UHasselt mobile web-app

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Rutger

Hasselt University, where I study computer science, positions itself as the university where students bring knowledge in action. With that idea in mind, I developed a mobile web-app for Hasselt University students as part of my master theis. After all, quickly checking your schedule or the restaurant menu on your smartphone is pretty awesome! Departure times of the University bus stops, practical information about events taking place and opening hours are also included.

Check it out: m.uhasselt.be!

Student startup roadtrip to Berlin

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Rutger

Although I have read a lot about tech startups lately, there’s obviously nothing like diving into the real thing! That’s why me and a couple of friends are organizing a startup roadtrip to Berlin; which has a very active startup scene.

We created a web page with the details of our roadtrip at www.startuproadtrip.be. Copied straight from over there, our mission:

Visiting tech startups working on kick-ass products. We want to learn about the innovations they’re working on and discover the start-up culture: how they roll, what the challenges are, the best practices,… we want to know all about it!

Here’s a quick overview of the organizations we are going to visit:

Betahaus

A place anyone interested in startups and visiting Berlin should visit is Betahaus; a co-working place where many small startups and freelancers are working. They do a lot of events, of which the weekly breakfast (with startups pitching) and tour are on our schedule!

www.betahaus.de

Triposo

A startup building travel guides might not sound that spectacular, but just read this short explanation on how they do it:

At Triposo we make travel guides using algorithms. We crawl data from the web, apply some clever algorithms and fully automatically generate travel guides of high quality that cover the entire world.

That’s some fascinating stuff! However, I am very curious to hear how they turn this automatic approach into a usable, high-quality product.

www.triposo.com

SponsorPay

On SponsorPay’s website, they describe themselves as follows:

SponsorPay is the leading value-exchange advertising platform providing high-quality brand engagement for advertisers and driving user acquisition as well as content monetization for publishers of mobile and social apps.

Or more simply put, they allow app developers to monetize free apps and to acquire new users. An interesting approach they are working with is value-exchanging advertising, which for example allows a player of game to receive bonus points by watching an advertisement video or installing an app.

www.sponsorpay.com

Yetu

According to their website, Yetu is creating a new standard for Smart Homes. Also according to their website, they are in stealth mode. That means there’s nothing else I can share over here!

www.yetu.com

Aquilamus

When I emailed Magnus Resch, former Springstar managing partner and serial entrepreneur, he described his current enterprise to me as a company builder. Sounds fascinating, but also a bit vague. Make sure to check out the Aquilamus website, where you can read about their approach – which I absolutely love:

We don’t talk about projects or great ideas. We consider them business. Meetings start on time. We enjoy life. Here or somewhere.
We start internet companies. Around the world. This is our passion.

They seem to have a couple of interesting team members too:

The artistic souls. The exemplary. The rebellious. The disruptive. The unstoppable. The revolutionaries. The warriors. The relentless. The inspired. The ardent hearts. The daring individuals.

This is our team.

www.aquilamus.com

T-Labs

T-Labs is the central research and development unit of Deutsche Telekom. T-Labs recently completely overhauled its strategy; even appending “2.0″ to its name. The new approach means going from an ivory tower approach to integrating with the industry, supporting startups and working together with more partners. You can learn more about T-Labs 2.0 in this short movie:

www.laboratories.telekom.com

TEDxUHasseltSalon: Meeting of Young Talent

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Rutger

A while ago, me and my team organized a very large TEDxUHasselt conference with 500 attendees and speakers from all over the world. It was awesome. But what if we could do a conference with exclusively young people: both on stage and in the audience? With that idea in mind, we organized TEDxUHasseltSalon: Meeting of Young Talent.

A total of 9 speakers shared ideas on a broad range of topics: from a tech start-up and a hackerspace to saving African wildlife and plants and bacteria working together for a healthy soil. To find these speakers, we not only used our own network and research, we also invited anyone who wanted to apply to speak. Seven people did and three of them actually ended up on stage.

