It’s been just over two weeks since I arrived back in Glasgow following my four-day excursion to the inaugural Explorers Festival, Lisbon. It has taken this time to digest the buzz of activity and information which surrounded me during that half-week and really quantify what I’d learned.

Explorers Festival, organised by Portuguese startup advocacy NGO Beta-i, was intended to be a celebration and meeting of minds that seek to push the boundaries of knowledge, physical endeavour and business. It was clear that it was also to announce the arrival of the Lisbon startup scene on the world stage, and what an introduction it was.

The event kicked off with a weekend-long “Bootcamp”, involving an early-morning assault course given by the Portuguese Marines, though I missed out on that delightful experience and flew in just in time to catch the Explorers “Toolbox”.

The “Toolbox”, comprising two packed days of workshops, gave a rich overview of future leadership, design and technology. I attended some of the more technical two-hour sessions given by speakers as friendly as they were brilliant. The most notable of those being Ali Jeveh of Berlin “localised-cloud” startup Protonet and Luis Calado and Nuno Silva from Microsoft Portugal discussing the market transition from web to native apps. I have long considered Microsoft to contain some fantastic people, reputation tainted by poor upper-management, and those guys did nothing but support that opinion.

As well as the workshops, there were frequent networking breaks in the modern lounge area. This provided a welcome opportunity to discuss ideas with both the up-and-coming and established in Europe and beyond. What really struck me was the disconnect between the majority of self-titled “modern” startups and the capabilities of the latest technological advances. There were many people with fantastic ideas and fledgeling business models that could really benefit from a little technical creativity.

The highlight of my networking experience had to be meeting Sergio and Luis from Unono, a Madrid-based startup aiming to change the way universities manage their student projects to facilitate greater collaboration and visibility for the students involved. They pulled me aside for an enthusiastic discussion on the future of commercial computing infrastructure around lunch-time on the second day of the “Toolbox” which lasted late into the evening. We collectively explored many different avenues to future computing and they offered some much appreciated advice on my own ventures over dinner in the former port-district.

The final day was conference day. The main auditorium was standing room only for an impressive programme of speakers including Bjoern Lasse Herrmann of Compass, Dave Goldberg of Survey Monkey, astronaut Jean-François Clervoy and the ingenious Dr. Leslie Dewan of Transatomic Power. Of particular interest was Mark Leaver from the UK tech consultancy, Parameter. He demonstrated how the culture of exploration and innovation, particularly in technology, was rapidly crossing cultural and geographical barriers. With incubators and accelerators springing up from Tehran to Indonesia, it would be hard to disagree.

Unfortunately, my flight required me to leave before the end of the festival, though not before saying my goodbyes to those I’d met and thanking the man who had enabled my presence there, Petko Anchev, the Explorers social media coordinator and great guy.

Overall, the Explorers Festival was an outstanding success. Beta-i delivered with flair and precision in addition to showcasing the sense of community amongst startups that can be found there. The event really demonstrated how vibrant Lisbon is as a city, a startup ecosystem and as a home to explorers of all kinds.

The flight to London was one of reflection. As we in Glasgow look towards the future and drive to become a paragon of the technologically empowered city, we will necessarily rely on the innovation of startups to explore undiscovered uses for new and existing technologies.

There has been a definite shift in pace within the trace start-up community around Glasgow in recent years. If we are to capitalise on our own unique offering as an ecosystem and local government united in pursuit of an improved, more connected future then surely now is the time to do it. It’s inspiring to know that as we do, we’ll be doing so along-side our friends in Lisbon, Dublin and the rest of the world.

If you would like to share your entrepreneurial experiences then please get in touch.

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Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '*** -[__NSSetM addObject:]: object cannot be nil'
terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException
abort() called

I can only assume that one of the fonts installed, was failing to load and as a result a nill was trying to be inserted into the font set being loaded up. Anyway here is the solution that worked for me.

• Open Font Book
• Select the File menu
• Click Restore Standard Fonts ( Don’t worry you shouldn’t loose any custom fonts they are merely moved )
• Open your applications to make sure they work.
• Finally go to Users->Library->Fonts(Removed)
• Drag all of these fonts back into Font Book to restore your Fonts
• Ensure your iWorks Applications are still working

Hope this helps someone and saves you the pain I have just had.

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History

Let me summarise how the concept of AirBnB came about (one of my favourite parts). First let me introduce the 3 founders of the company Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia were collage buddies at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Nathan Blecharczyk, a software engineer who graduated in 2005 from Harvard with a Computing Science Degree.

After a couple of years out of colleague, Chesky and Gebbia decided to start a business together. Chesky moved in with Gebbia, and the two immediately focused on solving their most pressing issue: “I had no idea how expensive rent was in San Francisco,” said Chesky. By happenstance, a major international design conference was scheduled to take place in San Francisco the next weekend. Gebbia recalled, “I had just read that all the hotels were completely booked out for the conference, and that people were having a hard time finding rooms. I happened to walk down the hall past an empty bedroom, and I stopped dead in the hallway, looking at the space.” Gebbia and Chesky decided to see what they could make of the room shortage and quickly built a website to help them rent rooms in their apartment. “We coded it up in a day,” says Chesky. “We were offering full bed and breakfast service, but we didn’t have any beds, so we called it Airbedandbreakfast. We sent it around to the design bloggers we knew, and got the convention website to link to us.” Ultimately the two ended up hosting three people for the week, and made $900. “We really became friends with our guests.” Recalled Gebbia: “watching them go down the stairs, with the money in my pocket, I was just overwhelmed by the size of the opportunity we’d discovered.

