Hello, good afternoon. Welcome back. Please take your seats so we can start with the kickoff of the hackathon to use development sectors innovation division who will moderate the next panel. Please finish up taking your seats and get ready. Hope you enjoy. Thanks. Okay, we could start in just a few minutes since we get our speakers up here. I hope you all had a nice lunch. We died in alcohol. Okay, we about ready to get started. We're a little bit late. I think you had a very nice lunch. You're all quite animated and going. And the title of this session is the official, maybe take our seats, find a seat. It's good to see so many enthusiastic people back from lunch.  Anyway, I think several millennium development goals or hack the engine grammars to try and develop applications in 24 hours are not allowed to sleep, I guess, eat pizzas in front of their computers and so on. And I'm told that actually we were it's not clear perhaps somebody to some of you, but we're welcoming with open arms more developers who want to be involved in this hack, the MDGs hackathon. So do we have Lewis, do I go here? Not yet. I thought he might like to say a few words about encouraging people to participate. Anyway, so this is, as I said, 24 hour competition. I think we're hoping for around 80 developers or so. And I'm told that I should highlight a few of the things this is being interpreted into the six official UN languages. And this session is also being captioned so that the deaf community can follow it.   That's on Google plus and Facebook. And oh great. Okay, we do have them here.  I'm sorry. I invite you to come up and say a few words about that. Thank you very much. I was asked just to make an announcement. We're pretty much closing the registration for the hackathon. And we're looking forward to bring more developers or participants that want to join us and acquire this challenge of 24 hours developing, working on generate solutions on three main topics, education, sustainability environment, and health. So we just had a great ideation meeting with so many experts that will also joining us during the whole competition to help you out with ideas and testing your prototypes and everything. Also many, many, many people from different countries and different backgrounds are getting together to work on these projects. So this is the last call. If you want to join us, we will be in the room next here. It was funny because we asked to the group who was participating in the hackathon before, and a few of them had an experience in the hackathons. But who in here has experience working on a social hackathon, which is developing solutions to social issues in 24 hours, non-stop, non-slip, a lot of Coca-Cola, a lot of Red Bull and a lot of coffee. It's also guaranteed a lot of fun. We're going to have so much fun during this 24 hours. So yeah, basically this is the last call. If you want to join us, developers or people from different backgrounds, the registration is still open. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And just to sweeten the offer a little bit, and just to sweeten the offer, we have some very good sponsors here and they've given us some nice prizes. I've been told I'm not allowed to mention specifically, but they are nice prizes, believe me. So if you participate and we'll come up with a series of winners in the different categories. Anyway, to get, we have just about 30 minutes and just to provide a bit of inspiration for the hackathoners or whatever the word is. We have some speakers here who are going to give their comments on the importance of applications and applications for social development, social entrepreneurship, and so on. We have from my left here, Howard Charney, Senior Vice President Sysco, you saw him this morning. We have Kat Wang, Senior Policy Analyst at Google. We have Akta Bashad from Microsoft. I hope I didn't massacre that. And then we have Victor from Claro, who's the Chief of Regulatory and Wholesale Services at Claro Costa Rica. And then we have Minister Alejandro Cruz Molina, who's the Minister of Science Technology and Telecommunications in Costa Rica. Welcome to you all. Okay, so perhaps what I'm going to do is pitch a few questions to our panelists here and let them give their views. I'll start here with Howard. You represent, of course, one of the major vendors of the ICT industry, the Cisco. And we all know that youth employment is a very hot topic, youth entrepreneurship, a very important topic here at the summit. When you are hiring individuals, what sort of skills are you looking for? Is it purely technical skills, or do you look at other things like creativity and so on? And how do you actually support these skills for, let's say, social good or social entrepreneurship? So when we hire people in general, we're looking for people who do have a certain set of skills. It's too difficult to take somebody and to teach them basic science or basic programming or basic physics or basic engineering. It's just not our job.  And so the recruitment process involves the ascertainment of the quality of those skills. Now, let's not confuse what's going on here. Cisco is a for-profit organization. And the goal is not directly social beneficence. However, we do realize that the products that we sell are used globally in many different ways. They're used in providing water to citizens and they're used to provide electricity and they're used to provide the backbone communication services. And so what ends up happening is a blurring of the distinction between profits and the delivery of something which has value to the human race. And so even though the company in and of itself is not, so we say a social benefit organization, such as the UN, it's ethos and I'm always surprised when I talk to employees and I ask them, what drives you? And they say, well, we'd like to change the world and make it a better place. And I think, well, it's kind of interesting because what's really going on here is we're here to make profits. But they say, no, that's not exactly what we're really here for. And you know what? I've decided after all these years, they're right. So good luck on your hackathon. I hope somebody wins. I hope a team wins, incidentally. There is no one person who is smarter than a group of people.  Thank you. Thank you very much, Howard. Fantastic. Great. Okay. Cat from Cisco. Oh, sorry. Not from Cisco. Google. If you would have. She's looking for a job. Probably after this. Okay. So of course, we all interesting Google apps that have come out of that. Cat, perhaps you can talk to us about what are sort of the principles that Google tries to foster in its employees. Yeah, no, that's great. That's great question. So Google, as you know, and also YouTube as well, we grew out of a garage. So the startup culture is still very much well and thriving at this company. And so I started at Google about six years ago. So I'm kind of a dinosaur now in Google years, I would say. And the first experience that I had was at TGIF, which is a great time where the entire Google community comes and sits down and listens to the news at Google from the founders themselves. And all the new glers are there. That's what we call kind of the new Googlers sitting in funny hats and kind of all excited. And what really struck me as super interesting was at the really end when anybody could get on stage and ask a question and could pitch an idea to the founders in front of all of their peers. And that is something that I find so important at Google is this ability to speak out. It doesn't matter how small your idea or how big your moonshot idea is, you can just talk to your peers about it, work as a team, collaborate and get it out there. And it's something that Google really puts a lot of attention on is this employee empowerment. Not only in our 20% applications, which actually Gmail and Moderator came out of. It also wants to continue the educational cycle. So Googlers, both from kind of the coders and the engineers to kind of the social scientists like myself, we could go on rotations. We could go experience what it's like to work in Hong Kong or to work in Singapore or in South Africa just to experience what the life is like there. And learning about kind of how your peers go about these projects day to day, you can come up with new ideas. And I think that is just so important to kind of who we are as youth is to continue traveling and learning and experience things that you might never have thought of. And the third thing that I would say is being silly, being whimsical. That's something that Google really loves. It's this feeling of kind of anything could happen. It could be while you're playing ping pong. It could be when you're in a micro kitchen and you guys are just talking about kind of the new latest game like Ingress or something. You never know when it's going to come that strike the brilliance. And so we really want to focus at Google on creating the community and environment where you're free to think and free to talk. And all your peers can basically vote on your idea. And so that's kind of something that I've always realized is very important to us. And additionally I would say volunteering. Part of what I love about Google on the entrepreneurship side is that we place a lot of investment, a lot of time on getting others out there and getting others the tools that they need. Like develop APIs for example. And we have an entire group dedicated within Google called Google for Entrepreneurs. And so I would totally tell you guys to go and check out the site. There's a lot of great programs that we have. It's over 110 countries. We have over 100 programs now. So getting connected with your peers from all parts of the world, we definitely encourage that. So yeah, I would say just have a lot of fun. Like this is so exciting. And if I could code, I would come down there and join you. Maybe you guys can teach me a thing or two. Okay, thank you. Okay, Akhtar, are you ready to tackle the same question? Yeah. So like my two colleagues from Cisco and Google have said, it is actually quite important that if you are thinking about a skill, that it is a core skill that you develop. Without a core skill, it is actually hard to work for any technology. And we at Microsoft started, we wouldn't call it a hackathon, but actually a competition 10 years ago called the Imagine Cup, which was focused on creating social solutions to the Millennium Development Goals. This was started in 2003. And the focus was to get university students to come together as teams and use technology to solve pressing social solutions. Last year, we had over 300,000 students from 208 countries participate. And we had 100 teams in the finals in St. Petersburg, Russia that competed for various awards and prizes. But we've also looked at it and said that there's one thing to actually create a competition which is a student competition and, you know, get ideas out there. But how do we continue to support them? What can we do to take these ideas forward? And three years ago, we launched a competition on top of that competition called the Imagine Cup Grants, which is run by my team, where we take the winners and then ask them if they want to be the finalist and if they want to apply back, if they want to take the ideas and turn it into a venture, whether it is a social venture or a corporate venture, it doesn't really matter. If they want to turn it into a venture, they apply again and we work with a prestigious group of judges from different parts of the community. And then we invested about, you know, three million dollars into these organizations that we provide them with cash technology and mentorship support so that they can continue to take what they're doing to the next level. So this is one way in which we as a community of, you know, technology professionals have stepped out and brought in our ecosystem to go around the world to encourage all of you to participate in an environment and activity that can bring about sustainable change.  