Surely it’s not enough to think through all the details and fine prints but it’s definitely enough to get the ball rolling and deliver a first prototype. We guarantee that in some two days, backed up with a skilled team and an inspiring community, you can achieve so much more that you ever thought possible.

If the concept of a hackathon is unfamiliar to you, we suggest you take a look at some of the amazing events our Estonian neighbours Garage48 have organized in the past few years.

Below is a collection of feedback from people that have taken part in Garage48 over the past 1,5 years, to let you in on the kind of opportunities collaborative development weekends offer.

Aaltoes Build It, the weekend hackathon to build ideas into functioning life forms, takes place March 9th -11th at Aalto Venture Garage, in Espoo. Sign up: http://build-it.eventbrite.com/

Name: Jevgenijs Kazanins
Team: Campalyst / Garage48 Riga

“I learned that it is totally possible to find dedicated and enthusiastic co-founders right at the event! We didn’t know each other before G48, but it wasn’t a problem in building a very solid team.”

Name: Otto Laulajainen
Team: TurnStartup / Garage48 Helsinki 

“Garage48 was my first take on web development, so I learned a lot even though our project didn’t fly. The greatest learning experience came from realizing how much one team can do in such a short time, and getting some first hand experience of what working in a startup is like.”

Name: Valeria Gasik
Team: Wuppie / Garage48 Tallin

“Being a graphic/UI designer in Garage48 is fun and exciting task. I learned that even though under the pressure one is tempted to select the most obvious solutions, challenging oneself to create something unique really pays off. Working on an idea side by side with the team is a great experience.”

Name: Ilona Mäkinen
Team: Aidbrella / Garage48 Helsinki

“I pitched an idea at Garage 48 last January: it was about something that I had studied in my Master’s thesis. I got a team of some 10 people excited. I thought the group size was far too large, so I almost threw out one of the founders of Skype!

Managing the crazy and hectic working with so many different skills and personalities was at times very challenging,
but I also learned a lot and some I met in Garage48 are still
working with me. You to choose a small topic that can be made
functional within the 48 hours. And if you are debating whether
or not you should attend - I’d say go for it, it is a very unique
learning experience!”

The events are a series of interviews from a variety of topics with selected entrepreneurial individuals and startups. The catch is that these discussions are as informal as it can get i.e. “a microphone in the other hand and a beer in the other.” The aim is to show a different side of the interviewees than you would get by arranging a normal keynote event.

The first Startups Studio will be held at Aalto Venture Garage on the 16^th of February. The first person to be interviewed is Markus Nuotto and he will be talking about the birth of Aaltoes.

Markus is one of the co-founders at Aalto Entrepreneurship Society and Venture Garage. He’s still actively involved with the community and has recently graduated from TKK, nowadays the Aalto University of Chemical Technology.  Markus was the CTO for a startup called Widsen and is now working on another interesting project related to startups.

RSVP for the event on Facebook

Our first event of the year at TaiK was the second round of our Open Mic event concept, where the floor is open for everyone to come and share their ideas and toss them into open discussion. A lively group gathered in the eighth floor art gallery on Thursday to share their thoughts.

The variety of ideas presented were a refreshing reminder of the purely fantastic thought processes that fill the heads of our Arts and Design students. With five different ideas presented, no member of the audience left the event without having learned something new.

Very interesting was the Okinawa Social Network proposed by Sam, a concept that puts importance on the quality, not quantity, of friends. Can we really call all of those 700 Facebook friends “friends” in real life? Sam’s idea puts you into a social network with only a group of five or six people. Immediately the interested audience launched into discussion about how this could be deployed in a very simple and easy-to-use format for, example given, the elderly. Hope to see you at our pitching evening on the 17th, Sam!

Another cool idea, already a reality in development, was the Helsinki Public School – check it out at helsinki.thepublicschool.org.

Before the pitching evening, we still have one Open Mic session at the Aalto Ventures Park in Otaniemi on the 11th of February. Hope to see you there!

Antti Aarnio from the Tuli program was on hand to open the event and tell the audience of the funding that they make available (check out www.tuli.info). The new Aaltoes chairman, Jens Sørensen, also talked to the crowd briefly about Aaltoes and where we are currently going in our event series, and what’s coming up.

