The European Maritime Day (EMD) is the annual two-day event during which Europe’s maritime community meet to network, discuss and forge joint action. It targets maritime professionals, entrepreneurs and ocean leaders.
This year the event will take place on 16-17 May 2019, and it will have a special feature: Pitch Day for Bluetech Accelerator applicants.
The Event
European Maritime Day gathers all the stakeholders of the maritime economy in one place, to join together in discussing the future and finding plans of action to ensure healthy, fruitful and sustainable use of ocean resources.
The events’ themes range from sustainability (with talks on climate action, bioeconomy, and sustainable tourism in coastal areas), to innovation in maritime activities, like shipping and energy production (with panels on different techs – AI, Big Data, etc – and how they can bring new advantages and resources in these activities).
The event will include a workshop on Port Tech Clusters, powered by Bluetech Accelerator, that will explore the role of ports as hubs connecting sea and land and striving to maximize efficiency and support international supply chains. The panel will include Guilhermina Rego (President of Port of Leixões, Portugal), Christine Cabau (CEO / Présidente du Directoire Port of Marseille Fos, France), Carolien Vat-Sandee (Director/ Co-founder at PortXL – World Port Accelerator) and Xoan Martinez (CEO of Fishing Accelerator), and will be moderated by Ruben Eiras, Director General of Directorate General of Maritime Policy of the Ministry of the Sea (Portugal)..
Pitch Day
Bluetech Accelerator is in its selection phase and one integral part of it will happen at EMD. In Pitch Day, Bluetech Accelerator applicants will pitch for the program partners, who are selecting the startups that will join the program. This pitching session is open to all attendees of EMD, which gives these startups the opportunity to be known by some of the biggest players in the maritime industry in Europe.
With startups pitching both online and some opting to join the event for a live pitch, it’s set to be an inspiring event for the development of the blue economy.
The third edition of Smart Open Lisboa (SOL), an open-innovation programme connecting some of the most relevant players in the residential and commercial real estate sector with startups to implement innovative solutions in the city of Lisbon, is currently in its pilot development phase.
This means the extraordinary startups that triumphed in the bootcamp are now developing solutions with the SOL Housing partners to be applied in the city of Lisbon.
Let’s meet some of these innovators and the solutions they are bringing!
Howz
Louise Rogerson, from Howz has a mission: to improve the living of elderly population so they can be independent for as long as possible. #SOLhousing #SmartopenLisboa
Publicado por Smart Open Lisboa em Quarta-feira, 10 de abril de 2019
Louise Rogerson, COO of Howz, has a mission: to improve the living of the elderly population so they can be independent for as long as possible. They developed a solution that measures an elderly person’s home electricity usage via clamps, sockets or from their smart meter and fuse this with data from other sensors. They then build up a pattern of daily behavior. Thanks to machine learning they identify unusual activity or trends and notify the family in case of abnormal activity.
Alfredo AI
Alfredo AI is a Portuguese startup that was born when its founders needed to find a house and couldn't find enough real-estate information. There are now innovating in SOL Housing.#smartopenlx #smartopenlisboa
Alfredo AIis a Portuguese startup that was born when its founders needed to find a house and couldn’t find enough real-estate information. They now provide real-estate stakeholders with a time-efficient and objective way to access the market and each individual property.
Bluetech Accelerator – Ports and Shipping 4.0 has closed its applications. An ambitious and innovative program looking to create a new batch of ocean startups, Bluetech attracted startups from all over the world.
The program received a total of 87 applications, from 29 different countries. Portugal and the United States were the most represented, with 13 startups each, followed by India, with 10 applicant startups, and Germany and the United Kingdom, showing the international reach of the program.
The challenges being tackled
Looking into the four main challenged areas that the program aims to find solutions for, we can see an overall response of more than 30% of startups tackling the challenge (with most startups tackling more than one area).
What comes next
The program has now entered its selection phase – the partners, supported by the Beta-i team, will select among the applicants 40 best startup fits to online pitch during ‘European Maritime Day’ – an annual industry-wide two-day event during which Europe’s maritime community meets to network, discuss and forge joint action. It targets maritime professionals, entrepreneurs and ocean leaders.
What follows the Online Pitch is a Bootcamp, starting on June 24th, where the selected startups will join the partners to prepare a piloting phase.
There has been a constant rise in demand for UX designers, but what really is UX design? And how can it help startups move their business forward?
What is UX?
UX stands for user experience, which refers to a person’s emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service. It includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human–computer interaction and product ownership – which means it includes the online and offline experience of the consumer with a brand or product.
What can we tell if it’s a good design?
From landing pages to store shopping experiences – how do you if your design is good? Well there are a couple of performance indicators you can use:
Sales: Did the experience result in sales? An increase in sales is a good reflection of straightforward user experience.
Retention: Did the customer became a returning customer? A returning customer is a sign of satisfied consumer.
