and we're here at the Montenegro Pavilion, hi! Hi, welcome, welcome to Montenegro. And who are you? My name is Dado, I'm an informant here, along with my colleagues and I'm going to show you our pavilion and explain you a little bit about Montenegro and all we have to offer. Over here, you can see where Montenegro is located. It's in the western Balkans area of Europe, right across Italy. And over here, we have the capital, size and population of Montenegro. So there's a lot of flight connections? Yes, so there are a lot of direct flights to Montenegro, especially during the season, during the summer. With the Ryanair or EasyJet and everything? A lot of different air companies. And from Dubai, it only takes five hours to reach Montenegro. So there's a flight Dubai direct? Yes, so during the summer, we have flight Dubai. They have direct flights to Montenegro. If there aren't any direct flights, you can always go from Dubai to Istanbul and then from Istanbul to Montenegro with Turkish Airlines. Alright. Over here is the main theme of our pavilion, Blessed by Nature, accompanied by a great quote from the English poet Lord Byron and some information about Montenegro to bring the idea closer to you. Alright, there's a lot of mountains, right? Yes, actually Montenegro means Black Mountain because all the mountains in the area are pitch black because the forests are evergreen, so they have this lush green color. And there was a story that a long time ago, sailors who were sailing around the coast of Montenegro, they didn't know what Montenegro was called. It didn't have a name. But looking up at the mountains, all they could see was pitch black forests, so they gave it the name Black Mountain and later turned to Montenegro. This over here is our interactive wall. You can place your hand on any of the yellow icons like this, which will activate an animation that adds information for the various locations, first in Arabic, then in English. And for example, this is the Biogratzka Gora rainforest, which is protected and untouched since 1878 and it's a very special forest that has various different types of trees, animals and plants. And it's so special and beautiful that we dedicated this light infrastructure as a tribute to that forest and it's lavish and enchanting beauty. You can see over here. Who's the designer on the... Symmetriku is the designer of this pavilion. And Montenegro is 70% forest, which is why it's very important to us to dedicate a part of this pavilion to those forests. And this is really fully touched. Yes, so all the yellow icons you can interact with. How does it work? There is a sensor that notices your hand when it's near any of the yellow spots and then it activates an animation that is played by a projector and then you can see the information and animations that it has to show. Designed by Montenegro designers? Symmetriku was the designer of pavilion. And over here we have Lake Skadar, which is a very special lake that has over 270 different bird species. This Dalmatian pelican being one of the more famous ones in the area, which is why it's also the symbol of that lake. If we go over here, we have the old olive tree, which is 2000 years old. And it's a very special tree that is protected by the government and still alive and healthy to this day. And there is a story that a long time ago, families who had feuds would come under this tree to reconcile and make peace. It became like a national symbol of peace. Over here is a very famous place in Montenegro called Thara Canyon. And it's the second deepest canyon in the whole world. It's 1300 meters deep and it has 14 rivers flowing into it and over 40 cascades. So it's a very special place. And this over here is another canyon. In this case, canyon Nevidio, which is one of the harder canyons to pass in Europe and its name Nevidio actually means not seen because once you enter its narrow passages and you look up at the sky, you cannot see it. And this is the long beach in Ulcin, which as the name says is a relatively long beach. It's 13 kilometers long and 50 meters wide. It's the longest beach on the Adriatic Sea and its sand is very beautiful and also healthy because it's rich in minerals, and special medicines for specific illnesses. And the last one is this declaration on the ecological state of Montenegro, which was signed in 1991, the year when Montenegro became the first ecological state in the whole world. And it's basically an agreement that the country made that we will do our very best to protect all our nature, keep it safe, green, prosperous and sustainable. So one of your businesses is like tourism? Yes, one of the main sources of income in Montenegro is tourism, the second is agriculture, because we have plenty of different natural resources and beautiful places for tourists to visit, enjoy and vacation in. Over here you can see on this big screen some of the locations that we have to offer. This is the Biograzka Gora Rainforest that we mentioned before. It's a very beautiful rainforest. You can see various different shots.  You can see from all these videos you can see that Montenegro has plenty of natural beauties. That's a very big screen. Yes, we call this the Zen area because it's a very good place to just sit back, relax and immerse yourself in the beauty of Montenegro. Over here are the natural treasures of Montenegro and you can see the various species that we have in the area and how we protect and preserve them. Starting with this one, it's the long snouted sea horse which is found at the Adriatic Sea. It has a 360 vision and when they decide to lay eggs the female can hold up to 1,000 eggs at a time but it's actually the male that does the birth process. She passes the amount of the male and the male gives birth to the babies. This is a Lofchen bellflower found in the mountain of Lofchen in a specific part of that mountain and it's a very special and very rare flower and because it's so rare and beautiful some volunteers wanted to help protect it from wildfires that happened during the summer so they created this system of water balloons that will hang right above the flowers and when the fire reached the balloons they'd pop and the water would fall on the flowers saving them from the flames. This over here is a golden coral which is found in the bay of Kotur and the golden coral is very special so the country decided to help save it by not allowing ships to drop anchors near the coral or fishermen to use fishing hooks because they can get caught up in the coral and rip it apart and for this reason the coral became so expanded and massive that it's really helping the ecosystem grow and the water to be safe and clean for the fish. Here we have the Dalmatian Pelican that we mentioned before that's found in Lake Kotur it's actually a symbol of that lake and our country created this fake nest in the area so that the pelican can lay their eggs in them and be safe in them while in the environment because the lake can sometimes get flooded and usually destroys their nests. Do they know that it's a fake nest? Yes, they know that it's safe they know that it's not made by them but they use it regardless to be safe in them because again, like I said the lake gets flooded and it can destroy their nests and it's made, so this helps them. And this over here is a golden eagle which is a very special bird in our country it's actually on our national flag and the golden eagle has two sides the beautiful and the dangerous side so you see the beautiful side, the dangerous side actually is that it can fly really really high it's usually found in the higher mountains of Montenegro and it can take down an animal twice its size but the beautiful side is when a male and a female eagle come together and fall in love they do this thing we call a wedding dance where they hold their claws together they fly up in the sky and they dance around declaring their love to the people and it is said that once the eagles marry they rarely ever part ways as they're usually very loyal to each other so they stick together till the end and they can take down like a cow or something I'm pretty sure they're very tough creatures but again, very very romantic so we'll give them a pass and over here we have the brown bear and the brown bear is like any other typical bear you'd find in the world in our country it's found in the mountain forests and they are a bit peculiar how many do you have? bears? so there's a couple of them I'm not exactly sure on the number but they're usually found in the mountain forests and they're a bit peculiar so some scientists wanted to see why you see they placed some trackers on a few bears to see where they went, what they ate and what they did and they found that one of the bears actually enjoyed swimming more than walking and another bear they wanted to test out in a special location in the forest they put a trail for the bear to follow but the bear was very suspicious of all of this so he didn't eat any of the food until they put down the cake and the candy and the bear immediately went to the location and the last one is the black pine which is usually found in the Cinnapoda forest but also scattered throughout Montenegro and it's a very tall tree it can grow up to 47 meters high and it's very thick it has a dark green color appearing almost completely black from a distance and here comes again the story of how Montenegro got its name you see over here this is like a shot a different perspective of Montenegro that you'd see from the coast and this is actually what the sailors would see when they were traveling to Montenegro and all they could see was pitch black mountains because of all the dark trees one of them the black pine which is how again we got the name Black Mountain Montenegro you can see the story over here as well here you can see Montenegro the black mountain so when you talk about being in ecological country you're serious yeah actually over here you can see a quote from the declaration on ecological state that we that we signed see it's in 1991 and it's again an agreement that the country made that we will protect all our nature keep it safe, green and prosperous and here which is why yes all our nature which is why we invite you to join us on our sustainable journey and hopefully visit Montenegro soon can anybody just come and live there the citizenship visa currently active if you go to Montenegro you buy a piece of land and make a small donation to the country dependent on the plot of land that you buy you can actually be valid for a passport of Montenegro so you can become a citizen how many years do you have to wait before you can get approved I'm not exactly sure if you're currently in Dubai in United Arab Emirates we actually have an embassy of Montenegro in Abu Dhabi so you can actually go and ask them or send them an email and answer more questions about that more precise questions but I think it's a relatively short process but it has to be checked with the officials because it's the dream of most human beings to live in nature have an harmony with the ecology and everything what's happening in this little store there this is our gift shop and all the items you see here are actually handmade and eco-friendly excuse me sorry so starting from these we have handmade bags who's the designer so they're from the designer so this is the sticker it's a designer