And that's the same at Microsoft. Like somebody comes up with an idea and they'll keep pushing it, some of them turn into products that actually make us a lot of money. Some of them turn into products that do not make us a lot of money. But at the end of the day, people are actually trying. And one of the things that we do is that we have a garage which allows people to come and tinker, give their time, come up with solutions. And then from a social perspective, we actually get our employees to go out and volunteer. We will, you know, pay their time to the nonprofit organization where they volunteer at $17 an hour so you can have employees go out and volunteer to a nonprofit organization. And then we write a check with a nonprofit organization. And people do all sorts of things. You just go painting a fence, reading a book to a child in a hospital, or you're going and solving, you know, IT solutions for nonprofit organizations or IT problems. So that is just a way in which we can get back. I think the message that I want you to have here is that the hackathon is one way of really unleashing your creativity and unleashing your creativity in a team where you can work with different people, hear different perspectives, agree on a problem that you want to address, and then come up with a solution and present it. And that's the most important thing that you can do is to get out there and drive. Thanks. Okay. Thank you very much. And it's great to hear emphasis again of the thing about a team. I mean, we often have this idea of the lone genius, the lone inventors, but most good ideas come around the conference table when you get people together and they bounce ideas off of you. Okay, next we have Victor from Claro, from Costa Rica, and perhaps I know that you've got some, you have some fellowship programs for developers here in Costa Rica, and can you tell us a little bit more about that program and what are some of the advice that you would give to our hackathoners, let's say? Well, thank you very much to all of you. Clado Ribe is a very young company. It's a subsidiary of a conglomerate of companies known as America Mobile. It's a young company anyhow, and we're very focused on innovation. We have provided important contributions to very many mobile accesses across Latin America, and we're providing a lot of emphasis on app development. And this company has always been focused business-wise in order to roll out infrastructure, having ITCs infrastructure. Now the time has come where the tide is turning and we are looking more into app development, and it's precisely part of the programs that we have mentioned. More than simply a program of scholarships, it's indeed a platform from which you can have access to so many operations that we have across Latin America, and access to over 300 million people in order to make available those applications that we're going to be developing. It is truly a platform that will support young entrepreneurs that sometimes will not have the resources in order to have their own platform. We are also providing them with training courses, especially when it comes to life cycle for the product from the conception all the way to implementation and construction of the product. So to all of the different 18 different places where we do have a presence in Latin America, it is important to see how a telecommunication company has evolved into something, into a company that is rather developing applications now. I would suggest that there are three answers as to why this is like that. The first one, I would venture to say is that the technological and communication companies, we have come to realize that telecommunications and technologies are not, it is actually a means to an end, an end unto itself, and we are looking forward to achieving all of the benefits that we can attain by using these applications, these technologies in order to improve our everyday lives and change people's lives. So we have come to realize that and we have come a full circle and we had to face network convergences, services convergences, industry convergence. And at this moment we are a challenge point of convergence where we cannot do things by ourselves. We need multidisciplinary teams that will participate and that we have knowledge in different areas. And that will definitely put us in the second answer, why we are turning into, why we're turning our face into this new part of this industry. Beyond just access, all of these migration that's going on, we cannot do this by ourselves. We need everybody's talent. The challenges before us, I give it to us as a society for its social, cultural, economical developments actually do require everybody's participation. Not only developers, not only programmers, but also all of those that are part of the cultural and academic activities. And that that could be the origin point for all of the different ideas that we need to develop when we come to talk to all of these applications and transform everybody's lives in a very positive way. The third cost or the third reason why we are making this term towards a company that has a focus on applications is that we have realized the added value of content. We said this in the past, I think there's more to discuss that as well. It's not only a matter of having access to the content, but actually being able to use it and know how to use it and how to make it available to everybody, how to share them in these platforms. These contents have a very important value when we talk about economic values. We're talking about for 2017 and a half of the income from telecommunication companies are precisely going to come from apps and all of these added value services, including of course internet access. And the most important part of this line of thought is just we are companies, that's just the gentleman who just says we are not only for profit, indeed we are, but we have a vested interest in making everybody compatible with these platforms that we are creating. The economic interest of generator remedy of course goes hand in hand with the social impact of the activities we are developing in the different areas of society. That is the one reason I think that would be the most important as of why we are focusing on app development on all of the added value services. Clearly there is no incompatibility between entrepreneurship and desire for profit and of course the social impact of all the activities that we can develop. In that sense, this program that was mentioned at the beginning, it's a platform that provides all the youth with the life cycle of a product from end to end, even to those that do not have the money to pay for it or that traditionally have not been able to pay for it. We wish you all a very most successful venture with Hackathon in 24 hours while looking forward to seeing all of the results that you're going to have through this very interesting contest. Thank you very much. On behalf of Crattle, we welcome you to this beautiful country Costa Rica. Thank you for joining us of course, Mr. Alejandro Cruz Molina. You're all alone because these are all private sector companies here and of course one of the questions for many governments are governments here. Of course, what are the sort of policies that you can put into place to really foster growth in this sector? On both the supply and the demand side, what are the policies to help people become entrepreneurs and develop applications but also what are sort of the applications that can be developed on the public sector side to sort of create the demand. Good afternoon. I wanted to welcome everyone here to Costa Rica and I wish that you have a great time here and I want to congratulate all of the hackers here today already. We're starting right now this Hackathon certainly of the panelists that represent the public sector and public policy in the field of science, technology and telecommunications. I would like to focus on telling you that our public policy aims towards three main areas that are extremely practical to promote the advancement of human resources as a resources and also as the final goal of development for a country that wants to continue to grow of an economy based on the efficiency of its resources and of its production to move towards an economy of innovation and towards an information and knowledge society. You, the youth, represent the best we have on our planet and you are the main resource of the development of all of our countries. I congratulate you all for being here today and I also wish to congratulate all of those who have already registered to participate in this Hackathon because what distinguishes a hacker and also from another young person who is committed and focused on knowledge whether that be scientific or technological. It's his creativity, his ability to do teamwork, his ability to set goals that in some cases may seem focused solely on the financial. It's still in the end just a means to overcome challenges, to use the technology and to understand what's behind of the applications that we use every day and certainly it will have the ultimate goal of a social and human impact and this is why our public policy needs to be, first of all, it needs to be our first priority focused on the youth and the talent of our human resources in our country. This is what will allow us to grow, this is what will allow us to become more competitive and above all else this will allow us to have a better quality of life for all of our citizens. Secondly, as a result of this policy our mind ministry has been promoting innovation and productivity especially in small to big sized businesses and I know that all of you here you're almost part of it already. You are more part of it as entrepreneurs, as creative talent, as people who are committed in your communities and in your countries and without a doubt there is a financial interest which is important as I mentioned at the end of the day there is also a social and human impact on of our development and the third element of our public policy which is last but not least important this year starting February the Vice Ministry of Telecommunications was joined to our ministry and as Victor who is representing one of the main companies who are present in our region and our market and our country telecommunications and information technologies and communication technologies what they represent is number one there are a tool for our development for our empowerment but they are also possibilities and opportunities to develop content and to develop aspects that will improve our daily lives so in this context everything is focused on the human being so I congratulate you for being here today our goal as representatives of the government is to promote these policies through mechanisms and tools that will allow to truly structure and give life to all of your good intentions all of your ideas and objectives and of course some of these things may include competitions at the national international level also to promote people and have them study technology improve education at all levels have we have said we need to remaining in the educational system and we want you to take advantage of all the opportunities that are available to you through our education system but additionally we also need to create the proper mechanisms to allow the youth of today which are the adults of tomorrow the entrepreneurs of tomorrow the businessmen of tomorrow to have the financial resources to make their dreams come true today we were discussing in our generational dialogue that we all have dreams and because we all have dreams the role of the government is to help make those dreams come true through investment also venture capital also see capital to support entrepreneurs we need to support companies that are just starting and why not work it this way we also need to consolidate the presence of multinational companies in our country because they are creating sources of employment which are an added value so in summary all of this contributes to the social welfare and other countries and also the benefit of our human lives. Costa Rica is a small country it's not very large we're just four million inhabitants and our main resources is our people so if i have to summarize Costa Rica into three words which need to be truly supported by the government of the republic is we need to support human talent we need to promote innovation and also technological development as a source for human wellness thank you you get me but i you allow us to at least take a couple questions i hope from people here so is uh can we a couple of good questions for the panel here it's hard to see from up here no questions oh sorry oh waving in the back there yes is there a mic thanks for letting me participate thank you very much for allowing me to participate i think that it's actually the idea if every child had a computer we'd have the happiest children in the world but i want to ask questions to the people of sisco and microsoft or whatever company that you're presenting whether it's technology or telecommunications right now there are a lot of campaigns for paper plastic glass etc and this would have been the greatest support in the 18th century because right now we have technological waste we have batteries and all sorts of types of dangerous chemicals which are hazardous for the environment i wanted to ask you what do you do when the cell phone batteries or whether it's triple a or double a batteries or any other electronic device gets damaged how do you dispose of this waste what do you do to dispose of this waste because regrettably all electronic devices have batteries and lots of chemicals that we have our life of thousands of years so we'd like a few of the people who are on the stage to answer please we don't have much time so i mean i could first of all it is a question for the equipment manufacturer we may eventually become one but till that time i but i will say that it's a very important issue and in the u.s for example i mean there is now a law which allows you to recycle all of your materials this is actually paid by the manufacturers and it is collected safely and disposed of safely microsoft for from our side we actually have microsoft approved refurbishers all over the world and all parts of the world where used machines are just given to them but they are refurbished and then sent back into educational and NGO organizations where we provide our software back on it at a very low discount so that the life of the computer can be extended for a reasonable period of time so there are a number of things that organizations are doing to ensure that we mitigate the issue that you are talking about so we do manufacture equipment and lots of it and so over the years we've done a number of things to make the equipment more green with respect to the environment and so the equipment of today versus the equipment of a few years ago consumes much less power much less we we've stopped using certain chemicals and we've stopped using certain types of um well for example lead and solder we don't use lead anymore because it's too polluting of the environment and there are programs by which customers turn in equipment to us and we properly dispose of it the key here is not whether the equipment has to be disposed of because it always has to be disposed of at some point the question is how do you do it responsibly and so we've we've attempted to put in place programs whereby equipment does get cycled and does get disposed of in a manner which is consistent with our environmental sensitivities now it would it what is true is that is that there are batteries and you're right there are batteries in cell phones and there are batteries in backup batteries and even fancy routers