WT Innovation World Cup: Heroes of the Year announced

StretchSense is proud to announce we are finalists in the WT Innovation World Cup!

Selected from over 500 submissions from around the globe, an international jury judged StretchSense to be one of 20 “Best of the Best” most innovative wearable technology companies in the world.

But that’s not all! We are doubly proud to announce that Heddoko, with their 3D sensing sports garment based on StretchSense technology, is a fellow finalist in the Sports & Fitness category, congratulations Mazen and team!

The finals will be held at one of the biggest wearables conferences of 2015, WT Conference in Munich. CEO Ben O’Brien will be there representing StretchSense and to showcase the latest in stretch sensor innovation.

Lessons from Brazilian Jiu-jitsu

Last Saturday I earned my brown belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ). BJJ is a system of ground fighting in which a smaller weaker opponent can beat a larger opponent using leverage, technique, and conditioning. Just as important as these “technical” aspects are the philosophical or “moral” aspects of BJJ – honour, courage, and loyalty .With the right combination of both BJJ is an extremely effective martial art. So can these principles have application in business too? I think so!

Honour: If you are honest and ethical it sets a standard for those around you, builds trust, and minimises the legal overhead in business transactions

Courage: Tough business decisions requires courage. Usually you know exactly what you have to do and in your gut you know what you will chose. But you want to procrastinate and are scared of a person or the consequences. Find the courage to act.

Loyalty: A start up is a fight. You need to be able to trust and rely on those around you. People will try to drive a wedge into the company on a daily basis. You need to be strong and stand together.

Leverage: Find ways to make every hour you work go further. Exert effort in key places: a few well spoken words to the staff; going after the right contract; getting the key piece of equipment. You can’t win unless you work with leverage

Technique: Knowing you need to use leverage is one thing, actually knowing how to use leverage is another. You have to get out there and start accumulating experiences and techniques in business. If you don’t you won’t learn the hard lessons that enable you to apply leverage. There is no substitute for time on the mat.

Conditioning: Look after your body and mind. You must test it often so that you say sharp, but you must also rest appropriately too. Find the balance.

Thanks to Professor Douglas Santos, and all my training partners at DS Team!

– Ben O”Brien

How to raise money

Credibility: We just raised a seed round.

When we started trying to raise money we thought the model was:

Have a great idea.
Write a business plan
Ask an investor for money
Get funded

I thought that the difference between success and failure was the quality of the above. If you are rejected you go back and do it again. Refine the idea. Write a better plan. Find a different investor. Etc…

But this is poppycock.

No matter how much you refine this process you are optimising for the wrong thing. Why? Because real companies are not evaluated in this manner. The soul of a business resides in your track record, your credibility, and your ability to execute. If you want funding you should:

Form your team and incorporate your company
Grow your business with real revenues (or users or whatever)
Partner with investors leveraging their money to capture bigger opportunities
Get funded

See the difference? With the first approach it is impossible for an outsider to know if you have the chops for running a real business. With the second approach they can now tell that you are a survivor, you can hustle, there is a market, you don’t give up, and you can execute on a plan.

The pitching process becomes a discussion between equals. You are simply working out if a partnership will enable both parties to cash in on a huge opportunity. Once you have this mentality investors become customers. Work out how to deliver value to your customer and you will close any deal.

There is heaps of advice about this topic out there. Your job is not to work out the rules of the investment game. Your job is to make a successful company. Remember the difference.

– Ben O’Brien

Smashing Vases

We closed a contract to smash 4 vases – one per week. We drew up a plan, placed our orders for sledgehammers, practiced on pumpkins and got to work. The sledgehammer was a dull arc in the sunlight as it descended on the first vase. We checked the size of the pieces and verified sufficient granularity to proceed. We had to get a slightly larger sledgehammer, this time with a mahogany handle, but soon vase number two was crashing to the ground. We filmed the destruction of vase number three – the lighting was amazing and we even had little chunks of vase spinning towards the lens in slow motion. We showed the video to the client who loved it. They said we had over-delivered and our cinematography was first class. They were excited to see the final vase smashed to pieces!

But then something went wrong. I went away for a week. When I came back the 4^th vase was sitting there and my engineering team was smashing away at the third vase. I asked why and they replied “the fragments aren’t small enough so we bought this great compactor to really grind the pieces down!” I look over and sure enough one of them is vibrating away on top of a pile of powder. The project was running late, resources were being spent on a problem that didn’t exist, and morale hit rock bottom when I told them they were wasting their time.

