Entrepreneurs working on the Internet of Things, or even the Internet of Everything by now, you’re in luck.
A leading international company like Cisco, which was once a startup too, is keen to lend a hand to entrepreneurs who are working in this area.
Specifically, it was the CISCO Spain team that made Spain the pioneering country to launch this initiative. Cisco has been organising big events for tech entrepreneurs for years, but not so specifically focused on this field.
Instead of going it alone and setting up a call for projects without looking outside, in my view they chose the perfect partner: the Fundación Inlea, which also runs the LinktoStart programme.
So a few months ago Guillermo Marqueta, director of Inlea, called me to organise the #CiscoSpainChallenge over a weekend at garAJE.
Panoramic view of the garAJE
It’s 3 intensive days to work on 5 selected projects, which are developed and analysed in detail so that they can see the light of day. The great thing about this event is all the expertise of the Fundación Inlea and its LinktoStart programme, which has been taking projects from idea to market for 6 years.
The projects battling it out are:
- SParking, a solution that connects free parking spaces with our smartphone
- eThing-net, home automation to control electricity and water consumption in your home from your mobile
- Intelligent Retail, big data to help shops sell more based on their stock and other data
- Smart-Memory, analysis of household consumption for the early detection of Alzheimer’s
- SmartPacking, a device that tells us about our shipment: temperature, humidity, knocks, position.
It isn’t like the classic iWeekends where the teams start working flat out as soon as they’ve been put together; here development doesn’t start until the first training session has been delivered.
Each stage is preceded by a tailored bite-sized session: the Internet of Things ecosystem by the Cisco team, the first pitch, business models (the canvas), the MVP (minimum viable product), the project retrospective and the elevator pitch. The star speakers were Mario López de Ávila, aka @nodosenlared, and César García, aka @elsatch
Guillermo Marqueta of Fundación Inlea
There was no shortage of icebreakers and de-stressing activities either, such as building the tallest tower out of spaghetti, string and marshmallows, the fishbowl, games of table football, power naps on the garAJE’s beanbags, a few beers…
This whole process is supported by more than 10 mentors from the CISCO Spain team, Inlea and the Colegio de Ingenieros de Telecos (the Spanish association of telecommunications engineers), so the projects get tremendous feedback from people in sales, marketing, operations, finance, development, entrepreneurs and executives.
@guillemarqueta giving a training session to mentors at #ciscospainchallenge @cisco_spain #coitt @InleaFoundation . Go! pic.twitter.com/iYt9evgYQ3
— Xavier Simo (@xaviersimo) March 29, 2014
It was a weekend of very hard work, but it flew by thanks to the great atmosphere. The winner will get the support of the LinktoStart programme and will go to CISCO CONNECT, and I’m sure the others will also make it thanks to everything they’ve learnt.
Don’t miss the next call: follow both Cisco and the Fundación Inlea.
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