and so we have to dispose of these things properly and as a as a manufacturer we take this extremely seriously because we want to be the very best citizen of our on our planet with respect to holding the planet's assets in the highest regard so you're not incorrect but over time we've now learned that television sets and we've learned that vcrs and we've learned that cd players and batteries have a dark side and the dark side is to be respectful of the fact that they will pollute our environment if we don't take care of take care of them properly okay thank you much i'm getting stared at here and we need to to wrap our session up anyway i think one of the messages that came across here during this panel session was you know just get out there and do it the tools are out there don't be afraid and it reminds me of a great quote from uh read Hoffman who's the founder of linkedin and he said i i have this up in my office at times if you aren't embarrassed by the first version you shipped you shipped too late and so you know just get out there prototype it you know get the feedback from the team and do it again okay so anyway i'd like to to thank all our panelists i'm sure you have more questions for them but they'll be walking out that way probably and so you can just grab them as they go out thank you very much thank you very much uh thank you all the panelists again we have a 15 minute a presentation of the beyond 2015 be healthy be mobile competition uh so i would like to ask please vera karen seledonio von flut and huancardo blanco infante i'm gonna get that name correct please do the stage thanks on foot now for now yes thank you very much and sorry well first stop thank you very much for joining us uh we're very excited to hear about the competition a first of all i would like to ask vera what is the competition about if you can tell us please hi i'm vera i'm from a startup in new york and we're called noom and we're trying to help people lead better lives and uh one thing that basically everybody in this world can do to be healthier is to walk and to walk more and then to walk even more and i personally walk a lot i walk to work i walk from work i walk to meet my friends i walk to do groceries i basically walk everywhere um and once you get used to it it's actually pretty cool and you don't have to take the ugly subway in new york um so luckily i work at a startup that is concerned with health issues and one thing that we found was that with the smartphones and all the fancy sensors they have we can actually build an app a step counting app on your smartphone because most people carry their phone everywhere they go anyways so why carry an extra device if you can just have it on your phone and use all the calculating power the phone has so we build this app it's called noom walk and oom and then walk you can download it on the android market it's free and you can register for it and every day it will count your steps from when you get up to when you go to bed and you can see your steps overall you can see your records which is kind of motivating to a lot of people and you can also see your friends step and other people's steps so you can get a sense of how much other people walk and maybe increase your personal walk time per day and for this summit we created a competition to for you guys before and we created a dashboard so we can see every day who takes the most steps every day who walks around some kind of city we're in and so you can I don't know if they think there was I was told there would be yeah shown here no one's in there yet because they're just distributing the registrations so once people register on this list you will see your name and if you upload a little picture you will see your picture and it will show your steps for today and starting tomorrow it will also accumulate your steps over the three days and then on Wednesday we'll find out who walked the most steps over these three days and the first 10 people will win some prizes okay thank you very much that sounds exciting and we should definitely start using it at least in Costa Rica we don't walk much well to the Alcatel representatives Celedonio and Mancayles can you please tell us why is Alcatel supporting this competition okay I will say this in Spanish so your challenge will be to walk as you develop your applications so you have 24 hours to walk and accumulate all your points Alcatel provides networks to do research development we sell and implement the networks what networks do you use for communication to do your phone calls to access the internet to access your mobiles the landlamps cable proving all types of networks now the concrete reality is that the networks are a part of this world that we live in and this broadband world that we live in is essential for the development of each one of our countries the social development of our countries and also the personal development of each one of you also what we need to do worldwide is to create a worldwide broadband network because the benefit for society at large is unbeatable but there's another great challenge I may have a great network but if I have no applications if I have no content it's useless I don't have people who are accessing it through devices that they can use this network it's useless and this is a great challenge in our industry and for companies like ours where we focus mostly on infrastructure we're also concerned about the content issue and especially issues related to education and health education because without education in people you can't make take a benefit of a broadband network you can't take benefit of all that the internet has to offer and that's why you need to educate the average citizen you need to educate the kids you need to educate the teachers professors and each one of us here even the ones who already are foldered in 205 and along with education have been handled in here helped one and and help us that may help you to keep people healthy to also prevent diseases and also to accompany people throughout all of the pro and illness process is essential and that's what our cattle is doing worldwide and that is why we are supporting in this steps application I just find out that there's a minimal amount of steps that we need to take on a daily basis and I think we're quite sedentary so a lot of them especially the ones who work in offices and this can help us to become aware that these steps that can help us with our health well Juan Carlos he wants to say something easy very cost-effective thank you very much just briefly I also represent Alcatel uh educate this is actually a branch of research that is very strong through both laboratories as many of you might know we develop technology we understand that it's very well used in the day-to-day communication today the youth adults also are submerged in communication and online technology and over here we decided to support health because we are keen we're invested on keeping people connected and actually leverage technology so they can have a good use of that's not only zombie users just connected in the network just leaching from other bandwidth but actually to make something out of it and to actually make the best out of the device that they can also have good health and a good healthy lifestyle we've been all given a the registration forms so if you want to register for this competition I think we should all do it um fill it in please and when you're leaving the the the plenary there's gonna be someone next to the photo booth collecting the the forms because that's the way you're gonna be registered officially so thank you very much and thank you for supporting also this excellent idea and I hope it has lots of success here and everywhere thanks okay now we'll be back a to in the plenary at 5 p.m but before please stay seat we're just gonna go through the different workshops that are gonna be held for the next two hours I'm gonna repeat them and probably I'm gonna have some support of a slide if not I'm just gonna say them we have the part two of build my digital enterprise at room to report and negotiate for success at room corcoal number two be a volunteer the second part corcoal three realize your creative independence online at cawita number one and strengthening your entrepreneurial skills cawita number two and for the ones who registered for the hackathon we're really happy because the number went up and it's gonna be an amazing competition as of now the the hackathon is starting at room gondola if you have any doubts look for Luis Diego he's gonna be there trying to help you out thank you very much enjoy the next couple of hours and see you at 5 p.m we're gonna be talking some more about digital enterprises and building them in a bit if you're not here for that you're probably making a bad decision so I encourage you to stay anyway don't go to the other workshops although I'm sure they're wonderful but anyway if you're here and you want to talk about this pile in this way let's fill these front tables because it turns into chaos if we're scattered all over the room that's what my background is in but the card game is the first I've made in a long time cool uh I'm just gonna start talking because it's more fun that way and then people can come in and out and in a couple minutes I'll stop talking and then we can get it back to figuring out how to build your businesses oh so it's quite difficult to build something big if we want to start something from scratch just invent it out of thin air it's tough right there's a million different directions it could go in we have a hundred thousand ideas to choose from it's not just it's not as easy like so opening a restaurant is difficult if you want to open a restaurant right you need to decide which food to serve and how much to charge and then there's all the challenges about like how do I actually do it how do I make sure it's clean and in order and my staff is happy the customers are pleased everything comes out quickly all this stuff's difficult but you basically know what you're trying to do right people people come in they decide what they want to eat you cook it for them and they they pay you you kind of know how the business works if we're doing something on the internet or we're creating something from scratch it's totally different we have no idea how any of it works right people might come to your website and it's free but you sell data or they might come and then they pay you or they might come and it's free but then they optionally buy extra stuff or someone else could be sponsoring it there's so many different ways that you could arrange it that you just don't know what you're trying to do from the beginning and when that's the case we really need to have a way to figure out what people care about and one of the ones that you guys mentioned earlier is that we can talk to people we can say like hey what do you care about what do you need in your life what sucks about your day and if we can find a way to make their life much better then maybe we can build a business around that or you know a nonprofit or a movement we can do something right but the problem is that pretty much everybody lies to us and the way it works is this we have an idea and we get all excited and we're like okay i've got my idea i'm going to turn it into a business so i go and i get my suit looking pretty good and i go out and i start talking to people i line up meetings i'm networking i'm doing all this stuff and i'm trying to make my idea better i want to find out if it's going to work i want to find out how to take it to the next level but then when you actually get in these meetings it's a bit hard like several of you mentioned that what was stopping you for making your businesses was that uh either you didn't know the right people or that they didn't take you seriously because you're young that was definitely my experience in my first company we were selling to big advertisers and everyone i talked to they were older than me they were more successful than me they were richer than me they were better dressed than me it was very intimidating but it turns out that you can actually learn how to run these conversations it's very doable and if you don't take control of the conversations they kind of end up like a bad date it's like neither of you really knows why you're there and you're talking to each other about your business but it's like not sure not clear what you're trying to figure out you're sort of like hey this is my idea what do you think and they say well it sounds good and you say thank you and they say let me know when it launches i guess like nothing really happens there so you have to know what what you're trying to trying to make happen and it's got to be valuable too because you're always balancing um i'm trying to talk to people and make my idea better but i only have so much time you know time time came up more than any other problem about what's stopping you from starting your business we only have so much so when we go out and talk to people we feel like we're being scientists we feel like we're we're being very rational and and learning and figuring out whether our idea is going to work or whether idea is not going to work but imagine how that that seems right you have an exciting new idea for a business and you go to someone you say okay i've been thinking about this for a long time you know i've always wanted to start a company i finally did it i dropped out of university i quit my job i left my dog whatever i'm starting my company here it is what do you think like what are people going to tell you they're going to be like yeah man that sounds great congratulations like it's very hard to get honest feedback in this scenario so we think we're asking people for real data but what we're actually doing is we're kind of like we're fishing for compliments we're putting our ego on the line um and