This is the story that compelled me to follow the company, and gave me the desire to continue to find new ways to solve real world problems that I face. Today’s discussion focused on them being on the brink of failure until they presented at Y-Combinator, a high profile startup incubator. The question asked related to an inital seed investment offer from Sequoia of $610,000. To me it seemed like a no brainer. The company valuation had gone from $0 to $333k given the initial $20k for 6% Y-Combinator investment in only 12 weeks this seed funding offer from Sequoia represented a valuation of $3,050,000. With this investment they had the capital to grow their team, grow their customer based and improve their technology. They were presented with the offer prior to a presentation with one of the largest gatherings of VC’s from across the US. Even so the risk of saying no in the hope of a better deal was not worth taking. Sequoia had the right investors and the money on offer would enable AirBnB to achieve everything they needed to build the business and get to series A investment. However,fFrom my subsequent research of the company, while legal, their method for bootstrapping and building their user base was questionable and often frowned upon within the developer/tech community.

Question

By web scrapping other property listing sites and contacting individuals who had posted adverts they were able grow their user base. However, this was done under the guise of individuals giving feedback and advice to other peers not as an official message from the company. By spamming these users they were able to convince them to sign up to their service. By presenting the messages from peers they were able to prevent their service being blacklisted by the major search engines and preserve the good name upon which to build the brand. While a clever approach to growing you audience my dilemma or question to other Entrepreneurs out there is what is acceptable when building your business? Should we use any means we can to get up and running, provided it is legal? Can we do more ‘good’ when we are larger than we ever did ‘bad’ as a smaller company?

It is an interesting dilemma and has not been one I have considered until now, hopefully there will be some interest around this question and I can post a follow up with my take once I have considered the discussion further.

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Primary Needs

The reporting tool must make the capture of stakeholder engagement easy
The reporting tool can be used to identify gaps in our stakeholder engagement
The reporting tool can make finding information easier
The individual project reports provides an interface between projects
The reporting tool makes understanding your own progress easier
The reporting tool provides many views
The reporting tool increases efficiency

Concepts

Concept 1 – QR Codes

Concept 7 – RFID

Concept 10 – Handshake

Prototypes

Prototype 1 – QR Codes (Focused on attendance capture & Physical)

Prototype 10 – Handshake (Focused on Aesthetic & Analytical)

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Primary Needs

• The reporting tool must make the capture of stakeholder engagement easy
• The reporting tool can be used to identify gaps in our stakeholder engagement
• The reporting tool can make finding information easier
• The individual project reports provides an interface between projects
• The reporting tool makes understanding your own progress easier
• The reporting tool provides many views
• The reporting tool increases efficiency

Selection Matrix

You can find the original spreadsheet at the following link;
Stakeholder Mapping: Concept Selection Matrix

Concepts being explored with prototypes.

• Concept 1 – QR Code Badge
• Concept 7 – RFID Badge
• Concept 10 – Bluetooth Handshake

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Licensing: Please feel free to use these icons as you wish provided you attribute their use in the About (or equivalent section) on your website or in the credits(or equivalent section) of your printed documentation. If you require use without attribute then please get in touch.

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If you want to know how to do similar analysis I would strongly recommend checking out Martin Hawksey’s tuorial.

Additional Interesting Resources

• @fuelpoverty_eu
• Fuel Poverty Gap Widens

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Finished Chair

Chair Working

Finished Boxes

Boxes Working

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Primary User Needs

• The reporting tool uses engagement to identify areas of overlap in team members meetings.
• The reporting tool uses sentiment analysis to automatically identify areas of overlap in stakeholder interests.
• The reporting tool can provide annotated sociograms illustrating engagement.
• The reporting tool can create high level board packs.
• The reporting tool can create highlight reports.

Decomposition

For clarity here are the decomposed lists

Meeting Preparation

• Overview of stakeholders.
• Engagement with stakeholders mapped with associated annotations.
• All of the team’s (project team members) desires are shared so that relevant information can be extracted from the meeting.
• Understanding of the stakeholders needs.

Meeting

• Capture meeting and transcribe the meeting
• Searching through current notes or notes from previous meetings when things are sparked.
• Extraction/Identification of stakeholder needs.
• Cross reference (usually in my own mind) relivent information from previous meetings and stakeholders.

Meeting Reflection

• Analysis of meeting.
• Discussion/debriefing with team.
• Record additional notes.
• Arrange follow up meetings and engagements.
• Map connections.

Summarise Meetings

• Note Attendees.
• Create a meeting summary from notes.
• Identify outcomes and create new actions.

Share

• Share individual report with line manager.
• Share reports with other team members for awareness.
• Collate reports into a management summary to outline progress.
• Create a higher level dashboard for the most senior members of the project team
• Update the project plan and review timescales

10 Concept Sketches

Please note I labelled the sketches 1-10 rather than A-J hopefully this doesn’t get marked down.

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