we have over here also these are 100% eco-friendly made with material and these are magnets as well also made eco-friendly we also have over here these children toys these are ecological games this is like a puzzle game that helps children use their minds more creatively and think outside the box and while playing with this toy and making all these puzzles they also learn about Montenegro because each image is related to something from Montenegro and teaches them about it and over here we have these 3D printed accessories you have earrings, bow ties, bracelets all made with zero waste material and a machine a 3D printer so these you can see over here they're made by Miju Jewelry it's this lady over here and this is a message that she has for zero waste let me print your jewelry cool very cool initiative these are bracelets solid good quality and it's not all these effects when I turn them in the light and there's zero waste so if you buy them you protect the nature while doing so and here you're giving out some stamps yeah here we have the stamps it's over here you see what happens when you can you stamp something this is the stamp you get when you fly in from outside the Schengen right? yeah yeah if you have a Schengen visa you can visit Montenegro freely and over here we also have one more thing it's related to the business side of Montenegro you can place your hand above this sensor over here so it's COVID safe you place your hand right here you can control this cursor and you can see how Montenegro is improving in its areas of mobility, opportunity and sustainability and for mobility Montenegro is improving by making it easier for travelers to travel to Montenegro one of the ways we do that is adding another airport so we used to have one in the capital now we have another one in Tivat so this increased the influx of tourists and another important thing to know about Montenegro you see Montenegro is strategically located in Europe so if you do business in Montenegro you're not doing business with just Montenegro both with the whole vicinity many friendly neighbouring countries yes so the western Balkans consist of six countries we have Serbia, Albania, Bosnia Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro and they're all very friendly countries working together to make the world a better place not competing so the western Balkans is an initiative to work together and be a better country here we have sustainability and now opportunity and for opportunity we show a few business sides of Montenegro like the GDP income tax which is 9% and we also show how we are helping young entrepreneurs run businesses in Montenegro by creating a friendly environment for start-ups which is helping them try and make their businesses grow in Montenegro and the vicinity how do they come in there and do the start-ups so there are options for people outside Montenegro, there are options for foreigners but there are plenty of like programs built for people to like compete with ideas and the winning idea usually gets a financial help from very different organizations and that usually ends up in being a successful company that is trying to change a certain part of Montenegro so you have like climathons which are like hackathons made for like climate change and you have hackathons as well with different like programs How has it been going the event for you? The expo event? It's great it's really perfect, we have plenty of visitors that are visiting and discovering Montenegro because Montenegro is such a small country not a lot of people heard about it but this is exactly why expo is a perfect and a great event because a lot of people learn about it and hopefully visit and see for themselves the beauty that we have shown them here


And so we are now ready for our third presentation of the day a third presentation of the day Alex from place. So you're from Bulgaria, correct? I'm from Bulgaria, right? So it is my pleasure to introduce to you you're going to be giving a talk on WPA sec Alex Donov. Thank you guys so today I will talk about the WPA sec, which is currently the largest known handshake WPA handshake database So what exactly is this? We are doing collection and processing of a wireless network captures Which are submitted by our users Then we identify these handshakes. We maintain carefully crafted dictionaries to check it down as that and There are contributors that are contributing their GPU power So we can try to crack these handshakes and submit all the results in real time, which are available So WPA sec works with 7 open source tools. WPA sec is also open source and you can see over there Never swipe the life installation and the github Because they refer it So we're using the HCX tools for handshake identification. HCX tools is a very interesting set of tools. It's pretty new from its develop since one year maybe a bit more and The other is well-known Router KGNPC, which works for They find the known PSK generation algorithms Of course the cracking is done with my hash cat and John the Ripper the bleeding version and We use Wiggle thanks to the guys from there for our APG location So the brief starts about the service. We now have more than half a million handshakes submitted As you see there We're doing this since 2011 so this is a The whole Sarah water handshakes You see the raw capture data and our success is around 27% No algorithm Generation was hit in around five persons, but I'm sure we can do better. Yeah And from our craft dictionaries, it's around 10% of the case plays already cracked because as you know This is pretty greedy algorithm to crack and These are the good results there, of course, we are striving for more the new distribution based on Wiggle results You can see that there is almost there is no place where You can't Have handshakes there So I want the people submitting cover users are around 4000 so This is Pretty much very interesting to see how what are using users using on different parts of the world So let's see what we're doing there First we have to get the handshake We all know that how does this happen? Well, I'll be using back in time the old school AP attack to don't indicate active clients and get a shake right This is very good because we can extract the APBS CD and then we can do okay. That's AP but As you also know in crown that there is Or do bad connections transmissions, etc. We maybe in some places have to apply the AP knows correction Of course, we can do better Do AP less attack so we can attack directly the client which is also not so new thing at least and There is no need for those corrections since we control the work for with that client and Here we have to be very fast We have to work better and there is no need for AP knows correction And of course we can leverage some more interesting attacks on high levels The tool that we are suggesting to use for submissions in WPSX is HX dump tool, which is part of HX tools and Since last week it have a lot of more interesting features And of course before submitting to the database, please don't clean work on this and do anything with these captures because You may destroy some valuable information. That's in there The cracking part is also very well known, you know I don't think that I have to explain that but Basically PBQDF2 HHA1 And after that depending on the Version of the WPA we're using the HMAC MD5, HMAC HHA1 or With WPA2 CMAC, we're using OMAC So this is all implemented in the John DeRippa and Haschattings, of course, it's implemented in WPSX server side so we can do it better About the knows correction We all know about the knows correction and we are Very much using it because we don't know to spend years Or many GPU power to crack something that can be cracked in the end We can also try to rely on the replay counter field So we have to know what exactly the knows correction will use but this is Not very good solution because often the APs Keep the same replay counter field. So from the Database around five percent of all these half a million Handchicks that were cracked because not all not everyone of this half million was cracked of course just 27 percent So we needed the knows correction in five percent of these head shakes The most correction can be negative or positive. You see the Persons and can be implemented as a mathematics with Bikindian and Olinian Here you see the results of course a lot of rotor routers MIPS based or Bikindian And it's normal to see around 90% of them Again, of course, HTX tools can deal with the situations and can Reduce this a lot so The new kit on the block the PMK ID I believe autumn rope on the forum post about that and the last version of Hashtag has this additional modes. It was released just before that come So the idea here is that if you have network with roaming enabled and Comparison the I stand out We will have this PMK ID, which is a part of everything information element Here you see the Values that how is a PMK the value of calculated so here we just need the Mac AP Mac SDA and which come from the association requests There is a situation request proper response and you need the message one from the year pool so there is no need for all these Heart to get Parts of the handshakes like before of course there is no need for most correction So if you get the PMK ID You will be on safe side that you're cracking if you have this Dictionary this password in the dictionary you will get it So next part is the hardware what we are using to collect that Of course, everybody builds his favorite girl We are using Raspberry Pi's like this one What you see here is a ink display e-paper display That is not using many More power that we need and with this It's a rather big battery. We can run this for around two or three days without stopping the adapters we're using keys are Running based or anything that works better on the HCX tools you can see you can find the Different types of adapters that we have tested and know that they're working Here you see the open VRT being based device with hardware antenna mods It should just toppling battery power through the all pieces very cheap and of course here It's again Raspberry Pi based Solution but with way better antenna that give us a lot more power Of course you can use whatever You want for this so when you already when you have the captures and The first thing that you have to do is to issue your own WPSX key There is no some Striped registration process you just go hit the issue key and that's it So with this key you can access the results when they're cracked On the server side we're processing with HXP cap tool We check for duplicates Of course, we're doing a lot more like Trying to crack via PN key. So if we already have this Network with This ESID we will get the hit and there is no need for this whole thing to go to the crackers to Exhaust their energy We're doing the we go APG location and of course if we are not having the results from router kick in PC this goes to handshake crackers so the guys that Previously mine coins or I don't know their favorite crypto currency They can spend one of their GPUs to run a health crack This downloads the head shakes and dictionaries and fees them to cracker it starts with the oldest head shakes and with Those teachers that are with fewer words and this gives some fair results for most people What we're doing here is because we have