What went wrong? I didn’t set the high level goals clearly enough, the team were chasing perfection, and there was a communication barrier between the client and the team which caused a diffusion of urgency and misunderstanding of priority. Set goals, stamp out perfection, and get the team talking to the customer!

– Ben O’Brien

How my smartwatch helps my work life balance

A few months back it was my birthday so I bought a Samsung Galaxy Gear 2 smartwatch. It has a camera, speaker, microphone, and itty bitty touch screen. After a few months of playing I discovered 3 really cool functions that actually get used, and one blockbuster function that has changed my life. Bring on the list!

Baby camera: The camera is a great way to take photos of my 6 month old baby daughter. She stops and stares at a normal camera or phone put in her face, but the smartwatch lets you catch the sweet moments on film.
Car kit: Just talk normally and the microphone and speaker on your wrist acts like a car kit for your phone. There is no need to take hands of the wheel and no need to hold a phone. Fantastic!
Notifications: You would think that having notifications on your wrist would be more intrusive, but actually it is less. When an email or SMS comes through you glance down and instantly triage the issue. Nine times out of ten you maintain flow and keep working on whatever you were doing.

So what is the “blockbuster” function?

I started to associate work notifications with my wrist. Unexpectedly once this association formed I found I could disconnect by simply taking the watch off. Because phones are used for play they cannot be so easily turned off. But with a smartwatch you can turn off by taking it off. Think about winding down at the end of a long day by undressing from your suit and putting on sweatpants. We can exploit the physicality of wearable technology and “undress” from our smartwatches to achieve a proper work life balance.

It’s how you use it that counts!

I love my job. I’m doing something I love, something I’m passionate about, and I’m doing it with an incredibly talented group of people who feel the same way I do. In anything new and exciting the road is inevitably bumpy, but if you are doing something meaningful and you learn to adapt to the bumps, it is this collective belief that gives you the momentum to keep moving. More importantly it drives innovation because you know that overcoming the bumps is worth it and there is always a way. This is doubly important in a high tech startup! The whole point is to push the boundaries.

So what do I believe in? Technology enriches our lives, gives us access to new information, entertains us, helps us work, it is so much a part of our lives that it would require wholesale change to our way of life to give it up! But right now it can be isolating and invasive. Take smartphones for example, who hasn’t been left hanging by someone who temporarily checks out of a conversation to check their email or text messages, or done the same to someone else? The beep goes off and we check it without thinking. Technology competes for our attention at the expense of the real world.

I never want technology to stop moving forward, the tools and creativity and new perspectives that come out of innovative processes simply make our lives better. What I DO want is a future where I’m not at risk of missing out because I was too busy looking at a computer screen, because I was too busy not being present. I want the best of both worlds. StretchSense is the beginning, but boy does it give me goosebumps thinking about the future ahead!

Todd Gisby | CTO

University spin-outs are beautiful butterflies

Two popular ideas about university spin-outs annoy me:

I feel safe in the university so I want to run a company with my research career as a safety net.
Universities are slow, bureaucratic, and political, I would never do business with one.

These are stupid.

Universities are good at some things and bad at some things. Entrepreneurs are good at some things and bad at some things. These things aredifferent and real spin-outs take advantage of this difference. So what happens in reality?

Universities are good at providing resources, mentors, facilities, money, education, and shelter. They are suited for the incubation of ideas and individuals too soft for the real world.

Entrepreneurs are fast aggressive, focused, and commercial. They are suited for taking an incubated idea out into the world and coaching it through the many knocks along the way.

In reality the job of the university (regarding spin-outs) is to support and train entrepreneurs until they are ready to move into the “real world”. The job of entrepreneurs is to learn, move the company out, and finally return value to the university and society.

This is the best of both worlds.

StretchSense stayed in the university while we were inexperienced and our ideas were raw. Over time with university resources, mentors, and money, we became increasingly confident of ourselves and our business. When the time was right we formed the company, initially incubated in the ABI, and then grew it until we had our own facility. We were out and standing on our own two feet.

It worked for us and as far as I can tell this hybrid process is what actually happens. Sure the transition from caterpillar to butterfly can be confusing at times, but that’s life, it works, and we should celebrate it!

