Six editions have brought us here: an important step in our local technology ecosystem and another successful event which results in valuable knowledge for our attendees.

Over these past 4 days, Cluj-Napoca burst with technology & innovation enthusiasts, all seeking new information, new networking opportunities, new ways to apply their knowledge base. We had an intense hackathon, many cutting-edge ideas at Startup Avalanche and two days during which some of the brightest minds in the world stepped on our Techsylvania stage.

Let’s take a look at how the last day unfolded

Through our endeavors and knowledge inputs as technology professionals, we can say that we’re contributing together to building a digital future. But on a more hands-on approach, Jerald Singh from Grab, launched this day by revealing how his company managed to build a digital future for 650 million people.

Moving over to artificial intelligence, on topics that concern most of us: “will it outgrow our abilities or will it be a major help in our day-to-day lives?”, Jatin Aythora from BBC tried to enlighten this by presenting both opportunities and threats of AI.

If we stop and take a look at Romania’s potential (business-wise), we’ll see that more and more opportunities appear as its development has started to interest more peers. On the same page are Oren Stern from Connatix, Remus Lechintan from RoundAssist, Adrian Enache from Angels Den and Philipp Kandal from Telenav who discussed the pros of investing in Romania during a panel moderated by Ionut Bunoiu from Forbes.

A subject that is somehow unattained so far at Techsylvania is the communication part. In all this technology swirl, we’ve lost sight of how to market the organizations we’re invested in. This is where Ted Persson from EQT Ventures intervened and tried to explain to his audience what startups get wrong when it comes to branding, comm & PR.

How does the future look like?

Collaborative, we hope. When building smart cities, we reached the conclusion that collaboration is the key. Jan Ameri from Arctic Startup moderated a panel between Peter Vesterbacka, Emil Boc, Claudia Griech and Nan Zhou, which resulted in a futuristic and optimistic overview for all of us.

After this, Peter Vesterbacka took it to the next level of future innovations, revealing us his masterplan on how to create gravity and interconnecting Eurasia.

We didn’t neglect the IoT area as we were all eyes and ears at Vlad Trifa from Ambrosus, when he presented “How to Build the Operating System for Smarter Businesses” and shifted over to legal manners that have been a total haze lately — scaling new data regulations across all countries, with Peter Yared.

“The splinternet is here — the internet as we know it is continuously fragmenting.” Peter Yared.

Want to know Koen’s secret for outcompeting competitors?

“If you want to win, if you want to outcompete your competitor, focus on how to iterate faster.”

Our agenda was prolific today, having all these topics to complete it:

  • Zafer Babur (Turkish Airlines)- How the Airline Industry is Transformed by Technology
  • Panel: What’s Coming Next in VC & Global Trends: Christian Renner (Kompass Digital) — Moderator/ Rob Kniaz (Hoxton Ventures)/ Gwendolyn Regina (Entrepreneur First)/ Fang Yuan (Baidu Ventures)/ Brahm Klar (Round13 Capital)
  • Investing in Leaders: In Conversation with Tim Sullivan (Oceanic Partners)/ Gwendolyn Regina (Entrepreneur First) — Moderator
  • How to Fundraise With Zero Connections- Fang Yuan (Baidu Ventures)

Techsylvania’s 2019 conference ended on a high note, with no one else than Tom Mueller from SpaceX, our long-awaited guest. He presented his vision on how space technology can be revolutionized (even more) and how we will attain a satellite constellation.

“It’s not within human nature to slow down and reach balance. We’re always onto exploring new horizons.

We need to go to space to preserve humanity.”

The Startup Avalanche finalists:

We had a batch of very promising projects for this year’s Startup Avalanche and were really glad to meet all our participants.

The Startup Avalanche winner

The Startup Avalanche winner is Alessandro Monterosso with Patch AI, a startup that streamlines the clinical trial network of patients, researchers and sponsors.

The first AI-powered conversational platform for clinical trials can now have a better future with the €100.000 investment prize!

The workshops

We dived into more fintech with Dr. Karol Przystalski from Codete, who took it to another level by engaging his mentees in procedures of NLP in fintech.

During the second workshop of the day, Valli Ravindran from Google tried to make Lean User Research easier, by explaining some easy steps to conduct it.

We heard serverless technologies are the new thing, so we brought Razvan Bretoiu & Darius Bogdan from Linnify to present how you can process 50TB of data per month by using them.

And because we like to stay one step ahead of the game and keep our dear #techsylvanians by our side, we held a workshop on “Augmented Reality on Android” with Alexandru Gherghina from Cognizant Softvision. After this, we closed our workshop sessions for this edition with Convolutional neural networks (CNN) explained by Cristi Lungu- ML Trainer / Consultant.

The Impact Stage

The Impact Stage was mainly focused on Artificial Intelligence: the challenges, the opportunities, the impact. Our French guests from La villa numeris had various dedicated panels and presentations to get more incisively into this topic.

We also checked out the state of tech in the CEE with Ivan Draganov from DealRoom, the growth and global impact of eSports with Joey Brander and discovered the world of digital dentistry with our local expert — Cătălin Dimir from D’institute.

Aaaand that’s a wrap! It was the most intense Techsylvania so far, but the most rewarding also. In-between so many new ideas, insights, knowledge and perspectives, we had the opportunity to enjoy the company of so many bright minds. We want to thank you all for taking part in this and we hope to put all this new info to work and become the next change-makers in your industry!

See you next year!

Innovation tech technology techsylvania