At the end of the event, I had the honor to announce that Wouter Vanoppré will become the new TEDxUHasselt president, because I will graduate in a few months and TEDxUHasselt is supposed to be a student-organized event. We celebrated the announcement by sharing an ad fundum of Jenever on stage. I will, however, stay strongly involved in TEDxUHasselt, focussing on strategy and speakers.

More pictures of the event can be found on the TEDxUHasselt Facebook page.

How to win a hackaton

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Rutger

I’ve recently won AppsForStudents, a hackaton where the goal was to create an application useful for students – in just one day! Together with my team member Bob van der Vleuten, I have won both the audience award and jury award.

Just a few months ago, I’ve also won the AppsForFlanders hackaton. There’s obviously no step-by-step process to win a hackaton, but I will share some tips.

Aim for impact

In the end, the goal is to create a useful application. A hackaton is not just a programming competition, it’s a lot more than that. When brainstorming about a concept for your application, aim for an application that could make a real impact on people’s lives.

At AppsForStudents, my team designed an application that saves students money and allows party organizers to attract more attendees. At AppsForFlanders, my team designed an application to help long-time unemployed people find a job. These things simply matter a lot more than saving a little bit of time or having fun by sharing pictures. At both hackatons, the jury mentioned they liked the winning application because it solves a relevant problem.

Work in iterations

Don’t start off coding something to hopefully end up with a great app at the end of the day. You have just one day and the chance this would work out is about 0%, as any software developer should know. After prototyping on paper, start with making a mockup design in Photoshop. This way, you make your ideas tangible and you can still alter the design without too much precious time lost. But there’s another advantage: you can now create an extremely simple “working” app that just contains the different Pohotoshop designs with clickable areas. In case everything goes wrong for the rest of the day, you at least have something you can show off at the end of the day.

After the Photoshopped mockups, start by developing high level functionality. Next, continue developing the functionality in iterations with increasing detail. Make sure to avoid having one perfectly working function and many other functions not working at all. A wizard-of-oz technique can also help a lot in quickly making it look like your application contains all sorts of functionality. While one team member is presenting, the other one can use a web app on his phone to trigger events.

Ask feedback

At the hackatons I’ve been to, there always were a lot of people walking around and checking out the teams working. Competing teams might not give a lot of useful feedback, but the organizers and sponsors of the hackaton might do. Ask them to test your app for a few minutes, ask them what they think about the concept, etc. They can validate your assumptions, or prove them wrong. Or even better: they might come up with a solution for a problem or an additional feature your application should include.

The pitch

I’ve heard it many times: half the work of a hackaton is done at the pitch at the end of the day. Therefore, you should prepare a clean, simple and short presentation and rehearse it. The jury has to be able to very quickly understand the application and how it makes an impact. A hackaton pitch is not a technical presentation for computer science professors, it’s a start-up pitch.
You’re application is very likely to contain a lot of bugs, so prepare for this by making a demo video. A live demo going all wrong is something you want to avoid!

The winning application at AppsForStudents

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get reductions or free drinks when you go to a party with a large group of people? This was the winning concept my team developed for the AppsForStudents hackaton.

We implemented a prototype for a mobile application that allows people to browse parties in the near future and allows them to buy tickets for a group of people. The larger the group of people, the better the deals.

One of the challenges was developing a fail-safe payment system, so you can’t trick the system by saying you’re about to go to a party with 100 people and then show up with just 5. Additionally, the entrance of a party should not become a chaos when a large group is validating their ticket and everyone should be able to buy a ticket, even when a person doesn’t have a smartphone.
Using SMS messages, a failsafe method was designed. One person configures the deal (= number of people and selection of party), after which a unique code is generated and every member of the group has to send this code to the system using an SMS message. The deal is happening only when the exact right number of people has sent a message. When this is the case, they get a confirmation message (which is also used for the ticket cost) to show at the entrance.