what we'll get a lot of is we get compliments back and i think compliments are one of the biggest enemies of trying to start a company the more people you talk to who say nice things about your business the more convinced you become it's a good idea and then you risk too much of your time and too much of your money but we can't expect other people to always tell us the truth and to be honest they don't even know even professional investors are wrong something like 80 or 90 of the time if professional investors are normally wrong how can we trust like anyone to know whether our business is a good idea right so we get these compliments and we go back to our team and our team's like hey how how is it going do they like our idea you go yeah they loved it everyone says it's great um and then we realize that that we built this product and it really doesn't work um people don't buy it even those people who said yes i would definitely buy that they don't this happened to the the first startup i ever worked for when i was still in university we talked to a load of people and they all said i love your business i would definitely buy this product and so the company spent about 10 million dollars building a product and when they launched it no one bought it so we had to fire like 150 people uh and we we shut down the business and it was totally needless it's just they had asked bad questions they had asked for feedback in a way which invited compliments instead of real data so i really believe that compliments are the enemy and it's our job to avoid compliments when we're trying to figure out how to make our business work um the easiest way to do that can any of you guess what it's going to be how do you avoid compliments all right that's awesome so be discreet about what you're trying to build if you go in and you say hey i'm building this what do you think everyone will lie to you they'll all be like yeah it's great if you can go around if you can can talk about them instead of your idea you get a lot better information um because what we want to avoid is this feeling of fishing for compliments um but if we're not talking about our idea like what do we do um and it's important to realize that that new ideas when they're really innovative when they're new they go through two different phases the first one you're trying to figure out what's going on basically you're trying to learn how the industry works what people care about uh where are the problems will they pay us money um it's pretty big and open and it actually doesn't involve your idea at all imagine if you were trying to build a new education business right who's going to come up with a better idea the person who completely understands education and the problems that teachers have and the problems people have learning or or someone who knows nothing about it it's like obviously the person who knows more uh about the industry so our first goal is to just learn about the industry and then later we come back to them once we've learned all we can and we say here's my specific product do you want to buy it and the do you want to buy it is important because if we just say here's my product what do you think or even worse here's my idea what do you think we always get compliments so you need to put them to a decision um but at the beginning we just don't talk about our idea instead we talk about our customers and we talk about their problems and their current solutions to their problems uh and what kind of budgets they have to solve those problems and none of this requires us talking about our idea right it's the craziest thing you learn if your business is going to work by not talking about it you you talk about your customers you ask about their life you do exactly what you said you go indiscreetly uh you want to learn what moves them because ultimately every business the reason people pay you it's because you're making their lives better you're either creating joy or you're removing pain right that's what a business does um and for that there's value created and sometimes they pay you um so i want to do a quick um just a quick it'll take two minutes we're going to break up into groups of three so just kind of at your table in groups of three and i'm going to give you a a scenario um whoever has the longest hair in your group of three um you're going to be getting interviewed okay so someone's going to be trying to ask you questions about how you plan your travel okay so you're going on a trip in a few weeks maybe you just came on this trip they're trying to figure out like how you plan your travel whoever has the shortest hair in the group you have an idea for a brilliant new startup it's going to help people plan their trips okay so it's going to help them find flights find hotels decide where to go find exciting tourist destinations um maybe if a whole family is traveling it'll help them all organize it together uh so this is your idea and people are going to pay you for this right so the shortest hair is trying to figure out if the travel planning app is a good idea the longest haired person is going to be answering their questions but you don't want to hurt their feelings so never tell them their idea is bad right and whoever has the middle length hair in the group of three i want you to take notes about what's happening and try to decide whether this is a good conversation or a bad conversation okay so this is just like you're talking to a customer and you're trying to figure out if your business is a good idea but you don't want to bias them you don't want them to be able to hurt your feelings so we'll take two minutes does everyone have their groups of three go yeah yeah go go go all right and i'll set a little timer you've got a two-minute conversation to figure out if this is going to work take it away go for it you guys one group you can do two groups of four yeah that's fine if you guys are just a group that's fine just you ask questions and you you answer it'll be fine 30 seconds so what i want to pull out who is one of the middle people in their group who is paying attention and taking notes how did that go just will you tell us just kind of what what what you saw did you feel like there was information do you feel like they were asking good questions what questions worked which ones didn't yes actually he tried to talk about uh twist travel for somewhere else actually don't remember the name but he didn't puntakana i think somewhere like that but he didn't tell him that it was a really bad place on all of that so he started talking about miami is a very very good place and they are offering all of these other perks that you can get while you cannot get this in puntakana puntakana it was really good actually he was able to tell him directly that this place is better don't bother yourself going for puntakana okay so that started out as a conversation about travel and it ended up becoming kind of which is a better place to travel and why do you like one place over the other uh so that might be good learnings for you you might realize that it's quite important for your your app to recommend like maybe people don't want to travel they don't know exactly where they want to travel they just want to go somewhere sunny or they just want to go somewhere nice so that might be an important feature to build in and it didn't sound like that was biasing um what was who was one of the other spectators how did how did how did what happened here i asked her what was she going to do like here in Costa Rica and she told me that she had to like get a car but she was concerned about the price of the car so i think the customer is like concerned about the price she doesn't have like a lot of money so i think that's the most important thing i thought would hurt so that's great as well and kind of points toward a way we might be able to make money one of the big questions was where do i find a car um so that's also great if we go into these conversations with our idea exactly as it's meant to be then we sort of for we we missed the opportunity to find out these extra ways that we could be making money or these extra ways we could be creating value uh what did you guys have going on we i asked her where she was traveling to what she told me was that she gave me a feasibility study about what she was going to do first of all she gave me a social direction she gave me economic factor and she talked about the political factor talking about the social factor she talked about the social one the social factor talks about with the location where she's going for but then she's going for fun talking about the economic factor she talked about the price the cost of going to that particular direction talking about the political factors talked about the people living there if if they are accommodating thank you awesome so that pulled out a bunch of other issues uh what are the the the political motivations behind the trip this might be a whole travel niche that you could address certainly people who want low cost travel are well served already but what about people who want to travel for these these other reasons you can't go to orbits or Expedia and search by you know political uh criteria um so that might be great as well this is actually one of my favorite ways to come up with startup ideas because if we sit around at a table and we just try to come up with an idea we always end up coming up with the same ideas we're like oh it's going to be a way to figure out which club to go to at night it's like everybody has that idea or it's just because they're they're kind of they're abstract they're just floating out there we're trying to just make up an idea on the spot but if you learn there's a type of customer you care about like maybe your mom was a nurse and you know how hard their days are and you really want to make nurses more effective and make their lives easier you can go to nurses and just do this type of conversation and really understand what motivates them and what the problems are and how their job could be better and suddenly you'll realize you've come up with a hundred startup ideas you don't need to have the idea before you start all you need to know is the type of person whose life you want to make better uh as you get to know that person you'll find the idea suddenly emerge cool yeah so although actually none of you really mentioned this morning that ideas were what was holding you back but you can always have more ideas they don't do any harm um real quick i wanted to uh change the subjects and they're sort of a special entrepreneur guest who you guys may already know from the day um but it's a cool story and he's sort of around to help out so will you kind of say hello and tell us what's going on so uh ral asked me to just help out because he's got a lot of people and uh he just needed some other eyes to be able to go around and and help out with the groups i told him a little bit of a story and uh i'll just do it very quick for you guys data wind as you may or may not know is a uh a mobile internet access device company so we manufactured low-cost tablets we produced tablets for the uh for the indian government and uh we are basically come from a history of mobile web so that the problem that was being resolved that kind of started the company was mobile internet and you know we were asking you know why doesn't mobile internet work uh this was back 15 years ago and everyone said well mobile internet will never work because you know images are too small and bandwidth you know at bandwidth the small images are too large but we knew coming from having a background of imaging technology that you can compress simple images and get them through the web pretty quickly so basically uh you know i'm doing research on the web you realize that images really only represent about five ten percent of the web anyway uh five percent being text and the rest is all the back end programming language so we developed the technology which basically it's an algorithm web server based technology which basically delivers the web as you see it on your mobile device through a proxy server using a fraction of the amount of data so when we surf the web on our mobile device on our app we're using about you know three percent of the amount of data that other devices will use and what that does is it resolves the bandwidth limitations especially in developing countries where you have little um bandwidth in these remote areas and so from a hardware background as well we started developing these low-cost tablets so now in india we're selling you know tablets for under you know 40 40 dollars $2 a month unlimited internet and basically that resolves the problem uh you know why mobile internet never worked and that's kind of where we came about and now we have the number one selling brand tablet in india so that's kind of where we come from that's kind of the background that i'm in education and getting tablets into education but you know so you know i'm just going to be around to help around and that's kind of what our story is awesome thank you that's there's a bunch of different approaches to how you come up with business ideas um one of them which like you just heard a perfect example of is noticing that there's a societal or technological wave and then being at the right place to take advantage of it you're sort of like this is inevitable i see it coming it's going to happen i'm going to position myself in the right place we're going to start now even though it's too early and by the time it becomes mainstream like we're we're there is that sort of a fair uh and it's a bunch of the huge companies got built this way and other people look at the opportunities and they go oh that'll never work look how tiny it is but they don't see where it's going um so if you can spot those that's great um another way which i want to take a couple minutes and and