Guest post by Line Svenstrup Berger, as part of our support for Founders House.

It can be confusing and time consuming to manage applications in the traditional paper format. Danish OpenFlow has helped to turn this around. The start-up company, with its electronic application system, has restructured and increased efficiency at a number of foundations – and secured a transparent process for the applicant.

Increased overview and efficiency

OpenFlow has, among others, developed systems for Real Dania, the Water Sector’s Technology Development foundation, TREFOR, Copenhagen and the Spar Nord Foundation. The latter participated in a customer satisfaction survey after the implementation of OpenFlow – the responses point towards a positive experience.

84 per cent experience an increase in efficiency, 75 percent say it’s a time-saver, and 69 percent have gained a better overview of the application process, after OpenFlow was implemented. Around 66 percent, found it easier than before, to find old applications that can then be used as a basis for the settings of new applications. In addition, at least 63 percent experienced that they used less time gathering information.

We now have a unified application process that is more organised and provides an overview of application phase – both in regards to who the applicants are, and the entire processing of the application up to the receipt of the grant or the refusal. Also, it facilitates a better and more efficient workflow, CEO of the Spar Nord Foundation, Steffen Nørgaard says.

With OpenFlow, foundations have a much greater overview – both at the application stage and of the very essence of the applications. Who they decide to support becomes more clear and exact:

Our focus has been to create a system that can gather information all in one place – digitally. This will be the end of applications arriving by email or through the post. At the same time it gives the applicant and the foundation an overview of the workflow and the approvals based on positions and rights, partner Thomas Ottosen says.

A point that has been crucial to Steffen Nørgaard and the Spar Nord Foundation.

We constantly take an overview, and it makes a big difference to our workflow.

OpenFlow listens to users

It all started in 2011, when Thomas and Michal worked together to deliver the first solution to the Water sector’s Technology Development Foundation. Michal wrote his thesis on workflows, and in collaboration with Thomas, came up with OpenFlow. From there on, the system evolved as new customers arrived. The company constantly works on expanding the system for the foundations – IT systems can always be improved. As a starting point, they look at user experience:

The Spar Nord Foundation gave us valuable feedback and great insight into what we should focus on. Users are located in many departments throughout Denmark, and right now we are working on an improved analytical and statistical part,  partner Michal Skowronski says and continues:

We are working with a lot of exciting ideas for making the application process more efficient and making it easier for users to switch between platforms. We also focus on the social marketing of the Foundations as an integral part of OpenFlow. Ideas, which we will present in future versions of OpenFlow.

Although the Spar Nord Foundation was generally satisfied, they thought there was still room for improvement – including an advanced search function and a more statistical and analytical approach.

That’s often how it is when you get a new tool. Now that we’ve created some organisation around the application part, we would also like to see that the other parts are included, Steffen Nørgaard says and continues:

So far we have been very satisfied. We’ve got a system that we can use to create the overview we need. We look forward to improvements and new features.

HR as the next step

It is not only in connection to optimising procedures that foundations are using the system. OpenFlow has been under the scrutiny of the national audit office several times, and passed.

It is important for the foundations that can draw all of their payments together – as part of their annual audit. This is easy with OpenFlow, and a number of foundations have also used Openflow’s API for integration, for example, publishing payments on websites or running them together with their own reporting systems,  Thomas Ottosen says.

Large organisations use very expensive systems, while others use systems that are virtually free. OpenFlow fits in between them, therefore, Thomas Ottosen thinks there’s definitely a market:

There’s a big demand for the digitisation of applications going to the foundations- but OpenFlow can easily be used by anyone who wants to streamline their workflow. If you make a targeted effort, you lay a good foundation for optimisation and efficiency, and with OpenFlow, an organization can adjust itself and create new flows.

The company initially focused on grants but aims to expand to other areas – such as HR modules:

Our latest initiative is targeted towards HR and recruitment systems – a market which is already characterised by a number of good systems, but OpenFlow differs by being a platform which promotes efficiency within the entire organisation, and HR and recruitment are areas that could easily be better optimised. We see a bright future for OpenFlow – it’s been hard work, but we are slowly being recognised by the industry especially by the foundations,  Thomas Ottosen says.

Facts OpenFlow: 

• Founded in 2011
• Founders: Thomas Ottosen, partner and Michal Skowronski, partner
• OpenFlow are based at Founders House – an invitation-only workspace for ambitious tech start-ups and entrepreneurs.
• Web: http://openflow.nu

The post Optimise Application and Work Processes appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Guest post by Line Svenstrup Berger in our support for Founders House.

What started as a small student project has now evolved into a successful tech startup. Labster has developed a virtual laboratory to use in teaching at both colleges and universities globally. The business reimagines the traditional non-innovative ways of performing laboratory experiments and brings creativity and science experiments together. The latest development is that they have expanded their concept into Virtual Reality (VR). Labster has already won several international awards and has high ambitions for the future.

Virtual labs as an e-learning tool

The virtual laboratory is a computer program, that gives students the opportunity to conduct virtual experiments, that in reality would either take months, be very costly or would be too dangerous for students to carry out in real life.

