Startup Journey 2021 Business Track Teams: Biot, furnituremusic, GoPPo, PocketSomm, What’s Poppin’ and TeamFeedback

To all winter sports enthusiasts! You know that dressing for winter is not an easy task, especially when you are active and sweat easily. Stay tuned,  Biot is offering you a solution to be super cozy, super comfy while playing outdoor. Forget about getting cold or being overheated!

Biot is developing thermoregulating jackets with AI-integrated control which manages the temperature inside the jacket for outdoor sport players in countries with cold winters. They use automated inflatable air pocket, filled in by an electric air pump. Air is a good heat insulator, meaning that the more insulated air we have between our body and the outside environment, the warmer we feel. Biot’s jackets smartly monitor the temperature inside and outside and adjust it accordingly for a perfect body temperature by inflating or deflating the air pockets.

Biot team consists of Tommi, Tuukka, Da and Lucas, 4 engineers from the University of Edinburgh, and one business student from Aalto University. They believe that their business would take off, considering that current heated jackets in the market do not work in all range of temperatures and have terrible battery life. None of the competitors have any smart features. Biot’s does. With a superior battery life!

To the success of their business and a more comfortable winter!

A cross-disciplinary innovation to bring art and technology together! (furniture music) is developing devices to create and play music that adapts to the environment, making it unique every time it’s played. Founder Shane Wirkes is a long-time musician and composer who later ventured on the technological aspects of music making. He is currently studying ICT at TUAS where he focuses most of his energy on making projects that are musical in nature. Shane developed his business ideas by combining a concept dated back in 19th century about “furniture music” with modern high-end technology of 21st century.

The core idea is to create tools, using a combination of hardware sensors (light sensors, motion detectors, microphones, etc.) and software, to let musicians use their environment as a way to control the playback of their music.

Furniture music team also include Robbin Daniels, another ICT student at TUAS with whom Shane has been developing musical projects for school over the last 3 years and Kate Black, a business development coach and creator of 3 successful small businesses.

Follow their journey at furnituremusic.co or subscribe to their YouTube channel at youtube.com/furnituremusic

Once upon a time in Romania, two childhood friends met after 18 years, surprised that they both became teachers and decided to go together, save the world and help the kids. No no, actually in real life, when Ramona and Alexandra reunited after almost 2 decades, they started working together in Yuppy Koti Centre, the Finnish inspired kindergarten established in Ploiesti by Alexandra, after graduating from the University of Turku. And that was when GoPPo was born.

GoPPo (or Go Play People) creates multicultural board games for kids designed to increase cultural sensitivity. Their games are designed to be collaborative, therefore everyone wins or loses as a team. In the games, children get to use their language skills and discuss about diversity.

Their business aims to fill in the small gap that Finland has when it comes to multicultural education. Lots of adjustments and changes would be done for a better cultural and linguistic diversity at schools and having relevant materials might be one of them. While providing board games, what GoPPo really offers is a solution. They offer educational materials for teachers, schools and families to target multiculturalism. Education, especially for young children, might be the best way to level up society’s diversity acceptance, and that contributes to solving deeper and more serious issues like conflicts, racism, xenophobia and bullying.

The game will be available in a crowdfunding campaign. GoPPo team is open to collaborate with international companies that want to contribute to increasing cultural sensitivity and associate their name with this project.

Contact: Website , Facebook and Instagram

Ever confused over what wine to go with your certain dishes? Don’t spend time searching for it on Google and getting back multiple opnions from non- sommelier, inexperienced diners. Check out PocketSomm and ask their AI sommelier! Pocketsomm aim to brings the luxury of wine pairing to anyone from anywhere using AI-based solution by offering wine options based on the ingredients in your meal in seconds.

Pocketsomm was born after three friends Tomas Bedej, William Brach and Jacob Pichna, who had known each other for over 20 years since early childhood, decided to move forward with a business idea and make use of their complementing  skillsets and passions. Their team is not complete though, there is still a yet-to-be-announced world-class sommelier. Their business solution is based on some newest machine learning techniques, using data and training of the AI. The team has a lot of great data from a multitude of sources; both on wine and food that they dived deep into analysing and finding the key elements to create the perfect AI. Their sommelier will take care of the AI training.

What special about Pocketsomm is that they plan to license their AI to large players in the wine market who already have audiences and digital portfolios, then having PocketSomm as an add-on on those sites to  boost sales and create better customer experiences. They already identified a list of 70 potential customers for their sales pipeline. Contact them at: partner@pocketsomm.dev

TeamFeedback is a SaaS application for frequent analysis of the situation of project team members, born via real life working experiences when Jakub the Founder, as a Project Manager of a Hackathon,  noticed a problem showing a lack of real feedback. This startup is the result of trials and errors, of several different approaches and ideas before they came up with their current solution – TeamFeedback! TeamFeedback is a platform to frequently analyze the progress of project team members by providing easy, fast and reliable feedback.

Their team currently consists of five people. Jakub is CEO, Project Manager and he's a certified Scrum Product Owner (hence he was able to pinpoint the exact problem in the feedback system in order to develop a solution for it). Daniel, CTO, is an enthusiast of new technologies. He is an Azure AI certified and Java Developer. Others are Adrian - Backend Java Spring Developer, Omar - Full-Stack JavaScript developer and Maciej - Full-Stack Java developer.

Teamfeedback is confident that their solution stands out by being fast and engaging, allowing them to provide feedback on a weekly or even daily, plus an exquisite panel for peer to peer feedback.

Follow them on their Website: - teamfeedback.co (constantly being improved)
Social Media: - https://www.linkedin.com/company/teamfeedback/

Do you usually receive the news about your local art/sport events in a bunch of emails, brochures and wish they could come from one source and updated in real time for seats available/cancelation/possible changes? Let’s checkout Whats Poppin’!

Whats Poppin’ was born after the Founders noticed how small theaters struggled to gain more audiences and decided to build a marketplace where venues can list their unsold seats and people can swipe through shows, sport and arts and similar activities happening around them. Because is it so easy to book a flight, order food or even find a date, let’s fill in the void and make booking for tickets and keeping people up to date with current events easy too!

Their  Founders Jan Talar and Max Dahlen, two passionate adventures, have background in Hospitality, techology (Jan) and Leadership and Service Design (Max). Their working experiences in various companies also add in and make it possible for them to start a company from scratch.

Whats special about their business is that it puts the ticketing more in the hands of the venues so they have more control with how they maximise capacity, as well as finally giving people a platform that looks to show them all the possibilities and great things in their area. Let’s use technology to attract new crowds, now rememeber to check whats Poppin’ today!

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