think about and is that there there was a lot of research done on the way some successful entrepreneurs go about uh go about new businesses and one of the myths is that they choose a vision and just find any way to get there some do for sure and some have made it work um but what most do is they they they know what they care about um but then they look at the resources they have available already and they figure out what they could do with those resources and this is actually pretty cool because if you're using your own connections and your own resources no one else can compete with you because they're not you right it leads to ideas that that they come from what you're good at so what i want to do is i want to take we're going to take a couple kind of 90 seconds and just build out some lists and the first one is going to be all of the the communities all of the groups of people that you think like you have some connection to or you care about uh so me it would be like people who like board games and teachers and entrepreneurs and investors and small business owners there's all these people that i have some connection to and who i would be interested in helping um and any of these like i know their problems a little bit and i have a way to talk to them so we're going to take 60 seconds i want you to write down as many different communities and groups of people as you can that you have some connection into it could be people your parents know it could be people through your university it could be your past work experience all the different communities you've got uh 60 seconds and go and just start writing there's no there's no dumb ideas just write the dumb ones down as well and do this do this individually as many as you can get go go go 10 seconds volume matters just keep writing the more you get down the better all right that's time now i want you to think about individual people so i can program but i'm a terrible designer so whenever i need something designed i rely on my friends who are good at design i want you to write down the names of specific people who if you needed to they would come over for the weekend and help you they have a skill they're great at i know a guy named devan he's an awesome designer whenever i need design i buy him a bunch of beers and he helps me out like who are the people that could come to your aid or like i have old business connections through my dad and if i was in an emergency i could go to them who are the specific people you could reach out to maybe it's the person who brought you to this conference maybe it's your favorite teacher and he has industry connections who are the specific people who could help you um again 60 seconds get down as many as you can who are the best people you know you don't have to know them that well you can always find an excuse to get to know someone better now the people you know are are so important but what matters is that you don't need them to join your company full time right you don't need to convince someone to quit their job in order for them to be able to help you you can use a little bit of people's time and it opens up so many possibilities you know if you get if you can't program and you get your buddy for a weekend bam suddenly you've got a website if you can't design and you've got someone for an hour suddenly he'll help you figure out which fonts to use this stuff can make a real difference one introduction email can totally open up your business so these individual people you know and they're a special resource because they're totally unique to you now i want to take slightly longer we're going to take uh three minutes and working in in groups of again sort of three or four i want everyone at the table to come up with at least one but hopefully more than one idea and what you're going to do is you're going to take one of the communities that you wrote down and you're going to take one of the people who could help you and you're going to figure out what would happen if you combine them so if it was you plus that person trying to build a business for that community what would that business look like what could you do with your skills and their skills for this type of person does that make sense does who does it does it not make sense to anyone yeah uh do you guys get it okay your the tables will help okay uh so we'll take actually we'll take we'll take three we'll see what we got with three minutes three businesses three minutes it'll work great all right go so combine a community plus a person what can you build for them that's time so could i get a couple people to volunteer to just talk us through your thinking and what you came up with okay so uh this is uh my partner so far and uh we've uh looked at the following aspects he's going to talk about the teaching application and i'll i come by fortunately enough who are thinking under the same direction so i thought about teachers and lecturers as well some things that you have to say that there is a need every time you teach to be assured if the pupae hasn't understood there's a probability that that pupae will understand later uh despite the teacher not being present so that requires an after lesson or some kind of a tutoring way and in terms of ict how we can tutor using icity is simply by bringing in animation uh that is synonymous to what you're teaching so in that sense we thought of developing that kind of application starting from lower grades to uh university as well why do we lack of visual aspect of learning in the university maybe because people don't want to develop visual aspects that are synonymous to what they're studying uh that can further extend to even particular fields that you're studying it i'll give over the mic okay the community i was thinking about is uh students and teachers there are a lot of apps in colombia that help you grade your students but when they log in to see their your grades they only see their final grade for that class so since i'm a developer i was thinking about making an app that would help the student log in and he could see every single assignment he did on that semester and i joined with uh the person i know in that community that i was a teacher before and i know the chancellor of the university i was and maybe putting them together i know that if i develop the app she would implement it in that university thanks that that sounds like like a good idea right and it's credible it's easy to believe in because it's not just an idea it's an idea and i know this person with this experience who's gonna help me do it and you i've even got my first customer it it goes from being just an idea to like hey we're gonna make this happen right and that's because you didn't just choose a random idea you anchored it in either people that you know or people you care about and the skills that you have access to ideas get much much better the more personal you can make them uh you're more able to do it right uh the worst thing is you choose an idea and you go okay i've got a great idea i just need half a million dollars and a programmer because then like it may as well it's never going to exist right like you gotta you start with something that you can do today um so yeah that that's great does is there kind of um did someone else want to want to talk through theirs boom boom boom cool um yeah hello uh we had actually not bad idea uh basically uh my colleagues here are in IT management and web development and i was more in accounting and project management so we couldn't be more different so we started to think how could we you know work together uh so they told me that they were very you know talented with creating applications and i and they also have you know connections with private companies and stuff and i do know ngos and accounting companies and other private companies so i said uh so we came up to a conclusion that we would create like a web development like we would create an application they would create it and we would get in contact with medium-sized companies and small companies because they can't afford to do like hire many accountants and to have like a sophisticated accounting software which created an application where they can do their accounting and they could do a project management instead of going up to another company and paying a lot of money for it so like if that was pitched to me and i was an investor i'm kind of like i have no idea i don't know how accountancies work but then you're like i understand accountancies i understand project management suddenly it's much easier for me to believe that that's going to work and you kind of have the connections to make it happen um so yeah that's that's great um the last thing i want to the last thing i want to say about talking to people is once we start to figure out exactly what our product is going to be like we've now got this idea and it's in our heads and we start falling in love with our our idea we need to what's going on oh yeah sure well our idea is aimed at the communities of rural schools so our idea our idea is aimed to companies that have social responsibility programs so true advertising for fundraising we want to manage these companies to provide funds to give computers at low prices to students who are in rural areas in schools in rural areas because the problem that we have in rural schools is that the quality of education is poor and so the idea is to have a system in these computers to allow students to go hand in hand with the classes that they're taught in school to develop these their knowledge using computers thank you is there what's up all right one more everyone and welcome to Costa Rica um we were thinking about developing a software that may help the medical sector in Costa Rica because we have the main problem here that for surgeries they take a long time so it takes like four five to six years to for you to get a surgery appointment and then when you get to the appointment they tell you you have to reschedule that because some of their the appliances so those names doesn't work so we were thinking about developing a software uh where all the people or Costa Ricans in this case can access uh to the application and they can sign for these appointments and make our doctors to have access to that community so they realize how how much people or how many people are requiring those things and I guess that would be something that may help our community we will realize because we have a lot of people working on that sector to get all those appointments and I guess that will improve the the way to get those appointments and we wouldn't have to wait a long time and wait until someone that we love may die just waiting for an appointment or to practice surgery thank you thank you yeah terrific um the we we like we we get the ideas ideally they come from a place that's connected to us so that we can make real progress on them uh and so that you care about it as well it's much more fun to work on a business you care about you don't have to but it you know it helps you stay excited um and once we get our idea once we know what it is that that we want to build we kind of need to put it in front of people right because you can't just go around with it in your head forever um but when we do that we need to make them work for it a little bit because if we just say hey here's my idea do you like it everybody says yes we need to say like hey here's my idea you can have it if you pay me or like you can have it if you work a bit that way we we we know that they're being serious and when we go back and we tell our team hey they liked it we know that's true um the three things we can ask for is we can ask for their money we can ask for their time and we can ask for their reputation um money is probably obvious if they buy your product you know they liked it if they pay for the service if they donate to your cause you know that that means a lot to them uh time I mean if someone looks at your demo for five minutes that doesn't mean that much if they'll commit to two weeks to use it every day as a trial then you can take that a lot more seriously uh if they'll let you write a public case study about them then they're putting the reputation on the line uh if they'll make an introduction to their boss that means a lot all of these it's ways that you can get them to start committing even before you've built the whole business you can say hey I have an idea it's this and this and they go they go oh I love it that sounds great and you go awesome like who can you introduce me to and they say ooh nobody then you know they didn't actually like it as much as they said so all of these are ways of kind of kind of getting to the truth there's also some other ways of coming up with ideas which are quite interesting um have you all seen where's this picture have you all seen this picture before this is the uh this is facebook's friend graph basically so there's a little line between everyone who's friends um and it doesn't actually have the shape of the world on it it's just you can kind of tell because people are friends um and it's pretty neat and one of the big changes in the in the the the kind of ICT in the startup world lately is that we now have these enormous networks that we're able to build on top of if we want to and some people say it's a bad idea because you give away control other people say it's a good idea because if it works you can expand really really quickly um but it's quite powerful um and there's a huge amount of work that we used to have to do ourselves that that now we just don't have to do when someone logs into your app using facebook you immediately know exactly who they are you know who their friends are that can be used for evil and it can also be used in good ways that's kind of up to you as the as the entrepreneur but it's powerful um like beyond building on top of facebook there's you know in twitter and