Global Challenge to High Tech Startups...Last Call to Action

Startupbootcamp HighTechXL Pitch Day EuroZone Eindhoven September 20th from StartupbootcampTV on Vimeo.

In the studio to get the word out about our pitch days in Eindhoven on September 20th. Thanks to all who helped us out so far. One final push to get the word out as we approach the home straight.

Summer Pitch Days Are Coming to HightechXL

Global Pitch Days on August 29th & September 3rd – read on for details

The recent hot weather is no distraction for the great conversations we've been having with teams applying for the Startupbootcamp HightechXL accelerator program.

We're talking with teams all over the world and encouraging potential applicants to sign-up early. Now we’re announcing a chance for teams to pitch to a panel of HightechXL mentors – the perfect way to test whether you’re ready to accelerate your company – and your team.

Bart Answers the FAQ's

In preparation for our latest program ”Startupbootcamp HightechXL” we’re starting a series of Online Pitch Days targeted at high-tech companies in the early stage of their development. Our mentors are hand-picked from our extensive network of both local and international mentors. They have one thing in common – they’re the very best in their field. All mentors are active entrepreneurs with a wide range of skills and experience. They know what it's like to start a new high-tech company.

Bart Lugard (above) is in charge of our global search for teams.

"Of course, in high-tech, we’re looking for strong teams that have more than just an idea. The winning teams will start the program on November 11^th in Eindhoven with a proof of concept or technology proof of principle. Ideally, they should have a demonstrator or a working prototype…something we can see. Paper plans are rarely enough.

We have only software. Can we still apply?

"We have had enquiries from companies who are focussing their efforts on software only. Yes, our high-tech acceleration program may also be relevant to your company. Probably the software somehow enhances the performance of a piece of dedicated hardware or the supply chain. It may also make the object easier to use; like in a vehicle, a specialised sensor, or a robot."

What happens in the first three months of the program?

It is important to understand that during the three months we will not focus on developing your technology any further. Instead, we will use the time to fine tune the business model, validate the customer base, engage with lead customers, sign up pilot projects as well as prepare a world-class investor pitch for Demo Day in February 2014. Others have described our program as building a real-world business strategy.

So when can we pitch to you guys?

We’re announcing the first full day pitching sessions on August 29^th and September 3^rd which are open to any teams that meets our selection criteria. Interested in pitching? Here’s the link to the online application form. Remember, we’re focussed on 8 areas of high-tech technology that closely match the interests of researchers and investors in Western Europe. These are the areas.

Internet of Things	Machine to Machine communication. Networks of low-cost sensors and actuators used for data collection, monitoring, decision making and process optimisation. Includes intelligent lighting systems, personal entertainment, Micro Medical Systems & relevant Nanotechnology.
Advanced Materials	New materials designed to have superior characteristics, (e.g. strengths, conductivity, weight,) or extraordinary functionality. (like graphene).
(Near) Autonomous Vehicles	Vehicles that can navigate and operate with little or no human intervention. Examples include developments in sustainable personal mobility as well as robots that lay glass-fiber inside pipes, or drone-like vehicles that operate in zones too dangerous for humans.
Energy Storage	Devices or system that store energy for later use. Includes advanced battery technologies.
3D Printing	Additive manufacturing techniques to create objects by printing layers of material based on digital models. From spare parts for obsolete cars to high-grade medical human implants. This area is creating huge interest.
Renewable Energy	Generation of electricity from renewable sources, reducing the impact on climate. From solar cells to tidal power.
Advanced Robotics	Increasingly capable robots with enhanced intelligence, dexterity & senses. Doing things that humans find repetitive, difficult or dangerous.
Lifetech – Medtech	21st century healthcare, including the “quantified self”. Technologies to improve personal wellbeing.

How Pitch Day works

Startups with global ambitions are invited to give a 5 minute pitch before a panel of world class mentors picked from leading high-tech companies in the Eindhoven region. Our mentors are there to listen, analyse and then give constructive, confidential feedback. That usually lasts up to 20 minutes.

This isn’t ”Dragon’s Den” or ”The Apprentice”, where to goal is to entertain people watching at home. This is different.

Win- Win for Everyone

·        You want honest, constructive advice on whether you’re ready to be accelerated. What has great potential? What needs to be fixed? What needs to happen next?