so much handshakes. We're doing we're doing the ESID combine so we are fetching all Networks that have one and the same ESID So we are doing the heavy part of PPTDF to just once and We are talking with our dictionaries The other part is automatic dictionary count because if you have very powerful GPU For one of these small dictionaries that we see for our one million word count in it You are spending around 30 seconds to initialize the GPU and after that for example three or four seconds to Push the full dictionary there. So we are combining dictionaries automatically So it's killing the pending count number of GPUs we have and the GPU power With the one something is cracked You're accepting one or more PSK by hash or boy hash of the network or the BSID We are doing the validations as far as we can And in the real-time we generate these cracked txt GZ dictionaries over there Okay, it's over there. So it's real-time. You can get every password that has been cracked Yeah, and there is a separate dictionary that is For those that are coming from route or cake and they're separated because most of the time they look very Random things, of course, they are not so random. That's why they get to the route or cake in and But they are not really interesting if you want to use this dictionary for your your own assessments so What we've learned up to now There are a lot a lot Vendors and ISPs that you're still using the fault BSAD SAD based our glory terms in database. There are a lot of these hidden and we hope to get them revealed To identify this and continue for that There is a lot of that Going to In this part a lot of people get the rotor firmware catch it and try to find these default algorithms and with this With the WPA Sec results we are validating their results and It gets pretty interesting. I will develop of course developing such a tool like H6 tools gets We hit a lot of things kernel and driver books. We try to fill as much as possible Bugs on a lot of them are already are already fixed. So this is a good thing for everyone that is using such a hardware We also identified some optimizations and improvements in the hashtag in general variable variable and help you Get to see it. Those also those by them And in the end the WPA sec is very useful as awesome sauce because For example, you're doing a remote penetration test on some bank You also can go on WPA sec and on we go see what are the networks there After that go to WPA sec and see if somebody already captures some natural hash there so From now on you will be Way further and you already have something to work on and to try for password reuse and etc. And What's next with this project? It's running Some years But I'm sure that there are a lot of more hidden algorithms and we'll be very glad to Check those out The interesting thing about these default algorithms that there is info on them on different forums we can send etc Very very spread and don't really useful When you look for something and I think it this will be a nice place to collect them all and to improve it Of course the web interface I really don't have full screenshot because it's really awful But this have to be gone from 19th and we have to do something better of course It will be nice to introduce your API for the eBc query. So a lot of guys will have The possibility to dig in this database But for now if you have some ideas, I'll be very happy to discuss them. Just drop me a mail and We'll work it out And of course prepare for WPA 3. There are some speculations and I'm sure that We will think of something, but Let's see the first client implementations and server calls so we will See how this happened, but since in 2018 we still fuzz out WEP and WPA the first version. So I'm sure this will not go around soon So thank you guys


All right, there's obviously lots of reasons they can be crystallized into these 10. No market need, right? So selling the wrong product or service. No marketing plan or no budget or too small marketing budget or poor marketing. No clear value proposition, no differentiation versus competitors. Wrong pricing, lack of control over costs. Poor product and service delivery, ignoring customer feedback. Ineffective business model. Personal, right? So you've got this harmony in the team. You've got burnout, lose of focus, this is a passion. Wrong team actually working on the wrong startup. Lack of investment or funding. And then finally losing track of the market, right? Losing touch of that where the market is heading. Today we're going to address the point number two, so marketing. And we're going to concretely look at how do you develop your marketing strategy so that you can do more of the right things for your business to make sure that you make it. So who am I? So my name is Marielle. I know for some people it's difficult to remember, you can also call me Mickey. I head up the EMS, that's my own company I started a couple of years ago. We do marketing for startups, small businesses and entrepreneurs. Everything from branding, websites, integrated campaigns, so enter and service. And I really love working with entrepreneurs and helping them achieve their goals. And besides being basically the founder of the EMS, I'm also an investor through LIC.  So that's a bit about me. Before I continue, I wanted to get a bit of a sense of the room. So who of you is selling a service with their website? Hands up. Okay, one person. All right, so everybody else is doing products, e-commerce. Okay, who's doing dropshipping? One person, okay. And finally, who's struggling getting good traffic to their website? Okay, one person's brave. All right, who doesn't know why they're struggling? Okay, one other person is brave. Actually, it's the same person. So everybody else is fine. In case you're not quite fine, like I said, the objective today is to take a step back and rethink about how do we actually approach this topic of promoting e-commerce or website to make sure that you're actually getting your business in front of the right customer. If you get your business in front of the right customer, you're definitely more likely to succeed. So strategic marketing, that sounds great. But why does it really matter? So if you're strategic in your marketing, you will get clear on your goals, clear on your target audience. This will help you also define the right channels to promote your business. It will help you improve the quality of your website traffic, caveat if you've got a good website, and also, of course, conversions. It will also help you to better optimize your marketing spend and how you're spending that budget. And finally, it will help you to ensure that you're doing more of the right things to basically help your business succeed. So how does it work? Step one, define your objective. The big question, why are you doing this? It seems really obvious, right? But actually a lot of the companies and entrepreneurs I talk to, they go straight to step three, which is, oh, I want to do a Facebook campaign. Great, but why? Is it really relevant for your business? Is it really relevant to your current challenge where you are right now? To understand your challenge, it really helps to look at the marketing funnel and where you are in terms of the journey. So basically the marketing funnel starts with awareness, right? Does your target customer know about your business? Then it's about education. Does your target customer understand what you do, what your business is about? Do they understand why they should go for you? Finally, in terms of consideration, it's also linked, right? What makes your business unique? Why should they choose you? Do they understand your value proposition? And finally, that should lead to conversion, right? To a sale, to a lead, whatever you're currently basically doing in terms of that. Well, this room sales clearly. And throughout all of it, you basically have branding. Why is branding important? Branding helps your customer identify your business and if they also have a clear understanding of your brand, they also understand what your business is about and essentially why they should choose you. If you're drop shipping, which is just one person in this room, this is really important because if you don't differentiate, there's lots and lots of competitors obviously selling the same product. So branding's really important. So all of these are interlinked and it's really important to understand where you are in this journey because if you, for example, get external help or you think about your business and you start promoting it, you would think, okay, obviously it's all about sales. It is at the end of the day, but think about it. If you've just started your e-commerce shop and let's say you're selling a t-shirt and your first ad is, okay, buy this white t-shirt from me, you know, great special price, free delivery, boom, that's it. They come to your website. Done. Does that really work? There are probably 50 other or probably way more businesses selling the same or similar t-shirt. Why do they go for this t-shirt versus another t-shirt? Again, this is where branding and awareness, et cetera, comes in. You need to have a reason why customers choose you versus others, especially when you're in a similar product niche. So when you're starting out with designing your strategy, if you're challenged, if nobody knows your business, you need to take active steps and design your marketing strategy to achieve awareness. Not necessarily straight go into just purely sales-driven things. For example, you can do a very simple test. You can run Google AdWords just targeting your core brand term. Based on that, you will see if people are searching for your brand term. If nobody's searching for your brand term, is really Google AdWords your first point of call or do you really need to educate your audience about what you do and why that's different and unique and why they should choose your t-shirt versus somebody else's? And based on this, based on where you're on the funnel and you will also evolve as your business evolves and grows, you can decide what tactical steps you need to take also in terms of your channels and how you basically deliver your message to engage your customers to do more of the right things. Step two, know your audience. Your business doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your business exists because you have customers. If you don't have customers, you can actually just stay in bed. The objective is to get customers. So who's your target customer? I love to ask this question. It's my number two question. A lot of people tell me, ah, I don't know. And then the other answer is everyone. Obviously everybody wants to buy my product. Well, everyone would be 7 billion people on this planet. Trust me, 7 billion people on this planet are not going to buy your product, sorry. Unless maybe you're Google. And that still excludes children. So not everybody's going to buy your product. If you don't know who your target customer is, how do you know where to find your target customer and how to engage that target customer? If you can't engage your target customer, how can they buy anything you're selling? And if they're not buying from you, how will your business survive? So really you do need to take some time to identify who is your target customer. So take a step back and think about it. What age