the others there's some other cool options so twillio you might have seen before um how many of you guys have seen twillio I'm sure it's more than that I know raising hands isn't very fun um so twillio lets your website send people text messages it lets you send sms's through your website and it lets you can respond to phone calls you can respond to sms so suddenly you can program with the phone which for a lot of the worlds that's incredible um even like when my website goes down I have twillio send me a text message and it goes oh no rob your site's down and I panic but it's good because I'm getting the message um another option for for sending sending phone stuff is is text it this is so cool as well you don't even need to program to use this one you can just say send this sms and then they they message us something back and we can respond to the messages and ask more questions you can build a whole business that works through sms without ever needing to program anything tools like this exist for everything you could ever want to do like any kind of infrastructure which you think you need to build yourself you don't um so let's take a minute what kind of business if it was within your group if that group if you were all co-founders and you were using each other's skills and each other's connections what business would you build that's based around or social enterprise or charity whatever you want that's based around this ability to use text messages and use phone calls as logic you know it opens up all of the developing world and it gives us huge new options for for you know anyone who already has a smartphone as well uh what would you do with this using this technology we'll just go kind of within within the groups um we'll take three minutes what's the best sms business that you can come up with all right take it away about 45 seconds left think of it you're able to get information and back and forth to whole parts of the world that it's a real pain to get to at the moment um what can you do with this what possibilities does this open up and you can do it today there's no cost the tech is ready you could launch this business by tonight if you started right now so we we happen to have someone here with a bit of expertise in this area so i'm going to pass over the mic so we can get a real world story hello everybody i'm sid from zambia in africa and um we came up with a platform i didn't invent it i was part of the consulting team of it was funded by unicef and it's called you report and basically what it was is that uh nurses in rural areas use their cell phones any cell phone that you can use uh even a normal no-care smartphone i mean the prepaid phone and what you do is what they did is they used that to send text messages to report hiv cases so every time they they took a test they would send to a central server and sms saying whether it's positive or negative and that in turn built up a database of statistics of AIDS cases in zambia so yeah basically that was sms there that's brilliant so using sms to track the spread of hiv and kind of know what's happening around around the country um and that we were just chatting for a second and that was basically built from scratch which means it was quite expensive you would need a big organization to build something like that but now you guys could duplicate that overnight if you had the connections to the the nurses and the government right um the the technology that's available for us at the the platform layer the tools that we have access to it's insane how much we can do with them so one of the other ways we can come up with businesses is to look at the new tools that are available and think what would i do with that okay so hi i'm Beatrice um so my team came up with this idea of creating of creating a database uh based on the needs of people for example for doctors to send a message to their patients to remember them to take their pills or for any other kind of like for example in business they could create this um sms based technology to send you when you have to go to a meeting and so on and that of course you have to know the doctors in your country and of course to implement it throughout the all the medical i don't know community so that was their idea our idea okay thank you okay so uh we kind of got multiple different ideas so uh one of us um well one of us lives in uh in new york works there and uh he suggested that uh since everyone's living a busy lifestyle and you really don't have that much time on your hands um maybe you could send a message like an sms to this number which would find your location and would track down other people who are also um maybe heading to one destination for example and uh it would give you their location and that way you could do sort of carpool thing uh there's also one idea one another person who gave an idea where uh you could contact um emergency services via sms giving your specific information which is quicker than calling 911 um and uh they would also it would give you tips to deal with the situation until the until help arrives and uh finally uh an app where which um what was it again yeah and um one more app which uh which connects your family to you so uh wherever whenever you have a life event um you can easily share this with your family uh no matter where you are in the world so just with one simple sms and uh we thought that was a great idea cool yeah i love them sorry and oh and we missed your clap as well so we'll clap for you also um so i want to um a couple i just want to show you guys like a couple more tools that that you could have access to uh if you wanted it just so you get an idea of what's out there if i can find my little menu so Kickstarter we talked about if you have a product idea you can put it up on Kickstarter and see if people will buy it before you ever build it incredible right um there's have you guys seen alibaba yeah amazing right you can buy like the whatever you want really at wholesale prices and they'll deliver it to your country you pick it up from the port in a 40 foot shipping container and suddenly you're like a retailer i know a guy whose first business is he bought like hundreds of go karts off of alibaba you know like little cars and then he he sold them to kids in his neighborhood he became a go kart dealer like that was how he that was how he got started in business and now he's a really he just he does this he looks for products um it's available to anyone you can just go on there and buy whatever you want um if you want to take uh payments online you've got tools like Stripe which make it so easy to take people's money you used to have to sign up for merchant accounts and payment processing and all this stuff it was a nightmare now in 20 minutes bam you're taking money over the internet um but let's say that you don't want to use the internet you want to take money in person you can call someone like square and they'll send you this little accessory that plugs into your phone and suddenly you can swipe credit cards into your phone and take money it's like if you want to set up a market stall or an in-person business like suddenly everyone in the market can now process credit cards it's totally insane and they give you this for free because they want to be they want they you know like the way this is changing business is just completely incredible um like cash only businesses are going going digital um someone brought up earlier that one of the important things to for a career of entrepreneurship is to keep knowing what's going on and i totally agree with that but it's more than just the trends you also want to know what technology you have available to you because you can use and remix and be creative with this technology uh and suddenly it's like your businesses cost zero dollars to make and that's way better um a couple other just cool businesses that i want to highlight because they're a little bit weird and you probably haven't thought of anything like this before has anyone seen hero rats so you see these giant rats guess what they do well you can probably read it on the web page so this business uses rats to detect land mines and they work as an alternative to military solutions which either blow the whole field up with dynamite to blow up the landmines or send people around to dig them up uh or roll a tank over the fields to try to blow everything up but these rats they can smell they're kind of cute they can smell explosives and so they run up to it they don't they don't set it off they're not heavy enough they run up to it they start trying to dig it up and then someone goes behind them with a shovel digs it up disarms it uh sells the metal for scrap it's crazy you're not going to sit around in the kitchen and be like be like ah what would a good startup be hi no i'll use rats for landmine detection you're just not going to come up with that um this comes from being out in the world and suddenly and you know and you put the pieces together i think one of the best things you can do for for an entrepreneurial career is to live life and go around and meet people and be curious ask them what they do ask them how it works ask them how the industry is ask them what the big problems are um and these guys really took it to another level as well um they basically they they take guys who they take villagers uh subsistence farmers and they actually set up universities there like accredited universities and they take the subsistence farmers and they get trained in veterinary care and animal training and they leave with master's degrees in both so in addition to having a job and clearing landmines they're also taking people and like giving them master's degrees and through all of this they're making money so they don't need to spend time collecting donations it makes enough money by charging the governments for landmine removal that they can keep doing this for as long as they want they don't depend on anyone else because it's a working business um they recently also moved they realized the rats could also detect tuberculosis um and so now they're saving lives like that as well and they they sell the rats to hospitals kind of i'm simplifying the business but basically it's like it's very cool um another one i love is husk power systems which works out of the indian rice belt and they take what used to be a waste material uh the rice husks and they found a way to build a processing plant for it so that they could turn the rice husks into power but then they didn't want to bring in a bunch of consultants and concrete and all this stuff so they also before they set up a power system they first set up a university and they train a bunch of the people there in um like uh electrical engineering and construction so again they they get degrees uh and they use all of the native materials to build the power grid and it's this incredible it's an extra revenue stream for the rice farmers it's education for the workers it uses all local materials and it makes enough money that again they don't need donations it's a functioning business so they're able to reach a lot more locations more quickly than they would if they needed to wait for donations or government grants um and again like you're never going to think about this idea like i would never think about it right because i don't know the situation um and that's why there's there's countless opportunities because each of your lives is showing you these different places where innovation and entrepreneurship can make a real difference whether it's for your life for your community or whatever you want um it's just kind of it's that curiosity right the best entrepreneurs i've met they're always asking questions they'll sit down for a haircut and the barber will they'll ask the barber how he makes money you know they'll go for a taxi cab ride and they'll ask the taxi driver what he thinks of smartphones and whether they're making his job easier or harder just like get in that habit of asking questions and suddenly you'll see startup ideas everywhere um so i want to do uh let me see here i want to do one well yeah i'll show you uh this was one of my businesses that failed but was quite interesting um and it kind of ties together a few of um a few of the the things we've talked about i i wanted to build this technology to help people at conferences like me who were speaking get more twitter activity so the idea is while i'm speaking uh you guys would all be like ferociously tweeting about how great i am and i was going to make this technology which would make that happen more the problem is i didn't actually know if the technology was going to work and it was going to be quite difficult to build and i didn't want to build something if i wasn't sure it would even work how would you guys resolve this so in this case uh it would sort of test it ask people uh we could definitely do that but in this case i'm actually worried about the technology like i know speakers want it i just don't know if it actually works yeah yeah exactly if the technology works or if it's effective so so it was one of these things uh the question was how i thought of the idea and i was just at conferences and i was like oh i was hanging out with other speakers i knew a ton of speakers so i thought if i made this product i'll know people i can get to use it so it seemed like i kind of had the connections um the approach i took is i went to a conference and i talked to speakers and i said hey i'm building this product but it doesn't exist yet can i pretend that i'm the product and just give me access to your twitter account and give me your slides and i'll do everything that my software is meant to do for you and we'll see if it works and the idea was that if they wouldn't agree to this then i kind of knew that the product wasn't gonna they didn't want it and if they did agree then i could measure whether or