Speaking in front of an audience of 50 young students and researchers, Verkasalo spoke about his experiences as an entrepreneur, his companies, research background, and current company – Zokem, which aims to bring mobile analytics to a new level. It was refreshing to hear how Verkasalo has utilised his past as a researcher, both through knowledge and contacts, to monetize and develop his ideas.

The idea behind Zokem and its product interested the audience, who were keen to learn more, launching the Ventures Park stage into a 20 minute question-and-answer session in mid-event! Verkasalo ended his hour on stage with a list of useful tips and truths-based-on-experience for the audience. The lessons we learned today:

1. Be bold and take risks – believe in your idea
2. Forget technology – collect facts! Does it make business sense?
3. Patents do not guarantee anything – execute on go-to-market and sales
4. Team is everything! Do not take the pain alone – be open!
5. Go out and talk – do not hide your stuff! Put yourself and the product into the fire.
6. Don’t run for Tekes and VC money – raise money from customers!
7. Be willing to sacrifice (time, money, leisure, sleep) in order to get rewards

With similar messages coming in from so many directions, it seems quite wise to listen to the ones with existing experience. Especially concerning getting out there and discussing your ideas – that is a very central part of everything we do at Aaltoes. We want you to come out and talk about your ideas, and that’s exactly what happened in the informal mingling after this event. People stayed for a good while to talk, discuss, and exchange ideas.

Check out Zokem at zokem.com, let’s wish them all the best – thanks Hannu!

Communications and objective

One of the problems we have identified is that our communications about what we do hasn’t been working. Many students and researchers now that we exist, but many don’t know exactly what we do. The problem has been that we haven’t had a unified message that we’re communicating.

We want to be able to get the same message through to everyone. We’ve created new objectives and pitches for Aaltoes. One description we’ve come up with is: ‘doing everything we can to help students and researchers create more companies’. We want to keep it simple and understandable. What do you think? It used to be ‘catalyzing high-growth startups at Aalto University’… We thought that was a bit too complex.

About the objective, it hasn’t changed much:

In 5 years we want that at least 1 international successful company has come from Aaltoes. We want to create some stories such as Spotify and Skype. This requires that we create a lot of startups from Aalto.

At the Development weekend

Attracting new students and researchers.

We also want to reach more students and researchers. We have been doing a quite good job with the students, but we want to develop our relations to researchers. We’re going to start a project where we will go meet all professors to identify opportunities for collaboration and discuss how the commercialization of research could be more efficient and what Aaltoes can do. We want to create a lot of events through which student teams can find research to commercialize.

Aalto Ventures Park

One very important topic here is Aalto Ventures Park (Aaltovp). Actually Aaltovp is already open for startups, so people can just come there and use it as their workspace. Now we of course need more startups and people to come there. We’re planning to organize a lot of events to get people to find Aaltovp. One problem is that it’s a bit difficult to get keys for the place at the moment. We’re also renovating the place all the time, and we’re planning to invite design students there to work to make the space work. Do you have any ideas for the space? How do we get entrepreneurial students and researchers to come and work there together?

So if you have an idea or startup you are working on, contact Tuomo Kuikka (firstname.lastname@aaltoes.com) for keys. Or just come there, probably someone will be there to open the door (Betonimiehenkuja 3)

We’ve also started working on other issues such as partnerships, international relations, financing etc.

We’re going to keep you up to date, remember to comment!

Riku

We have just wrapped up our first week back after the Winter Break. Drinks, pizza and pitching – the very first Aaltoes Open Mic gathered some 40 people to share their ideas and build upon others.

Jens Sorensen and Ville Simola opened the event with a brief introduction to Aaltoes and idea generation from Steve Sammartino.

The lively discussion in Aaltoes Open Mic was something that we were especially proud of.  Store reviews, task management, digital paintings and Shanghai train among others spurred some very interesting roadmaps for the ideas. Pick a target group, speak to the users early on, get the team and don’t worry about competition – these were some of the advice from the crowd. Thanks for all the presenters and participants. Hope to see many of the ideas in the future Aaltoes Pitch and Talkoot.

The next Aaltoes Open Mic is going to be organised in TaiK on February 4th, see you all there!