group are they? Is it women, men? What are they doing professionally? What does their day-to-day look like, right? If you're selling children's goods, for example, who's the key decision maker buying this? It's the mom, right? How do you connect with that mom in her day-to-day life? When does she have time to actually consume what you're selling or think about what you're selling? Is it maybe during the daytime when her kids are off to daycare? Probably yes or maybe no. Maybe she's washing her hair because she's finally got a minute to do that, right? Not too many moms in the room, but I know that's one of the challenges. So really understanding your target customer will also help you choose the right channels. It will help you design the right message and connect with your customer in a more relatable way and make it also more obvious how you're solving a specific problem or need or desire, right? And based on that, you can just become so much more concrete, right? You can save time as well and money by doing things that connect with your target customer because you know exactly who that is and where to find that person. And you know exactly what goal you want to achieve. Okay? So that brings us to channels. It's not about being everywhere. It really isn't. It's about being in the right place. It's not about being in the channel that's hot right now because that's going to evolve every single day. It's really about whether that channel is right for you. How do you identify the right channel? It's really overwhelming, right? Just look at the social media space. There are gazillions and so many more channels every single day popping up. Should you really be on all of them? No, you can take really an active approach, a strategic approach to decide where you should be if you've answered step one and two very well, right? And also if you understand which of the marketing channels really well, right? So if you understand, you want to achieve sales, right? That's your core priority. If you don't make sales this month, tomorrow the lights are off basically, right? So then that's your core objective. Which channel is going to help you do that most effectively in the fastest way, right? Then that's the channel to go for example. Is your target audience also on this channel? Great. Are they consuming that channel in the way that you need them to, right? I.e., if you're B2B business, are people really going to Instagram to find out about, I don't know, what tech platform you've launched today? Probably not. If you on the other hand have a fashion business, probably yes. Vice versa with LinkedIn, nobody's looking to buy clothes on LinkedIn, right? All these things are quite, should be relatively obvious. But it helps to basically understand the channels, understand that each of them are good for something. They're not necessarily all good for everything. Understanding how that relates to your challenges and whether your target audience is there. And then one by one, you can literally become very concrete on where you want to be. So remember, if your channel doesn't achieve your objective, it's not the right channel. If it is not where your target audience is, it's not the right channel. And if your target audience doesn't use it in the way that's relevant to your business, it's not the right channel. So I sometimes have conversations with people that are launching a book, right? And then I ask them, okay, great, what are you doing to promote that? Oh, yeah, I'm starting an Instagram account. Okay, great.  Probably yes, right? So this is just one example, you know, where these things can go quite wrong. All right. Then let's think about creating your message. And this is where you can get really creative. But it's really important to stay true to your brand. And here we're just going to have a quick look at a little video. Let's see if it plays. Are we looking good so far? Do we have sound? No? No sound? Oh, a bit of sound. No, it's always risky playing a video. Yeah, let's see. Okay, let's try again. Are you ready? Okay, maybe we can hear some things. All right. We think first of vague words that are synonyms for progress and pair them with footage of a high-speed train. Science is doing lots of stuff that may or may not have anything to do with us. See how this guy at a lab coat holds up a beaker? That means we do research. Here's a picture of DNA. There are a shitload of people in the world, especially in India. See how we're part of a global economy? Look at those farmers in China. But we also do business in the USA or want you to think we do. Check out this wind energy thing in Indiana and this blue collar guy with dirt on his face. Also, we care about the environment loosely. Here's some powerful rushing water and people planting trees. Our policies could be related to these panoramic views of Costa Rica. In today's high-speed environment, stop-motion footage of a city at night with cars turning quickly makes you think about doing things efficiently and time-passing. The less you think we're a faceless entity, look at all these attractive people. Here's some of them talking and laughing, and close-ups of hands passing canned goods to each other in a setting that evokes community service. Equality, innovation, honesty, and advancement are all words we choose from a list. Our profits are awe-inspiring, like this guy who's looking up and pointing at a skyscraper or kite while smiling and explaining something to his child. Using a specific ratio of Asian people to black people to women to white men, we want to make sure we represent your needs and interests, or at least a version of your skin color in our ads. Did we put a baby in here? What about an ethnic old man whose wrinkled smile represents the happiness and wisdom of the poor? So, what do you think? Is it a good video? Is it a great branding video? The visuals are great, but it's all over the place, right? Today we're doing this, and then we're doing that, and we stand for everything, and we're for everyone, and everybody's represented here. You can't be representative to everyone, right? Not everybody's going to relate to everything that you're doing. You need to take a standpoint, at some point, in your journey, and it might be difficult to do that at the beginning because you're also still figuring things out, but at some point you need to take a brand stand and you need to become clear on what you stand for because that's going to connect with your tongue customer. It takes a bit of guts because it might mean that you're excluding some people, right? Because maybe some people will not connect with your message, but it will make the bond with your customer that this actually resonates with a lot, lot stronger, right? So, the magic really behind branding sits in consistency and clarity, and if you think about the world's biggest brands in the world, that's exactly what they're doing, and they've been doing this for years and years and years, and that is why they are some of the most successful brands in the world, right? Think about Apple. What does Apple stand for? Come, in the room. What does Apple stand for? Think different, design. Maybe it used to be a bit more on the innovation side, but innovation, right? That very slick design is like an experience that you expect when you buy an Apple product, and it's in everything. It's not just your product. It's also the packaging. It's also when you go to the Apple shop, that entire experience. Everything is led by design, right? Think about Coca-Cola. That's, you know, fun family moments, et cetera, right? When you think of Coca-Cola, do you really think of a fizzy drink that's brown and sugary? No, right? Nobody thinks about Coca-Cola that way, but that's actually what it is, right? But because they're telling a story, they're selling an experience, you buy Coca-Cola for that reason, not because it's a brown fizzy sugary drink, not really, right? The same, well, I mean, Google is the champion, obviously, of search by default, but when I ask you, what does Google mean to you? Is it really, oh, yes, Google. That's my search engine. No, Google is because it's fun. It's innovative. It's doing cool stuff, right? It's in Silicon Valley, right? So all of these companies, and these are just some of the examples, right, are really very clearly, consistently across time and space, and of course their brands evolve, but the core of the brand stays the same. And they take a very clear brand stand, and it's not going to resonate with everyone, but it is going to resonate with their core consumer. And what they essentially do is they don't sell products. They sell an experience. They tell a story, a story that you as a consumer connect with. And you know what? You can do that, too. You can absolutely take those principles into your marketing, whatever channels you're using to connect with your audience. And I'm going to show you a few videos of companies that are doing this really successfully.  Video is not the end of all, but it's just to inspire you and just to show you an example of what that concretely means. Before I show you that, what makes a good story? A good story is genuine. It's relatable. It's inspiring, entertaining, or educational. It doesn't need to be all five. It could be just one of those. But these are like five guidelines that you can use to create really interesting content that connects with your user beyond just, oh, I'm selling you a product. Right? So let's look at those examples, as I mentioned. Sound, please. That will do everything. We still have to push forward. Are you ready to shake up the world? Me, too. Me, too. Me, too. How did that make you feel? Anybody brave? Was Google selling you their search engine directly? Not really, by it, but they were taking you through the year's events connecting with you or trying to connect with you on an emotional level. Maybe some of these events have, you know, created an emotional bond for you. And thereby trying to sell their product. I'm going to skip over the next one and skip to the last one, which is a more recent one by Hannigan. It's just one minute. Nico, it's just one line grab. Position. Just one second off first place. No, thanks. Come on, Nico, it's just one beer. I'm still driving. This is an interesting one, right? This is an actual alcohol company or brand taking a stand on drinking and driving. Who would have thought? Did they sell you beer? No, actually, they told you not to drink a beer. But actually what happened is you got reminded of Hannigan. You're probably going to have Hannigan later, right? It's clever. All right, let's talk about step five, implementation. So this is obviously the stuff that, you know, day to day everybody's doing this. So having a well-planned strategy is obviously not enough. You actually need to implement it. So now you're probably going to say to me, what are you talking about? I just spent all this time creating my strategy. Obviously I'm going to implement it. Well, what I sometimes see is people spend a lot of time designing this beautiful marketing plan or business plan and then they put it into a nice folder or they put it somewhere on their desktop. And then it just becomes a bit dusty as they continue with their day to day.  