not it was actually effective um and so then i just typed it all into a spreadsheet and it actually kind of worked so that convinced me to get some friends together and build the product um but we knew it worked because i pretended to be my software you know i was just like oh i could do that and a lot of technology and start to automate it it's a great way to get going do it by hand you don't get started don't wait you don't need to wait to build your website like start doing it today um you can charge people later um another time oh yeah oh i didn't work um so the reason it didn't work is because speakers are very unprepared typically just to generalize and so the environment they were meant to be using it in is very chaotic they're rushed they're panicked and they show up and they're like they're like oh yeah i'm meant to use that new software and then they they're like ah and they're already late and they're like what do i do and so they just didn't so it was one of these things where they they wanted to use it they liked it but in practice the realities of their situation it just didn't work out um and that was something that we could only really learn by giving it to them if we'd spent a year planning then we would have wasted the whole year but as it was we were able to figure that out pretty quickly which i was happy for you guys hear that rain i'm glad we're in here um and another time i had an idea that it was still about conferences and we were the idea was it was going to help conference organizers find and hire speakers and i wanted to know if any organizers would actually pay for it and i wanted to know if speakers wanted these connections so again i didn't want to build the whole website so i sent them emails i sent the conference organizers an email and i said hey i'll find you any speaker you want for 20 euros a piece uh and i emailed speakers and i said hey is it cool if i send you speaking gigs both sides said yeah that would be great and we ended up doing something like a thousand pounds of revenue in the first day it's like 1500 before we ever had a website we just sent emails and then later we're like okay this works so it's time to build the website it's just like it's how small can you make that first step so what i want to do to kind of close us out we've got a little bit of time left we've got a little bit of time left but i want to slow it down a bit and i want you guys to kind of decide what you want to do next you could do anything you could do nothing the normal choice would be to do nothing you know you leave here you fly back home you do nothing that's fine you graduate then you're like i should start a business but then you still have all the problems you have today or we could like start something now and then later you're in a much better position right later you have the audience you have the connections you have the co-founders you have the reputation so what i want to do is is what do you think that you actually want to do in the next say two weeks what are you going to start building is it a side project is it a blog is it a community what's the company that you want to eventually head toward and what can you start doing now to make that happen and let's take five minutes on that so not a huge amount of time because there's no sense no sense worrying forever about it and then we're also going to pull out who's going to kind of be the representative of of this session to make our case in front of the un later but first for you like what can you do what do you want to do in the next week or two weeks that's going to make a real difference what are you going to start on if it's nothing that's fine just help someone else figure out what they want to do but if you do want to do something that would be that would be best and we're going to we're going to wander around and try to be helpful does that does anyone not understand and when I say do something I don't mean think thinking is not work what can you do to actually start start the first step of a business what's your first stepping stone we're about to open up this new partnership or this new sales having you you know so you might think what's the first step to make that happen if anybody at your table is totally stuck now is a good time to start helping them about two minutes left 30 seconds three two one that's time so what are some of these first steps remember we don't need to get all the way to the destination we're just trying to figure out what we can do in the next couple weeks who'll kick us off here it's just a one-liner in the next couple weeks I'm going to I want to basically bring together because I've been participating to a lot of youth conferences this summer I think all of them that happened at the UN and I think the best idea that I can come up with is to bring everything together on let's say I don't know blog and actually bring all the good ideas of the network that I created and put it in a place where people who couldn't attend these conferences be able to take them to their home places especially for example Romania I was basically the only one from Romania in the majority of these conferences so I would like to take everything that I've learned and seen back to Romania one way or another yeah so I come from the world of global democracy and online deliberative decision making but I'm right now working on a project that's using bitcoin to create public funds that can be governed by the members of a fund that goes to a single discreet bitcoin account but I've slowly over the last few months been assembling this hodgepodge team of professors and phd students in a few different fields and we have some skype conferences coming up so it's not much but that's in the next two weeks what's on the horizon and if anyone here is at all interested in any of that stuff yeah you're more than welcome to get involved cool bringing together all the moving pieces sounds good okay so we're working on in Zambia right now we're working on a way to sell prepaid talk time via an android device so in third world and developing countries there's a lot of prepaid phones you know that is so you buy the scratch cards and that costs the mobile networks money and in turn the profits to the people selling those cards are lower so we have a device that hangs around your neck and you press a button depending on how much you want and it prints out a credit on a little voucher very small thing and that's what we're working on if you have any questions please let me know next couple of weeks so we have made connections with the mobile networks there so that we're developing the platform further yeah so I'm Claude from Rwanda thank you for the presentation I run a tech hub called KLab and I like everything you're talking about because myself I have I help young entrepreneurs and coming up with businesses I like the approach of first identifying a group and then someone who can help I saw that even in one of your style you have the business model canvas which I mainly use in my country I hope to implement what I have seen back home and I just visited your blog and there's a lot of resources I didn't know you actually it's my first time to see you I already even followed you on Twitter so I hope to learn more from you and the blog and also maybe we'll have in Rwanda sometime soon because I saw that even like to talk to young people and lastly texted the tool you mentioned was developed at KLab by Nyaruka Nyaruka is a software company that sits at KLab their mentors at KLab so it was really interesting to see you referring to their tool I also even tweeted them that you spoke about their product here in Costa Rica so thank you cool thank you now we have kind of a cool opportunity this this week oh you've got something to kick off do we have one more mic floating around I'm from Senegal my team and I have developed an app that has a social impact on the seconds of follow what all of learned here I hope to improve my application because the app has a social impact and it helps and it helps the workers communicate with people like you and I it helps them at the school level to better their lives thank you very much at some of I hope that all of you guys really will will take these these first steps whatever they are the first steps could be as small as writing your first blog post or making your first youtube video talking about something you care about or they could be a big sales or a big partnership or beginning your technology or talking to a first customer any of these are great they're that that first stepping stone they're the humble beginnings but they they build up over time and if you get into the habit of every week you say what's the the thing I could do this week that's most important what's the thing that you know the most important thing to learn about my business the riskiest the scariest piece then you'll find that you're just able to move so fast you know and you will it'll blow your mind how much you can get done in three months you know you can completely build a company in three months but we've got 15 minutes left and we've got a cool opportunity tonight because two of you guys will kind of get a chance to tell the UN what they should fix which is great and I don't know but I'm hoping that some of you guys do and so I want to do two things first we're going to choose and we don't necessarily need to do this in any any particular order but if you've got thoughts on on what we might be able to change can we just form like a queue of people here and I just want you to kind of come up and and tell us what it is what do you think like if if the the if entrepreneurship is to be made easier if bringing technology to scale is to be made more possible what could we do to make this happen and then we're also going to hopefully a couple people want to do this because I think it would be a shame if we had this opportunity and didn't use it to tell them something you care about right it's like you're not going to get this chance again so take it and then we're also going to choose like a couple people to to actually give that message we'll collect what kind of everyone says and then we can pass that on tonight sound good cool so who will come up can we just form kind of a we'll just build a line here I know a bunch of you guys have things to say yeah all right we've got our our first volunteer second yeah keep it coming bring it up bring it up and uh this isn't like your only chance feel free to come up as they're talking um cool so to give you guys some context um what what what you're going to be kind of sharing uh this afternoon it's just five ten minutes it's not long and most of that they're going to ask you questions for so you really only need to talk for like 30 seconds and basically it'll be like a two second version of what we did here and if there's anything that you're going to do differently because of it and then what you'd love to see the UN help make happen so that that entrepreneurship can you know can flourish and so that we can get technology uh technology out there so will you uh will you take things away and just we we sort of all know what the workshop was about hopefully so we could just focus on uh you know what you think would be a useful policy um my general thoughts that the ITU should confront with a lot of uh brainstorming powers with regards to cyber security because it's concerning it is termed cyber security however the policies in place are toothless there's nothing much being done in terms of safety uh online especially with underdeveloped countries very few people have knowledge about the safety usage of ICTs and if they don't have knowledge someone has to protect them prior to acquiring that knowledge so much as we want to create create technology we have to consider the priority which is the backbone of it all we're not going to be creating technology so that we can enhance crime in this world of ours we want it to be safe so in that case I think what we need to do is create a separate environment using ICTs just to conclude it doesn't make sense why should we create if we're creating crime why should we create if we're unable to protect why should we create if it's unsafe for others so I think that is a very major issue that the United Nations should work on and they should make sure that it is achieved is it impossible should I ask I think that's why we're here we're here to be challenged is it impossible is it possible can it be achieved I remember uh President Barack Obama of the United States saying it is not possible to achieve 100 percent security based on the hackings that are going on in this world so why can't we achieve even one percent of it thank you very much so what I'm about to tell you I think that the UN should stay well away from and I hope they never do it so I'm not really addressing this to the UN um if Satoshi Nakamoto is in the room though uh listen up so I think I I think a lot about identity and how we express it and how we share it and identity in the 21st century is two things if nothing else it's digital and it's global and we have a lot of great systems of digital identity I'm sure we all have Facebook we all have plethora of emails we all have multiple online identities and they're very useful for a lot of things some of them are anonymous or pseudonymous uh some of them we have multiple of and it's if you're a Syrian human rights activist right now it's really great that you can have let's say an email account that isn't inherently attached to who you are and I think that's really important and that's one of the vibrant things about the internet but there are certain interactions that we do with one another where I think it is important that there is only one identity within a given system that you have access to or what I would call a bijective online identity and someone we need to we need someone needs to