Completion of a task: Did the consumer finish the goal of the experience (be it an application submission, points conversion, video watched)?
It’s important to define how you measure the success of the design – by clearly defining a goal for it that can be turned into the KPI (Key Performance Indicator).
UX for Startups
When building your product, everything comes down to your user experience. From how you approach your clients initially to how their invoice is generated, presenting your startup in the best possible light is essential.
The methods used by UX Designers are, essentially, the methods most lean startups use: prototyping, iterative learning and lots of testing.
These methods allow startups to discover what works before investing lots of money into manufacturing or developing the product. They use the vast amount of user data available (through social media and smart devices) and apply its new technologies such as artificial intelligence, to create valuable insights for the business.
The Value of Design
A report by McKinsey indicates that the companies that succeed in using design as a methodology (who scored in top-quartile in the McKinsey Design Index) also outperformed industry-benchmark growth as much as two to one.
They also noted that to achieve these results is not enough to just hire UX Designers (although that helps!), but also to embrace design thinking throughout the company. The top performers all succeeded in these four main areas:
Analytical Leadership:
To embrace design metrics as heartily as revenues and cost metrics. This analytical thinking can help leaders make decisions based on evidence rather than gut feelings. This type of thinking must also create a deeper knowledge of the consumer (what the consumer needs and not what it says it wants) for all employees, including executives.
A design methodology is not something that you can do just once – it’s something that must be continuously worked on in order to work. The best-performing companies encourage continuous testing, learning and iterating. This constant work helps companies avoid big costly mistakes.
User Experience
The importance of user-centricity, demands a broad-based view of where design can make a difference. This means mapping a customer journey with its pain points and delights, rather than re-using a previous model. The broader view of the consumer journey will demand a break down of the barriers between digital and physical, as the online world gets intertwined with real experiences in the consumers’ world.
In the end user experience is all about design thinking in all areas of a business, which its focal point is to minimize all risks by getting more accurate information to base decisions on.
When starting your own business or growing your own startup KPIs tracking is one of the most important tools you can use to keep your growth on track and measure the viability of your business. We’ll walk you through the traditional and news ways of doing it.
CAC:LTV Ratio
Traditionally, the CAC:LTV Ratio is the most used KPI. This important KPI measures the sustainability of your company. This ratio can be broken down into two metrics:
CAC: Client Acquisition Cost
In a nutshell, this metric indicates how much money your company spends to acquire a new single customer (through marketing, advertising, sales, including salaries and overhead).
Essentially, the lowest the CAC, the better, so a high CAC can mean flaws in your sales process, and a growing CAC can be a sign of trouble (as your CAC is expected to reduce with time as you build your brand), but it depends on the situation: it’s not a problem if you’ve introduced a new product or service with much higher margins. Essentially, following your CAC can help you optimize your return on investment.
LTV: Customer Lifetime Value
This metric measures how long a customer or user remains a client, on average, determining how much business value will derive from each customer.
Combining these two metrics into the CAC:LTV ratio, you get an indicator of the sustainability of a company. For a business to be successful, it must be able to drive more income from its customers, than the money it invests to bring them onboard, and to actually deliver the product/service the customer is receiving.
Although the CAC:LTV ratio has been traditionally used by investors and venture capitalists as a measure of growth and viability, there’s a new more viable KPI that was introduced by Social Capital and is used by Venture City and also by our own team in Lisbon Challenge by Beta-i – the Quick Ratio.
The Quick Ratio
The Quick Ratio is a shortcut metric to define where the product stands in terms of growth. It combines growth, retention and churn into one number that describes how efficiently your product is growing.
Essentially it’s the ratio between the new and resurrected clients over the clients lost in that month. Simply, if a Quick Ratio is >1 the number of users is growing and if it is <1 the number of users is declining.
It’s important to always see the number of lost clients in relation to the acquisition and retention of clients because it can tell you important information to base your next steps on. A company with a high retention rate doesn’t need to make a big effort in sales to keep growing steadily (as opposed to a company with a lower retention rate that would need a bigger client acquisition to keep growing at the same rate).
provided by The Venture City
A lower retention rate means you need to put efforts into bettering your product, and a low acquisition rate might mean you need to rethink your marketing strategy.
The only way to have a high ratio is to keep both acquisition and retention high – that means your product has a healthy life.
The advantage of using the quick ratio is that you can apply it for your product even when you don’t have paying customers yet, or apply it to several parts of the business in order to understand its challenges.
As Eduardo Sette Camara, Lisbon Challenge by Beta-i’s Head of Acceleration put it:
In a gross simplification, sustainable revenue and growth is the end result of capturing value through a great product/service delivery. But if you want to go to the core of what drives that growth, slice up the problem and variables, and really understand what sticks, applying the quick ratio calculation to more and more granular information can deliver those insights. It’s about trying to understand cause and effect.
This is why most VCs are looking into this metric as a way of evaluating the companies they want to invest in – and so should you.