·        We want to meet world-class start-ups and meet the raw talent we know is out there. We'd like to explain why our city of Eindhoven is clearly the best place for your team to accelerate. Confront us with your questions!

Signup here for pitch days.

Good luck from all of us
Jonathan Marks on behalf of 
The Startupbootcamp HighTechXL Team

www.HighTechXL.com

Startup Materials in Eindhoven and Sweden

In our search for brilliant high-tech startups at HighTechXL, we're also looking for young teams working on new materials. And here are two examples.

Recently, the Public Library of Science reported results from a University team in Upsalla, Sweden in an article published on July 17th. But you really need to the read the article by Robin Burks in the magazine DVICE to understand the significance of what has been discovered.

Upsalite - Credit to PLOS-One

Upsalite has the highest surface area measured for an alkali earth metal carbonate: 800 square meters per gram. This puts the material in a very exclusive class of porous, high surface area materials that includes silica, zeolites, metal organic frameworks and carbon nanotubes. The research team also found that the material was filled with empty pores, which gives it a unique way of interacting with the environment. For example, Upsalite can absorb more water at low relative humidities than any other currently available material.

These unique properties could lead to Upsalite being useful in a variety of industrial applications, including the collection of toxic waste, chemicals and oil spills. It could also prove useful for drug delivery systems, odor control, and sanitation after a fire.

So basically, this is like Silica Gel on Steroids! 

And that reminds me of an article which recently resurfaced in the Los Angeles Times. 

Pollution Absorbing Pavements Reduce Smog

It is about a technique developed at the Eindhoven University of Technology and tested in a residential area of Hengelo. The original report was published three years ago when the TuE, working with a paving company, developed a new type of pavement which directly reduces air pollution. The technique involves spraying specially treated paving stones with a compound that includes Titanium Oxide. The brochure from the manufacturer says that measurements in Hengelo are showing the stones are absorbing large quantities of Nitrous Oxide, one of the pollutants emitted from car exhaust pipes. The findings, published in a recent edition of the Journal of Hazardous Materials, could provide a scenarios of how cities might be designed to gobble up air pollution from auto emissions. After taking measurements for a year, the scientists found that the street outfitted with smog-eating paving blocks, also called photocatalytic pavement, reduced nitrogen oxide air pollution by up to 45% in ideal weather conditions and 19% over the course of a day.

Nitrogen oxides -- also known as NOx -- are a group of poisonous gases produced by cars and power plants that react with other compounds in the atmosphere to form smog.

Modern Eindhoven 

While the air-cleaning potential of photocatalytic surfaces has been known for several years, the Institution of Chemical Engineers Chief Executive David Brown, “this latest research shows the potential of chemically engineered surfaces to further improve our quality of life, especially in major urban areas where traffic emissions are high.”

The specially treated paving stones in Hengelo are already visible on Google Street View

Renault Nissan - Will they be the Electric Vehicle Pioneers?

It is some time since I looked into what the automotive industry is doing with tech startups. But now that Startupbootcamp HightechXL is on a global hunt for high-tech startups, it is time to revisit the business and catch up.

For me, the first time I realised that the automotive industry was getting serious about adapting to meet consumer demand was way back in December 2010. During the Leweb10, a sort of (European SxSW but better) I remember that Renault Nissan gave away the keys to one of its new electric city vehicles, the Twizy.

Back then, Chairman and CEO Carlos Ghosn suggested that despite the recession there will always be a market for personal mobility. The car industry needs to adapt to maintain its position as the most desirable object for most people. That means responding to concerns about energy - also opening up the car as a platform for application developers rather like the iPhone and Android.

Ghosn was bullish in 2012, noting that the personal mobility industry, was still worth 2 trillion dollars. He was clear that the entire industry will have to to agree on open standards to avoid the developer nightmares we've seen in the mobile handset space. I made a short reportage from LeWeb in 2010.

Since that video was made, more than 3 years have passed. Renault has launched that platform R-link, although it seems to be only known amongst French developers. It's clear to me that the car industry is still struggling with apps. I note that the streaming services as well as catch-up feature prominently. Radio is still a frequency. I maintain that most people don't shout frequencies at the dashboard, no matter how catchy the jingle. Major problem with Renault is that they haven't spent any money at all to explain the story in English.