figure this out and I think it needs to be distributed uh peer to peer without any kind of centralized hierarchy but we need to have some system of global identity a global identity number perhaps or something in which you only have access to one of them and you can you are the only one who can access that identity because once we have that we can open up an interesting domain of things such as global elections just as a heads up the key was growing so I'm going to cut you guys off at 30 seconds okay good evening my name is Juan Pablo I'm from Mexico I study economics and I think uh that information and internet it's the real key for transaction and for a fair trade so my proposal to the UN is made the internet as a right in order to forecast the information that is helpful is helpful for markets so people who are producers from agriculture coffee or any commodities can get access to the real prices of the market and they can get the real benefits thank you well good afternoon my name is Jose Wilfredo I am from El Salvador I will try to express my idea on English and if I can't I I will do it in Spanish yeah I'm in my fifth year of engineering telecommunications so my proposed for the United Nations is that it's so hard to start your enterprise when you have an unjust this market around you uh maybe the big uh the big uh companies will be agreed to don't let you grow yeah they will think and take you out of the market and yeah that's uh uh must be regulated uh for example for example I'm sorry but I'll explain in Spanish it's difficult to start a business when you have stiff and unloyal competition and you know that you're fighting the big guys and they can agree to get you out of the market because they see that you're growing which perhaps is good for you but it might not be good for a third party and so they can keep in line two friction forces but perhaps the third one is not convenient for them so even a small entrepreneur might be a danger to them and they might want to get you out of the market so we need better laws to control this and not to prevent a company because just because they're big and multinational doesn't mean they have to dominate the market hello my name is Talal I'm from Lebanon I think that ITUs in general should focus a number of things the first thing I think is food which is the most important thing we can actually work with microfinance institutions and private companies to try to get food to the developing world we're talking about Africa Central Asia many parts of the world because you still have a large percentage of people who can't who are not even eating so if you can't eat you can't think or implement things on the ground the second thing that we would like to do is to create access and we talked about this point a lot access to internet and computers for the developing world because that's like the largest percentage of the population if they start moving forward the whole world will move forward a third step would be is education online free education there are certain websites like Allison they give you free math courses free finance free science physics whatever the course may be so you can move forward and this should be in all ITUs in the world so people even if they don't have money for an education they can do something about it take online courses and slowly move forward in their life thank you hello everyone i'm botan from iraq many times i try to start my own business but every time i fail and one of the reasons that because we are in iraq we somehow disconnect from the other world for example when i go to google place where i cannot buy anything because most of the website most of the transactions are blocked from iraq so there is like a barrier between iraq and the other ways of the world so it is really hard for young people entrepreneurs to start digital enterprises or digital companies for example we still don't have credit cards or we don't have any online shopping so and with the help of letting internet access or internet accessibility in iraq that would be way better for the young people to start their own businesses and to be able to access the other world because it is completely disconnected and whenever i try to buy something or anything that like is excluded either we cannot do shipping or buying anything or even the place will not be loaded or will not be sold for the iraqi people thank you hi my name is alejandra and i'm from mexico i have a lot of ideas now but i think i i know i have to be fast with this i think that it's cool that we are making a lot of enterprises and building technologies that are awesome yeah i think that's okay but we also need to focus on the people that we are selling them i think that we need to focus also on the kind of people that we are talking to because maybe they are poor maybe they are not not only in my country all over the world i think that the aim of this event is to get to know everyone that we need to to see that there is more over the world so for the enterprises of technology for example when there are poor people we need to get to know them give them information give them a lot of information that can help to have i don't know to that make them build more technology and also because they are brilliant there are a lot of brilliant people and i think that's the aim of this event to get to know all the people all over the world that they can do it and they can build a lot of enterprises and a lot of technology that can help the world i think that we can change them because we are the future thank you i speak spanish well this is my i come from nicaragua my idea is that the united nations should not only meet in an event like today they are doing that it is an opportunity for us that promote our ideas but that they are already annually distributed in funds so that each country allows their students to their young people to develop their ideas and promote an idea for each country to promote our future why because all the things that we have today we proceeded or came from a past that at that time it was just dreams or ideas from someone but today they came back to reality so i'm going to present myself first really quickly my name is robell and i'm from france and i think this conference we all know is about empowering the youth we know that children really don't have an opportunity to talk to people who have authoritative roles in the government for example and i think that what we need to do is give them a pathway to communicate their ideas because kids they're young they're imaginative and they have sometimes really great ideas which we sometimes when we grow older we seem to no longer have the capacity to go brainstorm i guess so my idea is to give children and well not children but growing adults especially people who are in university studying languages and and law and all that stuff to give them a pathway to communicating with people who have authoritative roles in our society thank you hello Claude again from Rwanda Caleb my idea is about education i strongly believe in education as a tool that can change societies so my suggestion to itu and the urn is to really invest in education but not any kind of education but indication that empower young people and allows them to have critical thinking thus come up with innovations that solve real problems thank you my name is Sharon i'm from Kenya um hello my name is Sharon i'm from Kenya um our fifth year telecommunication and information engineering students i'm also with telecenter dotog my message to the un and to the itu is regarding telecenters um i believe that um the un should encourage the growth of more telecenters where especially in rural areas where we can have young people coming together and sharing their ideas on a continual basis not necessarily just during summits like this and whereby they can also get access like to the internet and they can also get access to computers because you find that um people in rural communities don't necessarily have the same opportunities that we have so my message is that in development of ideas let us not leave those in rural communities behind let us develop telecenters where they can also share their ideas and join us in this great course thank you hello my name is Pupa Hano from Botswana i am thankful for this opportunity that the UN has created for us and in order for this not to be a one-time thing i am proposing to the UN that they they make it a point that the youth is included in the UN general assembly meetings that they usually hold so for them to have a youth representative in the meetings thank you first of all thank you for the initiative that all the youth that we have accessed to issues that we get to speak to decision makers i have two topics here first of all is from Panama in Panama how are we going to do the radio electric spectrum where there is no more room for other technologies for example we have led that has been implemented so far in Panama but what happens when they um bandwidth runs out how are we going to implement how are we going to expand that different methods of compression of signals so we need to address that issue prices uh the cost-benefit relation in equipment there is this issue the financial issue when it comes to farmers the um the prices of demand versus the cost of supply for maintenance of their land via gps when do i have for example uh satellite images that will help me know when i need to put some um um fertilizers in my hand if i present that to uh coffee producers they're going to tell me that's too expensive so they really use no uh a cost-benefit relation that is positive we cannot use that technology in order to make the most out of their businesses that's just one of the issues good afternoon i am rosway manuel from Nigeria what i want the UN and the ITU to do is that i want them to set up in cyber security emergency team but they will set this cyber security emergency team in every country in the whole world not only in the whole world they're going to make sectional centers these are the centers we call about sensitization it will implement them into schooling in this asset in this instance they were able to transfer information to the young ones the young ones will be sensitized they know the rules on how to go about through the internet thank you very much my name is carlotte i'm from nicole Iowa i am an engineer in renewable energies my proposal is that the youth that are probably more creative when it comes to different uses or different sources of energy other than oil because we're not going to deplete our natural resources and we need to start producing clean energy and through ITCs we can definitely share information share ideas on how we can actually create synergies to start implementing the rollout of cleaner energies because we are creative and at some point this is going to come a reality good evening my name is de la veris i'm from castorica my question for the un is let me just the rural areas of my country these are the most impacted areas around the globe this is where we can probably provide more leverage where people can be educated from scratch and this is usually those that are ignored the most but if we do implement the necessary tools there is a tremendous potential in all of these areas kids are incredibly creative and that could become very very profitable in this area we could start working with the betterment technological betterment of all these rural areas in remote areas of the country thank you my name is lenon i'm from Honduras well in the un i want to say as my partner said we have to focus on the more of the poorer countries i have no people who do not have the means to come forward and it is these are important means to do so there are people who are ignorant but not because they want to but because they haven't had the opportunity our intelligent people that are basically uneducated but that can be changed and we are wasting all of that human talent education is the key there is so many possibilities there's so many advantages with people who are simply torment talent that would be a good solution to start off by facilitating for all of these people the necessary ITCs and technology changes constantly so we should also keep the updates on mind not only just providing a computer coming back 20 years after because that changes constantly and we must update all of this equipment so that is something that is going to aid a lot and provide a lot of help in the world because that will bring out the best in people thank you i come from senegal i'm an entrepreneur in senegal i developed applications and we have social applications particularly for syndicates what i propose for the un is to support syndicates and that's the objective our objective is to develop applications that will allow us allows to help the syndicates to contribute for the development of our countries we are developers and we must aim our needs thank you very much good afternoon my name is nil Vargas i'm from nicole agro so when we talk about education and when we talk about rural areas i believe it's important to use ITC so that business owners that actually empirically generate profit that it'd be good to actually create an open channel of communication as to for example create accounting systems because most of these people who are empirical farmers they don't have that type of built-in skill thank thank you so much guys you guys were awesome if i can be helpful with the first steps in any of your businesses please let me know how i'll do whatever i can the best way to reach me my twitter is robfitz rob fitz i respond to that much more than email so that's how you can get me and give yourselves a huge round of applause great work today and i hope you start what you want to start and now we've got about five minutes and then the next session is just in this room so you guys don't have terribly far to go