Our primary product is an easily scalable online platform for teaching life science, which has been demonstrated to improve learning significantly compared to standard teaching methods as well as substantially reduce costs, CEO and founder Mads Tvillinggard Bonde says.

Labster is a platform for performing chemistry and biology experiments. In addition you can add elements from real life such as molecular 3D animations, quiz questions and background theory that can make teaching more interesting, exciting and relevant.

It provides an increased learning effect. The students simply get more out of it – both at secondary school and at university level, Mads Tvillinggaard Bonde says.

Virtual Reality

So far the universities and schools have been able to buy a virtual laboratory that appears on a regular computer screen, but now Labster is ready to transfer their concept to VR. According to Mads Tvillinggaard Bonde the argument consists in recognisability:

It’s time to take VR seriously because it is easily recognizable. The closer the user experience is to the reality, the easier it will be for the user to empathise with the virtual environment, use it and take advantage of the many facets in it, he explains.

In the context, VR will be an additional layer on top of the existing program. It is still in the development process, but is a possibility of how one can use simulators with a usable interface. According to Mads Tvillinggard Bonde we are going to see much more of this in the future.

We can already see that simulations can be used to produce results that would be difficult to recreate in real life. Take for example crash tests of cars. You can not run the 1,000 luxury cars into each other again and again to test all small variations, he says adding:

But you can with simulations. This way, all parameters and variations can be taken into account. It can make big differences in experiments – even in science. Therefore, the results are sometimes more exact than it is in reality. 

Science is enormously creative

Entrepreneurship is perhaps not the first thing to connect with science, but the distance is according to Mads Tvillinggard Bonde not as big as one might think:

Science is enormously creative and there are many elements involved in establishing a business that can be compared with scientific experiments, he says.

Since childhood he has had a special interest in science and has experienced the difficult conditions science has in the Danish educational system. Of the very few laboratory experiments that are taught, most are generally boring and leave no room for spontaneous or innovative thinking.

Most of the teaching experiment is designed as a simple cookbook recipe that deals with a particular phenomenon as fermentation or DNA analysis. Students often follow the protocol blindly without understanding the underlying theory and mechanisms behind. It is inefficient, demoralising and very far from how real research is done, Mads Tvillinggard Bonde says.

The former Harvard student was inspired by today’s use of flight simulators. They are helping to solve some of the same problems, which one can have in a laboratory such as expensive equipment and reduced access for students.

So why not make a simulator to educate science students and thereby raise the level of education and motivation?

In that way his passion has been to innovate the conditions and increase the number of laboratory experiments in education – making laboratory experiments in chemistry and biology more exciting and creative and drive individual creativity along with increased motivation levels.

Successful young entrepreneurs

At 27-years old, Mads Tvillinggard Bonde developed the first version of the program during his training as a civil engineer in biotechnology at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). The idea started as a small project in the student organisation Biotech Academy and resulted in the founding of Labster by Mads Tvillinggard Bonde in 2011 with partner Michael Bodekær.

In 2012, the first virtual lab was ready, and the customers began to sign up. Since then Labster has had great success with partners such as Novo Nordisk, Novozymes, The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Stanford University, The University of Hong Kong and the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. Globally they have more than 10,000 students – a number that is increasing rapidly. In addition Labster has won several awards including a two-time Venture Cup win and funding from the Danish Market Development Fund and the Danish Ministry of Science.

A case story is Aarhus University (AU) in Denmark, where 250 medical students used Labster Medical Genetics lab to teach their students about breast cancer and tumor suppression. The students completed a survey after the lecture, and 88 percent said Labster was very exciting and 98 percent said the real-life interactive cases helped them relate to and retain all the theoretical learning.

The company lives in entrepreneurial collective Founders House in Copenhagen, but also have employees in Bali, Indonesia. In total they are approx. 20 employees.

About Labster:

• Founded in 2011
• Founders: Mads Tvillinggard Bonde, founder and CEO and Michael Bodekær, co-founder.
• Awards: DTU-prisen Grøn Dyst 2010, Venture Cup 2011 (Service category), Venture Cup 2012 (People & Society category), Elance startup competiton 2013 (New York) og Sanoma Startup Challenge 2014 (Amsterdam)
• Sponsors: Novo Nordisk, Novozymes, The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, Fornyelsesfonden
• Partners: DTU, Stanford, Berkeley and Hong Kong University.
• Lives in Founders House – a co-working space for ambitious tech startups and entrepreneurs, in Copenhagen and also has employees in Bali.
• Web: http://labster.com/

The post Virtual lab for teaching life science appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Guest post by Line Svenstrup Berger, as part of our support for Founders House.

It all started in 2013 and since then, it has expanded rapidly for the Danish/French tech startup company SNIPS. The company has already had great success and has won several awards. Snips leverages predictive big data technologies to make everything about a user’s daily life more intelligent, from driving safely to commuting more comfortably to finding something fun to do with friends. This concept of “Context Awareness” is what will ultimately allow technology to be fully integrated in our lives. The company would like to work with the best in their field and share their interest and knowledge with the best. That is one of the main reasons for their success.