It turns out that R-LINK consists of three things: an integrated tablet in your car with a 17-inch screen, a connection via a local agreement with a mobile operator, and a combination of both integrated services and a Renault app store, an iTunes-like store. Technically, it's all working. But the extent of implementation seems to vary from market to market with France leading the way. I would suggest that language might have a lot to do with it.

Late last year (December 2012) the BBC's Hard Talk programme did a follow-up woth Ghosn, who was less confident than when I saw him in 2010. Wonder if they will make it? Or do these giant corporations have such huge problems thinking outside the box?

So anyone had experience of working with car manufacturers building hardware and software? If so please get in touch.

Vint Cerf - What high-tech startups need to be focussed on

The Guardian has just published a keynote discussion from their "Activate London Summit 2013". Its a conversation between Vint Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google and Jeff Jarvis, professor, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. After a brief introduction, Jeff steers the conversation in the direction of online privacy, the internet of things, Google Glass, and the future of libraries. I have met and talked with Vint at several conferences. He is such a wise man and very approachable. He promised to follow-up on a suggestion I gave at LIFT in Geneva, and within days he had done just that, bringing me into contact with exactly the organisations I was looking for. So I find his thoughts and visions on what could happen next to be more than relevant when the media is all buzzing about privacy, Edward Snowden and his NSA revelations, and whether we can trust the cloud. For some reason the Guardian Media Network has not released this video for embedding, so you have to watch it on the Guardian site. It is here. Well worth the 18 minutes.

Vint Cerf also offers his perspective on re-imagining the media and government. May be the interview will encourage you to rediscover what Vint has said elsewhere recently. I also include the LIFT conference video where I first came into contact with the great man. 

Note how he stimulates you to think about what still needs to be done. The companies in Silicon Valley are still very much focussed on social and communications (mainly tablets and phones). What excites me about other places in the world, like Eindhoven. is what they are doing with the Internet of Things. As Vint explains in the Guardian interview. Passive Products are becoming active services. And the high-tech startups are the people really moving the boundaries. That's why I have become involved with Startupbootcamp HightechXL. It is clearly where both science and finance are converging. 



Because VC's are always searching for scalable ideas, in the one-billion dollar range, those teams working with both hardware as well as software solutions has a distinct advantage. Yes, the initial risk is higher. But so are the rewards. 

Insiders Guide to what Venture Capitalists are looking for...

As part of my research into high-tech startups for the Startupbootcamp HighTechXL program this November, I've been looking at the public resources out there. It turns out that Europe needs to do a lot more to explain why it is great choice for high-tech startups. The reasons are there, but not the stories. There are plenty of videos out there that give you an insight into events that you just missed. But, especially the Universities across Europe are slow to realise the power of publishing their mentor briefings. They should take a leaf out the on-line "books" being written by the US institutions like MIT and Stanford University. When it comes to the latter,  it turns out there are some real gems amongst the 1855 videos posted by that University.

Unfortunately, they are poorly labelled. That may be deliberate because they form part of paid college course. But if you're a startup, do spend the hour watching this excellent video from Howard Hartenbaum, who is a partner at August Capital. He explains why most startups don't need to even think about talking to Venture Capitalists....unless your company is going to be worth 4-5 billion dollars by 2020. In other words you have to prove that your company is capable of scaling fast...He also explains the different types of funding that is open to you - and why family and friends is never a good idea if you value those relationships. Part of a useful series.

3D Rubber Printing

I have been playing with Sugru (Celtic for "play" apparently), a self-setting rubber which is great for household repairs. Had a broken 64GB USB stick which I was anxious to fix.And it repaired a broken bit in the dishwasher. But suppose you could put Sugru into a 3D printer and turn into a gasket, perhaps to replace an obsolete part in the car or on a boat. Hyrel3D printers are the ones pioneering this move. Have you noticed how more and more interesting materials are coming on the market?



Advanced materials and 3D printing are two areas of interest for the HightechXL accelerator program launching in November in Eindhoven. Curious? There's one simple address. HightechXL.

Live Robots Playing Football - for a real purpose

I kid you not. For the next few days, Eindhoven, The Netherlands is home to over 2500 robotics enthusiasts as part of the international Robocup2013 competition. A huge effort has gone in to hosting this international tournament.