WTpicnic

StretchSense is hosting a wearable technology picnic next week. This is an informal get together for the local community to talk, network, demo, and have fun. It is a “picnic” because our friends in the northern hemisphere are enjoying summer at the moment.

Why is StretchSense hosting a networking event? There are so many functions you can go to. You can spend just about every day visiting a party, conference, workshop, or booze up but these events are formed around certain topics. StretchSense is hosting this picnic so we can pick our own agenda suited to our own markets.

Because real business is creating a platform for serendipity. If you constantly find new connections, make introductions, pay it forward and put yourself out there, you will make opportunities. We are hosting this picnic as a networking opportunity, but also as a challenge.

I challenge every attendee to set up their own event. Pick a cool theme that aligns well enough with your business to deduct, but is loose enough that you will attract weak links and uncover serendipity.

Real business is also about collaboration. We need to find our place in the ecosystem and trust others around us. It is no good landing that big order if your suppliers can’t scale, if your bank manager doesn’t know who you are, and if you have no talent pool of staff to tap into. Networking events are the firmament from which this capability springs.

Since it is a wearable tech picnic I should probably say something about the space. Wearable technology is booming. It is the buzzword of the moment and the globe is frothing to find business models, use cases, and technologies that make sense. This kind of thriving uncertainty is perfect for reaching out, making links, supporting each other, and growing together.

Scifoo Part 2

1. Scifoo WAS AMAZEBALLS.

2. Twitter is a narcissistic waste of time. Actually it is an amazing platform for letting groups of strangers spontaneously form around an issue. For example, I wanted to meet with people for a beer beforehand, but didn’t know anyone. Searching on twitter for “scifoo” revealed there were people meeting by the hotel pool. Converted!

3. Everyone was spectacular. You meet this introverted scientist who talks about his latest quantum this, or cosmological that. Can you work out that he sold a 10M copies of a book on cats?

4. An astrophysicist lamented not bringing a telescope. So one of the organisers says “Google needs a telescope” and buys a 10 inch telescope on the spot and we start looking at Saturn!

5. Google provided unlimited food, alcohol, and ice cream. Everyone got a smart watch.

6. The toilet seats were heated and there were little fake campfires to sit around. The campfires and the toilets were in different locations.

7. The best talks featured:

a. Building a telescope for finding non-equilibrium chemistry (life) on other worlds.

b. Spending 2 months a walking a backhoe 50 miles through the Sahara desert because of a broken axel.

c. This guy who really loved fungi.

d. Evolving robots!

8. The format was really effective for seeding discussions. I used it to explore the question – would you wear wearable tech?

9. I learned that introductions should be a striptease. For example:

What do you do?
I make rubber bands
There must be a trick…..
Do you know what a rubber band is?
Yes
Do you know what Bluetooth is?
Yes
We make rubber bands with Bluetooth.
I knew it! So what do they do then?
Blah blah blah.

10. I would kill to go again.

Scifoo

I am hopping on a plane to Scifoo in a few hours.

What is this?

Scifoo is an “un-conference” put on by Nature, O’Reilly Media, Digital Science, and Google. They invite between 200-300 people every year to the Googleplex and talk about everything.

No. Really. Everything. There are proposed sessions on astronomy, politics, engineering, economics, ethics, art, education, computer theory, disease, maths, lobbying, and magic. That’s just scratching the surface.

The format?

We show up at Google. Talk about what we intend to talk about. Talk about it. Talk about the process of talking about it. Talk about it some more. Then talk about all the things we just talked about.

I think I have died and gone to heaven.

What’s the point?

The top minds on the planet all in one place having an intellectual orgy? If you have to ask stop reading right now and go drag your knuckles through the cave back to your uncooked protein lying bludgeoned on the floor.

What’s my plan?

Meet everyone. I want to learn about the most esoteric subjects, I want to really understand if calcium had a role in the development of macroeconomic theory in the 16^th century. I want to introduce the world to StretchSense and our vision of the future. I want to leverage minds wiser than mine to learn how to truly promote scientific and technological concepts into the classroom, the media, and the marketplace.

Blog. Scifoo runs for 19 hours a day but I am going to valiantly try to keep a diary and communicate my experiences. I think people will be interested and it will help consolidate my thoughts. Maybe I need to take a breathalyser and chart my blood alcohol content next to each post….

Am I excited?

Yes I am excited.

http://www.digital-science.com/sciencefoo/