Sure, there still are some problems (mostly business related, as SMS services take a large margin), but the basic idea is here. We had the opportunity to discuss the system with a person of one the largest student fraternities who immediately came up with a number of solutions, such as working with an identification badge instead of an SMS message to charge the ticket price. One thing’s for sure: there’s potential. The jury and audience clearly agreed, so we couldn’t be any happier! Okay, maybe we would’ve been happier with a free iPad or Android tablet than a Windows 8 tablet

One more thing

I was recently invited for the The Next Web Kings of Code Hack Battle, a two-day hackaton in Amsterdam. Should be fun, but I don’t promise I’ll win again as this one is obviously A LOT larger

TEDxUHasselt 2012

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Rutger

On November 10 of 2012, the TEDxUHasselt conference took place. Me and my team worked for seven months on this conference, but the results were there: it was a truly awesome day. You can confirm this yourself by watching the videos or by checking out some pictures.

Right after TEDxUHasselt 2012, we’ve sent an anonymous survey to the attendees. We were very happy to read all the enthusiastic feedback. One of the attendees puts it as follows:

It was truly one of the most perfectly organised events I ever went to. Everything was great. The talks, the food, the venue, the drinks, the people, all of it. Even the smallest details were done perfectly.

Our speakers liked the event as well:

Speaking at TEDxUHasselt was for me a great experience. Although the team keeps telling this event is all about the speakers, they actually did all the work. It was the smoothest, most well organized event I have ever been to.

97% of the attendees plans on coming back next year and over 70% feels TEDxUHasselt made an impact on their life. Mission accomplished.

1st place Apps For Flanders Student Hackaton

Posted on September 15, 2012 by Rutger

Yup, that’s right: I won the Apps For Flanders Student Hackaton; in a team together with Jeppe Knockaert, Michael Vanderpoorten and Pieter Reuse.

The challenge was to create an app using on or more open data sets, provided by several partners of the hackaton. To make things even more difficult: my team had to work with VDAB data (VDAB is one of the largest job sites in Belgium). And because of legal reasons, the data of vacancies was not available; we had to work with just the data about the courses organized by VDAB and the location of the VDAB offices.

It was quite a challenge to come up with something actually useful, but we did it:

KnelKiezer is a web application that constructs a profile of the user and uses this profile to recommend a career (“You are a programmer!”) with too many open vacancies (“knelpuntberoep”). The user can immediately browse related courses at VDAB and check out at which VDAB office in his neighborhood he can take them.

So how is the profile constructed? After logging in with Facebook, the user has to judge several statements as true or false for him/her. Instead of asking obvious questions (“do you want to be a programmer?”) we ask questions about the user’s personality. This way, the user can discover careers he didn’t know about but that are a good fit for his personality. Using Facebook, we pull the location of the user to recommend VDAB offices nearby, but this could be extended to pulling relevant information for the career recommendation.

The application serves two purposes:

Getting people to discover and follow courses for vacancies that are hard to find the right people for.
Let people have fun (“haha, should be a programmer – lol!”) and share their result on Facebook, to have it end up by someone who could actually use the application.

Here’s our presentation for the 2 min pitch:

Three things I think we did a good job on with the presentation:

We immediately stated the problem we are solving. And by backing it up with real numbers, it is clear there is need for a solution.
We kept the presentation clean and simple so the viewer doesn’t get lost in massive lists of bullet points. Instead of text, we used as many images as possible.
We included a one sentence description of our application, making it easy for the viewer to have a clear idea of what we’re doing. It creates context so the viewer can easily understand the more detailed parts of our presentation.

Finally, I want to thank OKFNbe, iDrops, Flemish Government, iRail, IBBT en MultiMediaLab for organizing the hackaton. It was a lot of fun!

Announcing TEDxUHasselt 2012

Posted on July 17, 2012 by Rutger

After a small but very successful edition in 2011, TEDxUHasselt returns in 2012. The theme and date of this year’s edition have recently been announced:

Me and my team are hard at working making it the best event we can. But one thing is already for sure: TEDxUHasselt 2012 will exceed all your expectations.

Check out the teaser at www.tedxuhasselt.be.

Talking at TEDxSummit

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Rutger

When me and my team organized the first edition of TEDxUHasselt back in November 2011, we were limited to 100 attendees because of our license with TED. Since much more people applied for a ticket and many of them had to be disappointed, we decided to set up a livestream.