Maybe some of you have faced this. But when you're going to design your marketing strategy, be strict with yourself and actually implement your vision and then really trust yourself and stick with your vision, right? So don't launch your first ad. And then after, I don't know, two hours feel like nervous. I'm sure none of you guys do this, but maybe you've faced a time where you did.   My entire approach doesn't work, right? Don't do that. First, set yourself parameters.  Set yourself parameters and base that on benchmarks in terms of what's the typical click through rate, what's the good bounce rate, et cetera. And then assess your performance based on that. And this is where we come to step six. So based on that, measure, learn, and then adapt your strategy.  It's not working after three times. I'm definitely going to stick with it because this is my strategy, right? No, this doesn't work. Especially with digital marketing, we have the great feature of instant feedback or almost instantaneous feedback after a certain volume. So definitely don't be afraid to learn and adapt your strategy. You definitely have to. Also, especially as your business evolves. But first of all, really do try to stick with and be rigid or be a little bit strict with yourself and do actually implement your marketing plan. After all, you did actually spend a bit of time on it. Right. So these are the six steps to success. We ran through all of them. And essentially that is the key to strategic marketing. If you enjoyed today's session and you want to learn more, I'm doing a workshop on Thursday at WeWork at 6 p.m. It's at the Beach Center. And we're going to go through these tools or skills. So how to create your elevator pitch, how to develop your strategy to find your target audience, the right marketing channels, differential business and also ensure that your business can actually work. So your business idea can actually work. If you want to come along for that, I'm talking to me after today's presentations to get your thoughts. Okay. Any questions? No, we'll do that later. Okay, questions. Please don't ask me technical things about WordPress. New stuff, old stuff. Doing this already. Yeah. Like a course or something? Okay, well that's selling something. Or do people not pay for it? Okay, but the end game is basically for people to sign up, right? Whether people pay for it or not, essentially the objective at the end of the day is the same, right? You want them to convert. And if you've just launched, especially if it's a product or, well, a product or service or a community outreach like this, it's especially really important that people understand what you're doing and how you're adding value and why you're actually doing this and how they will benefit from it. So let's start with that. So you know your goal. You know your target audience, I assume. And then think about what are the challenges of your target audience. And then think about what are the key messages that you can communicate to them first. And then obviously the channels will be relevant to, well, the channels that these guys are on. So I don't know exactly what you're doing, but that's one approach that you can take. But it's really important with these type of products to be very clear on the value that you're providing. Any other questions? Yeah? Yeah, there's actually a lot of online shops that kind of improvise chatbots nowadays to interface with the customers. Yeah. Do you think it has any practicality or is it, you know, does it, is it effective? It definitely has practicality, right? If you're running multiple commerce shops or you have a really big one, it maybe isn't feasible for you to be online 24 seven answering every single question. I think it's always dependent on how good is that bot. I mean, and some of them are becoming really good at emulating how we would be as a business. And then what's really important is to also have quite a clear brand voice again. Like how are you engaging with your customer? So you like your brand should even be trickling down through that, right? So the standard answers, you should really change that to something or it might automatically do that depending on what you have. But if it's manual, you should definitely change it to how you would respond to a customer. So it still feels like a personal interaction. I think to add on, because I'll be speaking on e-commerce at the moment, the statistic is that when you, when you actually have a phone call, right, like a phone number, contact number, or that you call into your customer support line, right? Your conversion rate increases by 11%. That's like what they measure. For my own business wise, I would say it's roughly about 10%. Yeah, and that is a physical number that they can call. So if you have live chat, it will probably at least increase the conversion rate by maybe 70%. I think it's important to just speak and let people know that it is a bot that is not trying to emulate a human. You can sort of say that this is an automated system. You don't expect a complete human response. So at least separate that too. So you're not kind of, you know, trying to confuse people that way. You're trying to sort of confuse people, I guess. I think the chat bot part is just sort of help people when you go have an active live person but because you usually ask the common questions, then it's when you can actually keep them answered and also let them know that this is our human. Yeah, that's good advice because sometimes it feels a bit random, right? What more questions for a start-up business and what stage you should invest in the branding? Day one. Day one. No, not really. I know what you're doing. Yeah, that's heavily on me. Oh, heavily. For full-flagged branding strategy, you give us examples like a Google Code and those big brands, right? I don't know if at day one, you invest a lot on that, so I just wanted to see your opinion on what stage. I know you have to do that. It's not a cup of tea for each and every start-up business. Oh, yeah, so I just want to be very clear.  Please don't do that. So I would say every company grows at its own pace and evolves at its own timeline, so I don't think there's a predefined time. What I would tell you, though, what I mean by day one, obviously you should have a very clear logo and just a brand stand from day one and you should interweave that into your communications and everything you do from day one, right? I mean, for some companies that are doing these big brand activities now, it's just a day-to-day, they have to do that to maintain sales, et cetera, but for some of them, it's also brand refresh, maybe. You know, sales dropped off, et cetera, so there's different reasons why companies do these branding activities, but I would say in the initial stages it's really important to first get your fundamentals right, like get your awareness where it is, get your education where it is so that your target audience understands you, et cetera, and then obviously have the right sales, but in all of it and everything that you're doing interweave your brand. Don't let it be something you do later.  Like your business could take off really, really quickly and then you just had this random logo and then, I don't know, five years down the line, you think, ah, maybe I need to update this logo and then people hate it. You know, I mean, I saw some really bad feedback that Slack recently got, for example, for their brand update. So I would really say, like, spending that initial effort to get that right, it makes a difference from day one. I think for the, when you talk about brand, it's actually more than just the people and all this, like what Mario said, it's actually your experience, when you give the customer the experience as much as you can control it. That is actually the brand. Exactly. That is actually the brand. So are you running the e-commerce, physical product business, or are you running a service business? Providing content. Providing content. Content, yeah. Suspicion model. But I have designed my logo by myself. I understand. But I'm just thinking, this is a state-by-state approach. To begin, I probably invest a lot on branding but then to focus on content creation. But again, you have to keep in mind about the brand strategy from the very beginning that as you said, you can understand what the audience is really into. It takes a long time to corrupt a real effective brand technology. It has to start from the very beginning. You have to start from the very beginning and it will obviously evolve with your business, right? When I say evolve, it doesn't mean, okay, today we talk about X and tomorrow we talk about Y. It needs to be gradual. But you should think about it really from the beginning because if you don't, later when it actually matters, you're going to have to do so much more work to actually educate your audience on your brand.  So how important is it to niche? How important is it to niche? Well, based on today's presentation, well, I would say it is important to niche. But at the end of the day, not every product is going to be extremely niche. I think it's also quite important that you do things or represent things that you like and feel passionate about. For myself, for example, I really like fashion and I'm trying to find my niche or something unique within fashion. That's challenging because let's face it, there's a lot of e-commerce companies out there. But I would just be such a fraud trying to sell laptops. It's not something I feel extremely passionate about. So I do feel it's important to find your niche, but when I say niche, you can still find your niche within a broader category. It could be age group, sports, specific things. But I know there are some people out there that just go for one product and then try to find that winning product and just push that. I mean, that's one approach and I'm sure that works great for some people. But personally, I feel it's quite important to feel passionate about what you're doing as well as having a niche. On that niche, it's easier to target your target audience. Absolutely. Because you know specifically more about that person, so you can only start small. And I guess with a niche, you don't always have to just focus on that niche. It may be your communication strategy, but it's not to say that you don't sell other related products or other related services. Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with that. I have a question. Blackagem is also part of branding, right? Yes, dropshipping. Yes, I know where you're going. Yeah, it's a challenge, right? I mean, depending on what system you're using, sometimes you could communicate with the dropshippers to... I can communicate directly. Right. Oh, okay, all right. I mean, further down the line, I don't know how far you are in this journey. I mean, in the ideal world, you would really introduce your own packaging, all of that from the get-go. But sometimes maybe you want to first see if it works at all, and then maybe do that later. So I understand that chicken and egg feeling completely. That's what I also want. Yeah, so maybe you can ask them to include a flyer or something at least on your brand or some sort of marketing material, you know, come back next time, 10% off, something like that. So I mean, if you're already dealing with them directly, I would ask them to chat with them if that's a possibility. Okay, great. Thanks so much, guys. If you have any more questions, see you later.


