Pioneering Education, BioTech, and Blockchain [Podcast]

I’d almost succumbed to ‘peak-startup-conference’ fatigue already this year, but dragged myself through flight delays to Vienna and the Pioneers conference, where I not only had a wonderful time, but it restored my faith in startups. Here are some of the companies I spoke to and what they’re working on.

Oculyze

Listen at 00:00

They started by helping brewers analyze yeast and are now moving into AgriTech. Oculyze combines a smartphone accessory with image recognition smarts to provide an affordable and flexible microscope solution.

Pepticom

Listen at 16:43

I don’t pretend to fully understand what a peptide is and why it’s useful in medical and pharmaceutical use cases, but discovering them is traditionally a long and expensive process. Pepticom use AI models to assist in the process, trialing potential structures far faster than a human ever could.

Robo Wunderkind

Listen at 33:40

If you read my article on teaching children to code then you’ll know that I’m fascinated with products that aim to help people learn programming skills. In the months since that article, I have discovered a half dozen other projects that I need to add. Robo Wunderkind follows a well-established ‘blocks’ path that is famous in Children’s toy design and also learning robots but makes the connection and pairing of the blocks more straightforward than any other option I’ve seen or tried. It ships with 15 sensors, and a usable app for connecting and programming the blocks and sensors together.

And, in part 2…

Salix

Listen at 00:00

I find Blockchain one of the most fascinating and promising technologies of the past years, misused by many, but in the right contexts, a ground-breaking technology. Salix is in early days, taking influence from asset tracking projects using blockchain, but instead applies them to chemical engineering, specifically odors.

ubirch

Listen at 09:02

Combining Blockchain technologies with another cool technological term, IoT, is ubirch. They aim to add trust and tamper protection to the myriad of sensors that are (and will be) sending data around the globe. By using a cryptographic pipeline that leads straight to the Blockchain, their platform creates a method of checking that data is from the source and form expected.

Fable

Listen at 30:19

And finally, one more from the educational robot camp, but something different. Many other robots designed for children tend to be block shaped, not much like robots in industrial and commercial contexts. Instead Fable has created robot parts and sensors that are like a cuter version of something you would expect to see on an assembly line. They are rugged, click together to create wondrous creatures, and use a scratch like application to program them.