Just this week I visited ATEC (Aachen Technology and Entrepreneurship Conference) with distinguished members of Momentum Maastricht. The event took place at Schloss Rahe, which was a great choice for this event. The Maastricht delegation was especially invited by the organizing team of AC.E as part of a cooperation of the ATEC and the Maastricht Week of Entrepreneurship.
The conference offered many workshops, lectures, presentations, and opportunities to network. A participant could chose between three tracks, namely Mobile Technologies, Automotive, and Energy.
The Mobile Track
I chose the mobile track and had the opportunity to hear and get to know a very interesting speaker and personality, Prof. Dr. Jan Borchers. His presentation about usability and how the topic should be approached by companies, especially engineers, was funny and very well structured. He gave great examples of Dos and Don’ts when designing a new product and showed the audience some hilarious product design disasters. It was a very valuable speech since he showed the different perspectives (R&D, production, marketing, sales, user, etc.) on product design. Overall, I enjoyed his restless enthusiasm for the topic and the way he talked about it. His presentation was definitely the best of the track and possibly one of the freshest of the whole ATEC. One version of his presentation is available at his departments website.
Other speakers of this mobile track included a representative from Metro AG, who showed a new concept that Metro wants to implement in their stores which makes the consumer’s cellphone center of the focus. With an everyday mobile phone customers will be able to scan their merchandise and use a quick check out. In essence a system that Albert Heijn uses in its stores but instead of the “Albert gun” the cellphone will do the job.
Another presentation was given by a representative of business consulting firm McKinsey & Co. about mobile trends – yes great consultant charts that left no doubt that the proper resources like Gartner, Datamonitor, etc. were harvested in countless hours of all-nighters… To give some credit, it was very informative though if you spoke consulting.
The fourth speaker was an entrepreneur (the first and only one in this track) who presented the history of his chip manufacturing business and had the great ability to convey some entrepreneurial spirit to the group. He shared his experience and gave some great advice on how to get started and how to fight the fear of going on “alone” if you are a non-business student. His presentation had among all the highest perceived value since it was as real-life as it could get and very personal.
The interesting thing about the conference was the schedule. The morning kicked off with the workshops without one real word of welcome (we were greeted very nicely though) and only after lunch the opening ceremony began. This had an up and down side. The good thing was that you started off immediately after you arrived but the downside was that without the opening ceremony in the morning the feeling of a united conference start kind of got lost. The location and the students organizing the event did everything they could to be very hospitable but to me a conference should start with everybody and should end at some point with everybody. Maybe this is just a matter of habit, nevertheless, quite noteworthy.
StartUp MeetUp
In the morning I participated in the StartUp MeetUp session which brought together four founders and their start-up story. Here is my twitter feed from that session to give you an impression of what was said:
Just heard a presentation of Felix from #conangel cool iphone app for conventions and fairs – def. bright future, great job #atec09
Just checked out the iphone app from @conangel after hearing a pres from founder Felix. Awesome tool that every event should use!#atec2009
Joerg Meyer of EUtech biz advice: have fun at work, watch for quality, watch your liquidity, choose your own project, think longterm #atec09
Claus Overbeck from RedTeam Pentesting talking about his biz: playing the bad guys (hacking) and getting payed for it – awesome!#atec2009
Sven Wilhelm from #collectiveiq: you dont have to be an IT guy to run an IT company, find great support, think about your biz model#atec2009
The AC.E Invitation
The organization of the whole event was remarkably well done. The subscription online was easy and quick and the day itself was perfectly executed. At this point I want to thanks all the people over at AC.E – who invited us – to make this such a special, meaningful, and informative day.
The Highlight
The highlight of the day was probably the speech done by Microsoft Germany CEO Achim Berg, who presented some of the latest Microsoft brew, which will hit the markets very soon. The focus of their R&D seems to go further into the direction of artificial intelligence and cognitive learning. He showed some videos and figures which paint an interesting future.