Hello friends, I am Sanjay Gupta. I welcome you on Sanjay Gupta Tech School. In this video, I'm going to explain these two patterns. So I will be implementing two separate programs in C so that you will understand how these patterns to print deserts in form of binary on output screen can be implemented. So before starting of the explanation, if you go to the details or description of this video, you will find links of various places. So you can follow them to watch various programming related video. Now I'm going to explain the first pattern. So we need to understand the logic first. So here you can see we have multiple rows, right? And in each row, we have visits, either one or zero. So if we talk about first row, so you will see only one we need to print. Then in second row, we need to print one, then zero. Then in third row, we need to print one, zero, one. So here you can identify a common pattern. Like at the starting of each one, we are going to print one, then zero, then again one, then zero. So it means if we are printing a particular row, so its odd positions will be printing one and its even positions are printing zero. So if we talk about this, if we talk about this row, so you can see odd positions are printing one and even positions are printing zero. So this way we need to identify the logic. So here total two loops will be implemented. So one will be for rows and second will be for printing columns. So now I'm going to implement rows. So this is first loop and this loop will repeat five times because we need to print five rows. If you want to print more than five rows, so here you can place a variable that you can read from the user. Now inside this, I'm going to write one more and this loop will depend upon i because here you can see in each row, if we are on third row, we need to print three digits. If we are on fourth row, we need to print four digits. So the j loop will depend upon the i. So j will actually print the digits and how many digits it has to print that will be decided by the row number will be decided by the i. So after implementation, I will explain you each and every line or step so that you can understand how these loops are working and how this pattern will depend. So now here I'm going to apply one condition. So if condition will be like if j is having odd position, if j is having odd position or value, then we need to print one otherwise zero. So I'm checking if j modulus to double equals to zero. So if value of j is completely divisible by zero, so it will print zero, else it will print one. Then after completion of this loop, I'm going to print new line. So this way this implementation is complete. So now I'm going to explain the complete execution cycle. So starting from here, initially i is one, then control bit transfer here to j loop. So here you can see condition is j less than equals to i and i is one. So this loop will repeat only one time. So value of i is one, divide one by two, so it is not divisible. So control bit transfer to else, else will print one. So this way this one will be printed. Now after completion of this loop, this printer will transfer control to new line. So cursor will be available to new line. Now i plus plus, so this time i will become two and this j loop will repeat two times. So first time value of j is one. So check one modulus to divisible by completely divisible or not. So if it is equals to zero, then it is completely divisible, but one is not completely divisible by two. So again one will be printed. Then j plus plus will take place because this time j is repeating two times. So two modulus two. Now this will provide the material zero. So zero equals to zero will be true. So it will print zero. So you saw j is, j has been repeated two times after completion printer will print new line. So control will be transferred to third line. Now I will again implement so its value is three and j will repeat three times. So first, second and three. So initially it will be one, then this condition will be false. So it will print one. When j will be two, the condition will be true and it will print zero. When j will be three, its condition will be false and again it will print one. So this way based on value of j, we are deciding whether to print zero or one. So if j is having odd values, we are printing one. And if j is having even values, then we are printing zero. So this way you understood how this pattern is printed on output screen with the help of this program. Now coming to the second pattern. So here you will see one more change. First and fifth rows are starting from one, then after starting one, they are printing zero, then one, then zero and then one. If we talk about this second row and fourth row, so they are starting from zero, then printing one, then zero and then one. So it means we need two conditions here, like we are printing odd row or even row and then we need to decide we are printing odd column or even column. So in this, we only decided that rather we are printing odd column or even column because we decided it vertically. So vertically we need to identify columns. So we identified which column we are printing even or odd. But rows are printing similar kind of values. But here each row or you can say even rows are starting from zero and odd rows are starting from one and then they are printing one zero continuously. So this way we need to apply different logic here. So I am going to implement that. So again, these two loops will be enough. But we need to apply one more condition here. So this I is pointing to the row and J is pointing to the column. So if we are inside J, so first we need to apply this. So this if and ends, right. So this is a block and this is another block. So here we are dividing I by two. If I is completely divisible by two, it means we are on even row. Otherwise we are on odd row. Now if we are on even row, so we need to first print zero and then print one. So zero one, zero one. So if we see the column, so odd columns are printing zero and even columns are printing one. So inside this I am applying this logic. If J is divided by two and its remainder is equals to zero. So then we need to print one. So here inside printer I am printing one and else I am printing zero and again implement this here. So if J modulus two W equals to zero. So this is for odd rows. This is for odd rows. So here you can see if J is completely divisible by two then we need to print zero otherwise one. So with this if I am going to print zero and if we write as so here we need to print one. So this way this loop is completed and after this I need to write one print as so that we can print new line and then first loop will be completed. So this is I, this is J, and inside J loop we have two parts so that we can print this back. So now I'm going to explain this. So let's say I am going to print this photo and this fifth row, right. So if I am going to print four, so you will understand one logic if I am going to print fifth row so you will understand another law. So let's say I is four. Let's say I is four and 123, first, second, third rows are already printed for explanation purpose. I am explaining one even row and one odd. So let's say I is four. So J will start from one and it will go to four. So J will repeat totally four times, right. Now, when J is one, let's say J is one. So we will go inside the loop, check this condition. I modulus two. So I is four. It means we are printing even row. So if I is successfully divisible by two, then we need to run this if otherwise else. So in this case, I will be divisible by two. So when I is even, when I is even, so this block will run and when I is odd, so this block will run, right. So I is four. So every time this block will run. And here we need to check the value of J. So right now J is one, which is not divisible by two. So what will be printed? Zero and we want zero. Then J will be incremented. It is two. Again, check this condition. It will be true. It is I is four. So check this J is two. So two modulus two. So this time one will be printed. Again J will be incremented. J is three. So this time condition will be false. So zero will be printed. Again J will be incremented. So it is four. So four modulus two. Result will be equals to zero. So one will be printed. So when I is even, so this will work and accordingly J will be checked if it is completely divisible then one will be printed otherwise. So here you can see on even position ones are printed and odd positions are printed zero. Now this loop will complete after repeating four times. New line will be printed. Then I plus plus and this time I is four. So this time I is five. So J loop will repeat five times. And if J is repeating five times, so every time value of I will be five and five is odd number. So it means this condition will be false and this L block will run now. This L block will run now. So in case of I, if it is odd, so this L block will run. So again, we need to start J from one. So if J is one, so we are on L, so one modulus two. It is not divisible. So it will be printing one. So we want one. Then J will be two. So two, it is completely divisible. So it will print zero. That again J will be incremented. So this time J is not divisible. So again one. So this way all these values will be different. So you can see here, we are printing one zero. Here we are printing zero one. So we are just switching the result according to the value of J. So this block is for even rows and this block is for odd rows. And this way, if you implement this complete program, so this kind of pattern will be displayed on output. So I hope with this explanation, you have understood how these patterns will be printed on output scheme. So if you want to watch more programming related videos, you can go to details and description of this video. There you will find links of various players so you can watch them. And those players are also available on my channel. So do watch them. And I hope you understood whatever I explained in this video. Thank you for watching this video.


My talk is about virtual audiovisual environments for hearing aids evaluation and fitting. During my PhD project in Oldenburg, I helped to develop these virtual environments that are shown here in order to investigate the self-motion of people when listening to in everyday life situations. If you're interested in hearing also the acoustics, you can follow this link to do some videos on YouTube. So we modeled the following situations, the living room where the news was shown on the TV, lecture hall where there was a lecture, a cafeteria environment where there was a multi-talker conversation of people sitting around the table, a train station where there were announcements over the loudspeaker system, a street environment where there was also a multi-talker conversation at the bus stop, and finally a street situation where we measured passive listening of participants standing at an intersection and they were just told to wait there for someone to arrive. This is how it looked like in the lab. So of course the acoustic environment was presented over many loudspeakers. The visual environment was projected on a cylindrical screen. And we measured the self-motion of the participants while listening to the virtual environments with a head tracker and EOG electrodes. So when developing the virtual environments, we showed first that visual cues are important for self-motion. We compared the condition with videos of real persons to conditions with animated characters as shown here. And typical self-motion in such an environment with multi-talker conversation, for example in the cafeteria, looks like this. So plus here is the horizontal case angle of the direction the participants were looking at over time. We see the thin grain lines representing individual data of the participants. As you can see there is quite a bit of variance between participants. But on average they follow the location of the active speaker which is plotted in green. They follow this quite accurately. So this was the condition in the cafeteria with virtual characters. And if we look at the error between the direction the participants were looking at and the actual position of the active speaker, we see that for the video condition and the condition with animated characters that had some kind of lab movement, this is pretty much the same as so here they look about as accurately as the active speaker. However for the audio only condition the error is much larger. So here they don't really follow the active speaker anymore but mostly they're just looking straight ahead. If the animated characters were not moving their mouth then the error was also larger. So we've shown here that visual cues can influence the self-motion and also that they can steer the special tension in this case towards the direction