the next evolutions within the interactive communication field such as Augmented Reality, the concepts of Internet of Things and being connected in the real world, mobile payments, etc They gave a nice overview of different projects and applications already existing now which prefigure what will happen in a near future.

The concepts of Ubiquitous Computing and Internet of Things are way too wide to be discussed in this post so we will address those subjects in a later post on this blog. If you want to get a quick grasp of the idea and see what projects are being developed at the moment, we’ve selected a few links of innovative stuff. Below are a few articles and examples of projects bridging the gap between real and digital life:

The concept of Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery - creating a mixed reality.

Wikitude World Browser presents the user with data about their surroundings, nearby landmarks, and other points of interest by overlaying information on the real-time camera view of a smart-phone.

Two articles from Read Write Web listing and describing the Top 5 Web Trends of 2009 in the Internet of Things and 5 Companies Building the “Internet of Things”.


Pachube: Store, share & discover realtime sensor, energy and environment data from objects, devices & buildings around the world. Pachube is a convenient, secure & scalable platform that helps you connect to & build the ‘internet of things’.
An Analysis of Pachube’s Open Source Platform

We hope you’ve found those interesting. If you like reading about the Internet of Things, stay tuned as we will be posting more articles on that subject soon.