Highlights from the Smash Sport event in Helsinki (Day 1)
After a successful debut last year, the Smash Sport event in Helsinki kicked off it’s second edition. Smash is an official Slush side-event and a combination of speeches and exhibition, in which sports related startups are showcasing their products and services.
Here are my (subjective) highlights from Day 1:
What are current global sports trends?
Lars Stegelmann from Nielsen Sports gave an overview about the commercial trends in sports 2017. He highlighted 10 overall trends and detailed 5 of them. The following pictures show the outlook for the trends number 1, 2, 6, 7 and 10.
Make them love you! Data-based tips on what works on social media
Sami Kuusela from Underhood had some insights on what to pay attention to when posting on social media, based on more than 5 million updates from more than 5.000 brands. He was focusing on the right audience size, posting frequency, media format and text lengths and came up with some surprising recommendations.
eSport as a societal institution
Weldon Green from Mind Games Consulting is a successful Sport Psychology Trainer specialised on eSports. He predicts that professional eSports will go amateur, local and live and showed opportunities and challenges in the market.
AR/VR — Glimpse to the modern world
Emmi Jouslehto from Arilyn is convinced that in the (very near) future all the best stories are AR stories and that AR will profoundly change the human behaviour in urban landscape and the use of space. She described market challenges, opportunities in sports and what the Arilyn platform is capable of.
Insights from the other speakers
Ollie Phillips from PWC gave some insights on what we can learn from elite level sports, KooPee Hiltunen from Neogames described the history of the finish gaming industry and Bruce Oreck from Aalto University spoke about the 7 practices entrepreneurs should internalize.
That was it from the first day, looking forward to the second one (will be published on here as well)!
Benjamin Penkert is the Founder of SportsTechX and Head of Consulting at the leAD Sports Accelerator in Berlin. You can get in touch via Linkedin, Twitter or email.
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