of the active speaker. We've also shown that self-motion can influence the performance of directional hearing aid algorithms by estimating the broadband SNR benefits that different algorithms would have provided in these virtual environments under the self-motion of the different participants. And this is plotted here. So here we see a pretty large range and this is the range over the different self-motion trajectories of the participants. So if the participants were moving they had in one way or the other, this could have an up to 60B difference in broadband SNR benefit of directional algorithms. And this is averaged over the entire duration of the virtual environment. So if we would look at individual time points then this effect could be even larger. We also looked at the self-motion of hearing pair listeners and we found some interesting differences with normal hearing participants in the amount of movement that was done with the head and the eyes. So when looking at a certain direction people typically do part of the movement with their head and part of the movement with their eyes so they don't turn their head all the way. For the young normal hearing participants they did about 46% of the movement with their head. On average the older normal hearing participants did significantly more of the movement with their head meaning 57% and for the hearing impaired participants this was even larger so they did almost all of the movement with their head and about 90% flu. However we did not see a difference in hearing impaired participants who had their hearing loss compensated and were listening to output of an adaptive differential microphone. So the adaptive differential microphone had no effect on the self-motion of the participants. However we have to note here that the adaptive differential microphone has quite low directivity and also the benefit it provided in the virtual environment was quite low. So for algorithms with a higher directivity we do expect them to have an effect on the self-motion. So we showed that with the developed methods we can assess listening behaviour in more ecologically valid conditions in the lab by adding critical cues, increasing the acoustic complexity and including head movement. So this can at least partly explain the difference in benefits that was found and reported in literature between standard lab situations and real life. Then we have also found some points of improvement in developing these virtual environments. So for validation we checked if the environments would be realistic enough to allow participants to imagine being in the real environment. So we did this with a presence questionnaire and the participants reported it. At least to some extent they had the sense of being there in the virtual environment. And also the realism of the audio was judged pretty good by the participants. However for the video realism they said this was somewhat unrealistic. In the interview we asked specifically which points they felt were unrealistic. And they mentioned that objects especially the close objects looked unrealistic. This is probably because of the shading in the virtual environment. They mentioned that in the cafeteria the persons were mumbling and they wouldn't talk like that in noise. This is known as the Lombard effect that usually in the presence of noise people increase their vocal effort. However the conversation recordings were not quiet and this caused a bit of mismatch or even though the SNR was realistic it was still a bit too unintelligible. So this would have to be improved in maintaining the virtual environment. They also mentioned that they cannot liberate. This was because the lip-syncing model was a pretty simple model that also worked in real time. And currently there is work being done to approve this in Oldenburg. This is a PhD project of young Oldenburg and I'm sure that more institutions are looking into this. They also mentioned something about interaction. For example in the cafeteria environment they normally would just ask the persons to speak up. Of course this was not possible here. But it's also shown in literature that interaction can also affect the self-motion. So this would also be a factor for improvement. Finally we did not do yet comparison with real life situations. But this is currently going on in Oldenburg. So far the work I've been doing in my PhD project currently I just started at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam with Marie Curie fellowship. And in this project I am looking at improving the hearing device fitting with virtual reality. So I'm investigating if we can use the virtual environments in the clinic for the fitting of hearing devices. So the problem that I'm looking into is that the current fine-tuning process is based on trial and error. The audiologists make some changes in the settings of hearing devices and then the patient has to go home and try out these different settings. And this is of course pretty time consuming. But with virtual reality new settings of hearing aids and cochlear implants could be tested right away in relevant everyday life situations in the clinic. And by using the pairwise comparisons for the fine-tuning, the settings could then be better adjusted. So as I said I'm doing this project at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam with André Goedde-Geburen. And also the University of Oldenburg is involved as a collaboration partner with Volker-Hommel and Iso-Krim. So what do we have to do to implement these virtual environments in the clinic? First of all, we have to present them using VR glasses and a loudspeaker array. So this makes it much more portable. We cannot set up such a big cylindrical screen in a clinical environment. And loudspeakers are still needed because we are presenting it to people with hearing devices. So in order to do this we also have to switch to a different game engine. But the good thing about this is that this also improves the shading of the virtual environment which could help to make it more realistic. Another important point is the communication between the patient and the audiologist. This should be possible while being in the virtual environments because you cannot just take off the VR glasses all the time. That would be pretty annoying. And this would of course also add some interaction to the virtual environment which could help for the realism. Another important point is that we have to reconsider the selection of relevant situations. So Karolina Smates and co-authors have this publication on which listening situations occur in the daily life of hearing impaired persons. And they show that not only speech perception is important, so speech perception is here. Speech communication is above 31% of the cases. But there is also focus listening situations which partly speech but can also be music and non-specific listening situations which is monitoring the environment or passive listening. And we also did a survey with patients where they had to indicate in which listening situations they want to improve their hearing. And speech situations are mentioned most but they also mentioned non-speech situations for example listening to music. Also participating in traffic is mentioned quite a lot and monitoring the environment so that they know what's going on around them. So these are important situations to include also for the in the fitting process. And finally there are more and more hearing aids and also cochlear implants with automatic recognition of listening situations and the selection of the corresponding programs. Of course if we are fine-tuning the hearing devices we should fine-tune each program in the corresponding situation it was intended for. In order to do this I will ask hearing aid manufacturers for more information on these programs and which situations they were intended for. So if you're listening please go and contact with me. Then of course we also want to evaluate this if the virtual reality really adds something to the clinical practice. We think that it could make fine-tuning process faster because we can reduce these periods of trying out settings at home. We can increase the patient involvement which hopefully also makes them more satisfied both with the fine-tuning process and with the hearing devices. And we hope the hearing devices will function better. And in order to test this we also need more ecologically valid evaluation methods which is a challenge for this project. So this is what are we working on for the next two years and I hope that next time I can report some progress on this project. Thank you for your attention.


Hello Earth citizens. My name is Courtney and I'm a brain education instructor in Boston, feeling slightly vulnerable today as I'd like to share with you a little more about my life and my healing story of finding and practicing brain education. There's a lot we still don't know about the brain, but I found in some ways we can compare it to a computer. We install the software, input the programs and depending on the nature of those programs, the way we experience life can be very different. Whether we're conscious or not, we are constantly informing ourselves of our reality.  These programs greatly inhibited my ability to live my life with joy. I put a lot of effort into reinforcing self-limiting beliefs about myself, beating myself up with negative self-talk. I even had multiple journals with lists of reasons why I should hate myself. So a big part of my story includes the awareness of, unraveling of and undoing of that and the healing and reprogramming I've had to do to get myself mentally where I am today. In fact, the reason I know brain education works is because I did it already, just in the opposite direction. Instead of creating a positive, productive and healthy relationship with myself, I used my brain's programming to hate and hurt myself. And I got so deep in it that there were points I thought I would never get out. And I even considered taking my own life. I really sabotaged the full potential of my brain. I don't remember much from my younger years. And I learned later that people with anxiety tend not to have a good memory because we're never fully present. When you live with an anxiety disorder, you tend to live in the future, worrying about the next thing. And if you're not mentally present, and when you're running your own negative commentary when other things are happening, it becomes pretty difficult to remember things accurately. But from an outside perspective, you could say, I had a great childhood. I had two very caring parents. I had a roof over my head and I never had to worry where my next meal was coming from. In fact, having a privileged upbringing often made me feel like I didn't deserve to be depressed. And I added that to my long list of evidence of why I was bad and wrong. I taught my brain to always look for and gather evidence towards my case of self-hatred. By 14, I had a therapist and over the next few years endured a variety of psychological testing and a myriad of antidepressants that sometimes left me feeling catatonic. But besides being diagnosed with chronic depression and an anxiety disorder, they couldn't find anything wrong with me. And so I spent most of my life feeling deeply misunderstood with the feeling that no one could help me, that I was unfixable. I was sensitive, very sensitive. So even the slightest criticism or feedback shook my entire system to my core. Even silly things that seem to roll right off the other kids like being told to be quiet. I remember getting feedback in two contradicting ways growing up. I was either too bossy or too quiet. I hated being called bossy. So as I grew older, every time the bossy girl came out, I shushed her, shamed her, added that to my list. And in doing so, I really killed the fun part of myself for a long time. To add insult to injury as I got older, being quiet was often interpreted as being arrogant. And I remember wanting to scream out to the world, how can I be arrogant when I hate myself so much? One of my first memories was being held back in the first grade. I remember sitting in the room with my teacher and my parents. And I don't remember any of the words that were said, but I do remember that feeling. At first, I was confused. Was I the only one? What did I do wrong? All my friends are moving on without me. I felt singled out. I felt very alone. I felt flooded with shame.  