While to outsiders it may just look like a geek fest, the artificial intelligence technologies being developed by researchers are increasingly important. to society. Not only to do the jobs that are routine, but also to go into areas where no humans would dare to tread. Robots are already used in natural disasters, but they always need to be driven. To build effective robots that can operate and think for themselves will need another couple of decades. The Robocup organisers have set themselves a goal. To build a robot soccer team that beats a human team by the year 2050.

Live feeds from the event are here below and are active throughout the tournament (Eindhoven is on time zome UTC+2). It ends on June 30th.



The competition is split into various leagues, for example, how can robots be used in the home? Look at this video from a previous event.

Are you building a robotics company? Many of the contestants in Eindhoven are doing more that just playing games. This is a great opportunity to show the outside world just what artifical intelligence has achieved so far. 

High Tech Campus from the air.  We'te in the building by the lake....

Our brand new HightechXL accelerator is actively looking for teams that are interested in applying for a high-tech accelerator program we're organising in Eindhoven in November 2013. Robotics is one of the 8 fields of interest. Here are ten reasons to consider the High Tech Campus as a place to build your robotics company. 8000 next-door neighbours who are engineers, entrepreneurs and developers sounds like a pretty good reason to me.

Eindhoven University of Technology

First Dutch Technology Week - Now the rest of the world

Public Launch of High Tech XL in Eindhoven

It has been a busy couple of weeks for the team behind Startupbootcamp HightechXL with which I am involved. It has taken since the middle of last year to build the plan for the world's best high-tech accelerator. We've learned from the experiences from our Startupbootcamp colleagues in Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Dublin, Haifa and London. But we have also listened to local high-tech entrepreneurs who have been successful in what is called the "Brainport" part of the Netherlands.

We were delighted when talks with the High Tech Campus resulted in a prime office position right in the heart of what's happening. All systems are now go.

So with the everything in place for the next 3 years, we have but one goal.

To find the best 20 high-tech teams for our finals on October 14/15th 2013.

Over two days at the High Tech Campus we will select the final 10 teams who will go through to the full accelerator program starting on Monday November 11th.

Getting the word out.

We made a very public launch of HighTechXL during the recent Dutch Technology Week held all over the Eindhoven region. This gives a chance for the public and other sectors of industry a chance to get the "backstage tour" of what's happening in high-tech in the region. Partner Ernst & Young organised an afternoon workshop for its network to explain the difference between an incubator (who provide facilities) and the High-Tech Accelerator which provides an organised program plus access to an unrivalled network of mentors. 

"We have seen other presentations of the Business Model Canvas and the Lean Start up methodology. But the workshops have often been with fictitious examples, or a project taking place on the other side of the world. Carolien Sandee, who organised the event on behalf of Ernst & Young as well as Startupbootcamp HightechXL, took a different approach".

Carolien Sandee

"We found out about a great renewable-energy project working at the Eindhoven University of Technology. The Solar Team Eindhoven are competing against many other universities in the world for the annual solar-powered car race. It takes place in Australia over the 3000 kms between Darwin and Adelaide. The Solar Team Eindhoven caught our eye because they're competing in the cruiser class. This means that as well as being judged on speed, they are also being examined for how many people they can carry, the external energy requirements and the general handling and comfort of the car. The car will be revealed to the world on July 4th, but Lex Hoefsloot, the team leader was able to share a few secrets with us about how far they have got."

 Lex Hoefsloot of Solar Team Eindhoven 

"Lex also posed a number of dilemmas to the audience of several hundred participants. So we asked Samantha van Rooij of Business Models Inc (the publishers of the Business Model Canvas Book) to facilitate a very practical workshop. We split up into groups and 90 minutes later came up with a number of very practical suggestions in their quest to build the solar family car of the future. We also demonstrated the way we will be helping the HightechXL teams when they join us in Eindhoven in November. And the first prize for the winning group is a test drive in the new solar car. 

Working out the different Business Model Canvas options for the solar car!

The exercise yielded very useful practical business ideas for Solar Team Eindhoven

The afternoon concluded with encouragement from former Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende. He's retired from politics but now takes a keen interest in corporate governance and the growth of small medium enterprises. 

