Impressions from hub.berlin 2019 — the innovators’ stomping ground
In the past week, we at MotionPass, a part of the hDock42 launchpad, had the opportunity to join one of the largest business & tech conferences in Germany - the hub.berlin. This conference gathers key players of leading industries, politics and entrepreneurs in a unique environment of the Station Berlin event space to discuss, shape and experience the digital transformation.
Looking back at the event, the prevailing impression is the overwhelming amount of motivation and inspiration. Thanks to the great mixture of participants including 1,000 startups, c-level executives of large corporates, public institutions, scientists and even artists the chance you will talk to an inspirational person is very high. We used this opportunity and talked about our current and emerging projects to many of the participants, giving us a valuable feedback from people from various industries.
This year’s main topics were AI and Big Data, Digital Transformation, Education & Innovation, Fintech, Mobility and of course, Blockchain. It was quite hard to choose from the over 350 presentations and workshops. We sum up three of them that we found most inspiring:
Jack Ramsay, Accenture: Be Digital or be dead?
One of the many interesting thoughts in this presentation was that we now live in a world, where computers know us better than our closest family. E.g. the chance that Amazon chooses the right Christmas present for me is much higher than my partner. Why is it so? Because computers still listen to us. The disruption is now happening in our homes and the next industry to be disrupted is the transport industry. Speaking of transport: By the amount of people employed, transport is now the number 1 industry in the world. But this is definitely going to change. The jobs of the future are those in social intelligence & services, creativity, and craftsmanship.
Dagmar Schuller, audEERING: Listening Between the Lines: Emotional Intelligence Based on Audio
AudEERING applies AI to analyse the human emotion and acoustic context in voice recognition. Simply said, even though the standard audio recognition programs are aimed at the recognition of words, the AI allows also to analyse what is between the lines. And its not only the emotions like irritation or happiness, but also the physical state like fatigue, approximation of age or drunkenness. Currently they can distinguish between 50 different emotions and a variety of others based just on the analysis of human voice. One of the projects they currently work on is remote monitoring of the development of Parkinson’s disease.
Ansgar Schneider, PAYBACK: Direct Marketing Propelled by Big Data & Machine Learning at PAYBACK
Nine years since the launch of their mobile app, PAYBACK now has more than 7 million active mobile users in Germany, with the average usage of their app 10 times a month. Using their loyalty program some ten years ago, was quite far from a fun experience. There was a necessity the carry around the card and if one was lucky, one of the many linear regression models in the background has suggested some relevant offers at the participating partners in the area.
Since the very launch of their app, PAYBACK has worked on making the experience as much fun for the customer as possible. Nowadays, users can receive personalized offers from the shops in which they find themselves at the very moment. They can even pay with the app, using a QR-code solution that saves the merchants card payment fees.
This was just a fraction of information presented at the event. On the top of that are discussions with qualified experts from various disciplines and the opportunity to present ourselves in the Startups Meet Corporate Speed Dating event. And not to mention the great party after the first conference day! Thank you, hub.berlin!