Hackathons

Snips wants to generate interest for their technology, their field and their way of working in the very best in their field – hardcore mathematicians, programmers and creative people. Therefore, for example, they hold Open Hack Day every Friday and different seminars, where interested parties can come and get a taste of what they do based on concrete problems.

Friday afternoons are a great time to invite people in and hack with us in a casual setting and participate in the general discussion surrounding our field, partner Michael Fester says.

Every other month, Snips invites potential hires to a 3-day hackathon, where a specific problem is addressed. It was, for example, during one such hackathon, in December 2013, that they created a predictive model assessing road safety in the San Francisco Bay Area. This eventually led to a collaboration with Sprint, INRIX and the GSM Association, and an invitation from the latter to showcase the tech at the Mobile World Congress, held in Barcelona in February 2014. Perhaps more importantly, it led to the first hire outside of the founding team, Olivier Corradi, a data-scientist fresh from the Google Maps team.

A CV is interesting but is often “linear”. Hacking together is complex and multidimensional — you judge team fit, communication skills, creativity, response speed, Michael Fester says.

Through these Hackathons and talks Snips wish to show talented and ambitious hackers and others interested in their field that it is fun to work with data:

Data is sexy! The problems are manifold, and the solutions often require a beautiful mix of mathematical intuition, creative visualizations and state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, Michael Fester says and continues:

We are working at a high pace on a hot topic, with hard problems to tackle and fierce competition right at our heels. It is a necessity for us to get the attention of the very best, and our mass hiring strategy reflects this.

Context awareness

Snips’ focus is to make all connected devices act intelligently by reacting to surrounding context. As part of a larger movement where technology surrounds us self-measurement has become a reality.  Today, we interact with technology through push notifications, which are highly intrusive and distracting, or by juggling several different apps to get small pieces of information. Given that there will be more than 50 billion connected devices by 2020, neither approach can scale to provide a meaningful, relevant experience to the user.

What we need instead is to make technology learn and adapt to us so that it can become ubiquitous and give us the information we need, when we need it. At Snips, we call this Context Awareness, Michael Fester explains.

It’s about understanding how ones life looks like in a current context – whether it is a personal, activity, social or external context.

Right now they collect data from individual users, through which they receive accurate insight into the patterns and dynamics of user behaviour – a platform for connecting living.

Our technology analyzes a user’s actions by cross-referencing them with surrounding context, such as weather, road traffic and points of interest. This contextualized user timeline is then used by our machine learning algorithms to assess the user’s needs and intentions, Michael Fester explains.

A concrete example would be that you wake up in the morning, the technology can then predict that there is a lot of traffic and suggest a city bike rather than a car – a decision which is enforced by the fact that you have not been exercising this week. Or for instance, it knows that you have a meeting in an hour and therefore shows the LinkedIn profile of the person you are meeting as well as transportation options. After the meeting, perhaps it is around lunchtime, and you will be suggested various cafes for lunch nearby and in the sun.

Respect the user’s privacy

There are several different apps which makes self-measurement and tracks user activity — the Finnish app Moves, which Facebook just acquired, and Google Now. One difference between Snips compared with Facebook and Google is the approach to privacy. Snips holds great respect for a users privacy and the user can decide for himself and constantly change the data that Snips has access to.

 Privacy issues are central in our considerations. We are obviously manoeuvring in a area with sensitive information, and we wish to be completely open and transparent about what we are doing with it. We think that this not only crucial, it can really be a competitive advantage, Michael Fester says.

The problems are out there waiting to be solved. The consumers are waiting for them to be solved. Snips wants to solve them and they want to solve them with all ambitious colleagues in their field. Snips already collaborates with major companies worldwide to prove their technology, and they want to collaborate and share their latest technology with everybody:

 We want to be as open as possible so that the best can learn and be inspired by each other. That is why we, to the extent that we can, make our knowledge accessible to our surroundings – with notable exceptions such as personally sensitive information about the user, Michael Fester says.

In the long run, Snips hopes to be able to deal with large-scale societal issues such as the saturation of infrastructures in cities with an ever growing population. It is the hope that this new, bottom-up, user-centric approach will help them gain more precise insight into urban dynamics, thereby closing the loop with their initial endeavours of making cities more liveable, with citizens able to take more informed decisions during their day. Whether they will hirer new ambitious employees depend on the people they meet at their Hackathons.

Facts:

• Founded: January 2013
• Employees: Michael Fester, Co-founder; Dr Rand Hindi, Founder & CEO; Dr Alexandre Vallette, Co-founder; Dr Maël Primet Co-founder and Olivier Corradi, Data Scientist
• Main Awards: DataConnexions 2013, Worldwide Innovation Challenge 2014, MIT TR35 Innovators under 35
• Key Partners: SNCF, the French National Railway Company; La Poste, the French National Postal Services; Sprint, the 3^rd largest wireless network operator in the US; INRIX, worldwide provider of road traffic data.
• Michael has been operating at Founders House in Copenhagen, a co-working space for ambitious tech startups, but just moved to SNIPS’ corporate office in Paris , where his other colleagues are sitting.

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