Winner get a test drive in the new solar family car - no word on the price as yet!

Patrick Gabriels of Ernst & Young closed off the day's proceedings. "HightechXL is now no-longer a dream. It's all systems go. The next step is our global search to find brilliant teams."

Shaping the world's best accelerator for high-tech startups: HightechXL

Building on the shoulders of Giants

These last two decades have been totally disrupted by the Internet. There isn't a business that hasn't been affected. And the virtual connectivity as well as cheap access to powerful technology has also affected the way companies innovate. Most of us are walking around with several thousand times more computing power than NASA used to send a man to the moon in 1969. The so-called Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) used a real time operating system had approximately 64 kilobyte of memory and operated at a speed if 0.043 MHz.

The AGC had a miniscule memory....

It feels as if the speed of disruptive change is no longer linear. But it is logarithmic. 8 comes next to four instead of 5.

End User Innovation - Early Business Model Canvas?

The late Peter F. Drucker, the Austrian-born management consultant, is often credited with explaining how larger manufacturers innovated in the past. Basically they locked themselves away in secret labs, developing products they could patent and then sell to the public or other businesses. As the world becomes more connected, this is becoming harder and harder to do. 

Meanwhile, along came the notion of End-user innovation. A person or a small company develops an innovation for their own use because existing products or services don't meet their needs. Access to powerful computers as well as cheap hardware has made it possible for brilliant companies to start in the back of a garage, often funded by personal savings. 

In 1988, MIT economist Eric von Hippel identified end-user innovation as, by far, the most important and critical in his classic book on the subject "Sources of Innovation" now available for free download.

In addition, the famous robotics engineer Joseph F. Engelberger asserted that innovations require only three things:

1. A recognized need,

2. Competent people with relevant technology, and

3. Financial support.

The Kline Chain-linked model of innovation places great emphasis on potential market needs as drivers of the innovation process. It also describes the complex and often iterative feedback loops between marketing, design, manufacturing, and R&D.

To use this sounds like very early thinking that we know call the Business Model Canvas.

Adapting these ideas to 2013

Jed Cristiansen is an American living in London. He's raced solar-powered cars across the Australian outback, operated nuclear reactors and US Navy submarines, been a consultant, and currently works for Google.

Jed Cristiansen

In 2009, he wrote an extensive paper outlining how people could copy Y combinator, the successful accelerator program that kicked things off in Silicon Valley. It's inspired us to build a more focussed program in the South of the Netherlands. The report is an extensive analysis, but draws relatively simple conclusions. 

To be a continued successful seed accelerator program, you need to have a financial model that works, provide value to the companies that you invest in, and invest in the best possible companies.  That means the best possible companies need to prefer your program to any other.  

Jed now runs Seed-Database which monitors the successes of the Accelerator community. That turns out to be around 169 different programs, most of which are still in business.

The Countdown Has Begun

Getting the show on the road. Bart Lugard & Broos Bakens of the SBC HighTechXL Team

Yes, I've been up to something. I love it when a plan comes together. Some of you may know that I have a fascinating for science and technology. In the past that has involved several trips to Eindhoven in the South of the Netherlands, and what used to be called the NatLab. It was the R & D science park set up by Philips in 1998. And it used to have a high fence all around the one square kilometre. Journalists had to bring a passport and the procedures at the front gate reminded me of Checkpoint Charlie between East and West Berlin. All this was needed because Philips made a lot of money licensing its patents. They're slogan at the time was "Philips Invents For You".

The old days before Philips really saw the light....

Except that in 2003 they realised that closed innovation means you're not ready to compete in the digital age. It is now a time when the business model is not shouting but sharing. So the fence went away and Philips started a plan to sell off the real estate to make it clear that it was no longer the Philips Research Park.  Today the old research park is now the High Tech Campus. It's home to 100 companies, 8000 people from over 60 countries. And they're expanding because the ecosystem that is blossoming there is running out of space. Two new buildings are under construction, one connected with healthcare, the other with LED lighting.

Europe's answer to Silicon Valley.

Disruption is the key to Hardware Innovation

The large corporations on the site like ABB, ASML, Intel, Irdeto, NXP Semiconductors, NXP Software, Philips, Sentech, and SRB Energy, have realised the value of the positive, disruptive value of high-tech start-ups. 