However, livestreams traditionally are very static experiences; they don’t quite give you that feeling of actually being at the conference. In cooperation with the Hasselt University EDM research centre, TEDxUHasselt developed an interactive 360 degrees livestream – as the first TEDx in the world – which provides an experience that goes way beyond the traditional livestream.

I had the honor to give a talk about our unique livestream at TEDxSummit, the TED-organized conference for TEDx organizers. Check it out:

How can I get this livestream at my event?

A lot of people asked us this question! Since it’s a Hasselt University research project, you can’t just rent one somewhere at this moment. However, feel free to share your contact information and we’ll keep you up-to-date:

iOS widgets done right concept

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Rutger

I like designing software concepts. Quite often I notice the software I use everyday is not perfect, so I spent I lot of time thinking how it could be improved.
For example: I really like my iPhone and iPad, but one thing that has always been missing is widgets. Apple did include something resembling widgets in iOS 5, but they are flawed:

There is only a weather and stocks widget available.
There is no support for 3rd party widgets.
Putting the widgets in the notifications list makes them limited in size.
If you (hypothetically) would have more than two widgets, the widgets would cover up the notifications.
Why on earth are they in the notifications list anyway?

Another important feature missing in iOS is quick settings. Quickly toggling wifi or bluetooth, changing brightness, volume,… that would be very useful.
Apple does include something similar to quick settings in iOS 5 but, again, it’s ﬂawed. There are some quick setting controls at the left of the multitasking bar but:

Multitasking and quick settings are mixed in one single multitasking bar.
The settings that can be changed are too limited. (music playback, screen rotation lock and volume)

Now, let’s see how this could be done better. Saw that last screenshot? I think there’s some screen real estate that’s wasted. The area above the multitasking bar is empty. It’s current functions are providing context and if you tap on it, the multitasking bar closes.

By putting widgets and quick settings in that open space, the problems with the notiﬁcations list and the quick settings are ﬁxed.

The advantages of putting the widgets above the multitasking bar are:

Multiple pages of widgets so the user can add as many widgets as he wants.
Widgets can be larger, and thus more useful, than the current widgets in the notifications list.
The quick settings widget can handle more settings than the few ones currently in the multitasking bar.
The notiﬁcations list and multitasking bar are now used only for what they are supposed to, which is a lot less confusing to the user.

The current functionality of the space above the multitasking bar can be retained:

A translucent background provides context.
Widget can never occupy 100% of the space so the user can still tap an empty spot to return to the app he was using.

It’s easy to imagine how widgets could be moved around or deleted. The user could simply tap and hold on a widget after which they start to wiggle and act just like app icons on the springboard. New widgets can be downloaded from a separate category in the App Store.

I think my solution would be pretty awesome. What do you think?

TED Active update

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Rutger

TED Active is now over halfway so I thought I’ll share some things I’ve learned:

TED Active is a good place to meet interesting people. I’ve met a ton of entrepreneurs, TEDx organizers or just random people you bump into. I’ve just had lunch with a Sillicon Valley startup founder, yesterday I was partying with a Dutch professor and a Belgian serial entrepreneur. Pretty cool.

The TED experience is a lot more than listening to talks. On Monday I visited Long Beach, where the main TED conference takes place. There are a lot of interactive stands to visit during the breaks, the attendees are divided into groups (e.g. The techies) to bring them together and stimulate conversation.
Besides doing a tour there also where a few people of TED sharing tips for TEDx organizers and we attended a few speaker rehearsals.

Indian beer is not good (at least the one I tried).

The Rivierra resort where the conference takes place is an amazingly beautiful resort, the cheap hotel I sleep is not.

Some talks were extremely impressive, such as Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation and Jennifer Pahlea of Code for America.

New year’s eve is an original theme for a party on February 29th. But celebrating “new year” at 22h30 is pretty lame.

And finally: Americans think EVERYTHING is amazing and awesome. Even queuing in line is totally awesome.