And in the years to come, I would firmly reinforce that belief. It became one of my strongest preconceptions about myself. And it cripplingly narrowed down the career choices I allowed myself to look at. I made a lot of rules in an effort to stay controlled, to not embarrass myself, and to stay under the radar to be invisible. These were also documented in journals, further reinforcing what I was allowed to do and not allowed to do. And my world was just getting smaller and smaller. Emotions were not okay, even happy ones. But the more I tried to suppress them, the more sensitive I became. And much to my chagrin, I would cry easily. My own plan backfiring in my face. I can see in retrospect why I was drawn to acting. It was a place where emotions were okay. They weren't my emotions, but I got to express them nonetheless. Acting also gave me a certain level of comfort because a character in a play has a script. I didn't have to figure out what to do or what to say or how to feel. It was right there on a sheet of paper in front of me. Everything I needed to know. Because I certainly didn't know myself. Anytime I saw a piece of myself, I quickly put myself down. I always felt different from the other kids at school. I was bullied in church school. I was called weird. I was a bit of an outcast. There was no archetype or clique I fit into. I definitely wasn't the girly girl, but I wasn't quite the tomboy. I wasn't the nerd. And despite my throws at acting, I wasn't part of the theater crew either. I leaned towards art, but I destroyed most of what I created, and I didn't seem to make friends there either. I truly didn't understand how everyone seemed to be so okay, and I was not. When it came time to pick a college, art school seemed like the most possible. And considering my struggle in high school, the thought of a fraternity environment was out of the question. So I picked an art school in an entirely different part of the world, Scotland. My parents were born and raised there, and the rest of my extended family was still there. From the outside, it appeared to be perfect. A fresh start and the chance to be a new person.  I love Scotland. It is my favorite place in the world, and I got to travel a lot around Western Europe while I was there. But over time, it too felt like another place. I didn't fit into it. My mental health kept declining, and my ability to function in society was getting more and more challenged, with most of my fears being centered around social interactions and people. After moving back from Scotland, I diverted away from art and towards animals, perhaps because animals judge a lot less than people do. I worked for a few dog walking companies, ended up making a decent business for myself, and aside from dealing with the occasional dog disagreement, there were many days I didn't have to interact with people at all. Finally, I thought I hit it big by being hired by a multi-million dollar startup of a doggie spa resort. I was in on the ground floor.  Something happened, and it was this straw that broke the camel's back. My brain went into shock, and I needed the world to stop. So I ended up admitting myself to a day program at McLean Hospital in 2011. It was helpful. They taught me CBT, but obviously it wasn't the solution to all my problems, and I already had a decade of therapy under my belt at the time. After the program, somebody I connected with there invited me to a meet-up group and over-breathing and meditation, which turned out to be a brain education class. I really resisted going, but I was determined to give life a shot without medication, and I knew that that would mean I would have to supplement it with something else. So I begrudgingly agreed. I drove 40 minutes to this class. I had no idea what to expect, but I was sure I was going to do everything wrong and embarrass myself, and I remember being told to smile in the class. And what about, I cynically thought, but what was worse, at the end of the class, we were invited to say, I love you, to ourselves. No way. It goes against everything I believe in, everything I've been working so hard to reinforce that I'm not a good person, that I'm definitely not allowed to love myself. So I wouldn't, and I couldn't say it. Honestly, I really didn't like the classes at first. Physically, it was fine, but mentally, it was very, very challenging, and the whole process was very vulnerable and raw for me. But there must have been something that attracted me because I drove 40 minutes almost every week for about a year, until the instructor, who I would later call my yoga mom, encouraged me to sign up at the location closer to me in Brooklyn. And when I still dragged my heels to go, she drove all the way out to Brooklyn to take that first class with me. And this was just one example of the extent of the whole, the depression and anxiety had on me. I was soon drawn to our retreat out in Sedona, where I experienced a multitude of things over the course of one weekend. I went from feeling the depths of extreme pain, sadness, and fear that had been suppressed and tucked away in my heart to feelings of absolute freedom, peace, and for the first time, contentment. It was like, am I okay? For the first time, like ever, I think I'm okay. After that, I started to have awakenings frequently that helped me gain a perspective that I'd never had before. I felt my true self and existence beyond the small world of persecution I'd created for myself. And it was vast and mystical. And I often didn't understand it, but it came with a great feeling of comfort, of relief. I could really breathe for the first time. However, those awakenings would come hand in hand with waves of emotions and feelings. And I would learn later that those were signs of healing, a lifetime of being overwhelmed by feelings, by other people's feelings about my own. Later, I discovered I'm very empathic. And I had spent a good amount of time numbing myself. I'd been holding on to so much with no way to process it. So I suppressed whatever I couldn't deal with. And as I practiced, all those feelings started to come out in a big way. I began to be able to identify all the self-limiting beliefs and negative thinking patterns in my head. And I got the opportunity to decide whether I wanted to keep them or not. All the tears I had suppressed, the feelings of despair, it was like somebody stirred up a lake with a giant ladle and the stagnant dirt and the sediment from the bottom surfaced and clouded the water. My first few years of practicing yoga were difficult, arduous and intense, mixed with feelings of peace, presence, and most importantly, hope. And it wasn't just the realization of my true self that helped me heal from depression, but the realization of my purpose. And now I believe if we don't feel purpose or meaning, we can't help but feel depressed. The study of brain education and the process of self-realization was showing me that I was in control of my own life. Previously, I was living, waiting for others to tell me what was wrong with me, waiting for someone or something to fix me. So it wasn't I surprised that the person who had to save me was me. My brain was going through the five steps of brain education. I was sensitizing and feeling my body for the first time, and there was a lot to feel. I was versatileizing and becoming more flexible with all the negative rules I created for myself. I was refreshing, releasing years of resentments, pain and sadness, all of which gave me this space to feel something different, to integrate. And now I still live with it, but I master it. It wasn't an easy process, but you might be able to sense why I wanted to stick around.  And I thought, if I can climb out of this dark, bottomless pit, I thought I could never leave. Can I help others to do the same? And an even scarier thought, can other people benefit from hearing my story, my struggle, and know that there's hope? And it's in your own brain. You already have everything you need. It's in the process of self-realization, although it really helps to have a guide, a teacher and mentorship, because especially if we struggle with mental health, sometimes we need someone to remind us what is real and what is not.  It's awakening to and learning how to utilize the full potential of your brain. It's a way to take back your power that you gave away to others, or in my case, that I took away from myself.  So while I'm not going to tell you that it's easy, because healing is not for the faint of heart. It takes a lot of courage. Plus, if you can relate to my story, you may also have a lot of refreshing to do, a lot of cleaning out of old thinking patterns and self-limiting beliefs. Although they may seemingly be set in stone, they are not. No matter where you're starting from, no matter your background, it takes grit, persistence, consistent training, but it is possible. And by doing it, you may not only save yourself, you may even inspire those around you that they can do it too. This last thing I want to say is, if you don't know your purpose yet in life, you can borrow this one. Love yourself.  Use it to practice truly loving yourself. And with that, Earth Citizens, I am honored and humbled to have shared my story with you. If it resonates, please leave your comments below or perhaps even pop a hopeful message there for the next person to see. We'll also drop a link to my personal channel. And if you'd like to experience a full one-hour brain education, find a body and brain center near you.


My brother and I farm northwest of Mitchell, South Dakota. We've been partners since the early 80s. We raise soybeans and corn and some wheat. We were alarmed at the rate that organic matter has been decreasing since they broke the native sod. Once you realize that 50% of the organic matter has disappeared in literally 100 years and we know that organic matter without it you raise no crop. So really that kind of got us interested knowing that it was imperative to start increasing organic matter levels in the soil. We can't continue on the same path. We have to start focusing a lot more on soil health and soil health, you know, isn't just one thing. It's like a system to approach. I mean for us it's combining no-till crop rotation, cover crops and then planting like native grass species in our sensitive areas, in our wetlands, in our salinity areas and along our watersheds to try to make our land not only profitable but sustainable for the future and to be able to tell the consumer we're out here producing a crop in a sustainable environmentally friendly way. I think one of the big benefits that people don't think about is, I mean, is water management, you know, in our part of the world let's say you have a corn crop and it quits using water pretty much about October 1st and then you plant soybeans, you know, in the middle of May and they really don't use very much moisture until almost the end of June. And that's one of the downfalls of our crops is we have a lot of moisture in the spring and our crops don't use a lot so we have to find a way to store that moisture and cover crops are an excellent way to do them. We've made a real push to involve our landowners on the land that we rent and lease to get involved and to understand what we're doing and why we're doing it and show them that ultimately they probably benefit more than anyone does. One of the things that we've done in terms of educating our landowners is in the water quality area. We are upstream from Lake Mitchell and we have a one mile of Fire Steel Creek running through our property and ten years ago we worked in conjunction with the NRCS, the Game Fish and Parks, Jim River Development Corporation and actually the City of Mitchell to establish a mile long 350 acre riparian buffer to help keep runoff from going into the Fire Steel and ultimately end up in the lake and it just kind of ties into the whole package that we put together in terms of soil health, water quality. When coming down to the bee pollinators we're in the bee program and so you know we just want to educate non-farmers on what we're doing to make the soil as well as the water and keep the bees alive and the things that we do that are kind of going the extra mile. Working with these guys is kind of the same process I do with all my other landowners. We spend a lot of time with the conservation planning process which has nine steps of planning. We're trying to identify resource concerns and identify different conservation practices that will benefit their land and operation and the resources on the land. It's eye-opening to see someone that committed for this long period of time to make No-Till successful in this area and to try to better themselves with just not only No-Till but to interject the various crop rotations and the cover crops into the cropping systems. The fun part of it is there's so many passionate people involved with the NRCS, with the SDSU extension, with Dakota Lakes Research Farm and the Soil Health Coalition. There's all kinds of support and it's just nice talking with these other people who have the same passion that can help you. I mean it's just been really fun and this isn't all just about profitability, it's doing what's the right thing for the future.