Of course it's all about the network in the Internet of Things. The Great Cafe is where many deals are done

These are young companies of around 3-6 people who have come up with a brilliant business idea and have a working prototype. The High Tech campus is rapidly building a reputation where innovative start-ups & sme’s disrupt, innovate and get funded. Shapeways (3D printing), Sapiens Neuro (Neuroscience), Civolution (Media Content Fingerprinting), Genkey (Large Scale Biometrics), Intrinsic-ID (Sensitive Data Protection Across All Devices), are just some of the recent success stories. 

Infact I learned that a lot of the technology in my Samsung mobile uses chip technology developed on the High Tech Campus.

The inaugural mentor meeting at HTC Eindhoven

Assembling a different program line-up

I've been a mentor to a couple of accelerator programmes in Amsterdam. VC4Africa and Startupbootcamp Amsterdam. Now, I'm closely involved with building a very different kind of high-tech accelerator right in the heart of Europe’s equivalent of “Silicon Valley”. In fact, we’re convinced it has every chance of becoming the leading accelerator of its kind, because it is clearly focused on companies working in the most successful high-tech sectors.

We’ve secured a prime location on “the Strip”, which forms the centre of activities on what’s known as the “High Tech Campus”. It can justly claim to be the R & D capital of Western Europe with more than 1400 patents registered last year. It’s no wonder that the Eindhoven area leads in both brainpower and R & D investments (US$4.5 billion dollars in 2012). Large international corporations like are just a few minutes’ walk from our offices.

StartupBootCamp High Tech is driven by experienced entrepreneurs Guus Frericks & Eric van den Eijnden of Dutch Expansion Capital. Patrick Gabriëls is leading the team on behalf  of the Ernst & Young partnership.

And yesterday we launched the first mentor meeting to explain the plans and how mentors contribute to make the program possible - and much more effective than a couple of years at a business school. This bootcamp can draw on more than 500 world-class specialists and mentors in the 7 cities that form the Startupbootcamp international network. They have people covering a wide-range of relevant expertise. We’re also tapping into the mentor and investor networks of E & Y and Dutch Expansion Capital.

So we’ve now been given the green light and the challenge to to find the 10 best high-tech start-ups on the planet. They will benefit from a unique 6 month accelerator program starting in early November this year. But don't wait until then. If you know of teams that might qualify, now is the time to act. The sign-up address is simple HighTechXL.com

We believe that 70% of the teams in the program will come from outside the Netherlands.

In these times of polarising discussions about immigration, remember that Silicon Valley USA owes its success to the input of foreign nationals. 56% of companies there were started by international founders. It’s the same story here on the West Coast of Europe. At the same time we see very aggressive campaigns by cities and national governments in order to attract the best to their part of the world.

We’ve opened our application program to the world. But we’re starting an extensive active search to keep the standards at the top level. It's a safari in search of brilliance. And I must say - I love every minute of it.

The HighTechXL Long List

If you have an inside track to teams working in these disruptive technology areas, then don't hesitate to get in touch via LinkedIn

The areas where the Accelerator concentrates on.

Internet of Things	Machine to Machine communication. Networks of low-cost sensors and actuators used for data collection, monitoring, decision making and process optimisation. Includes intelligent lighting systems, personal entertainment, Micro Medical Systems & relevant Nanotechnology.
Advanced Materials	New materials designed to have superior characteristics, (e.g. strengths, conductivity, weight,) or extraordinary functionality. (like graphene)
(Near) Autonomous Vehicles	Vehicles that can navigate and operate with little or no human intervention. Developments in sustainable personal mobility (e.g. SolarTeamEindhoven)
Energy Storage	Devices or system that store energy for later use. Includes advanced battery technologies.
3D Printing	Additive manufacturing techniques to create objects by printing layers of material based on digital models. From spare parts for obsolete cars to high-grade medical human implants. This area is creating huge interest.
Renewable Energy	Generation of electricity from renewable sources, reducing the impact on climate. From solar cells to tidal power.
Advanced Robotics	Increasingly capable robots with enhanced
Lifetech – Medtech	21st century healthcare, including the “quantified self”. Technologies to improve personal wellbeing.