Market Engineering with easy-to-use frameworks enables startups to check the market opportunities and define the beachhead market. Learn how to cut the big market topic into 3 simple steps.
Urgency is the missing ingredient that changes the adoption of emerging technologies such as AR, VR or Blockchain. Technology markets are changing as buyers convert from innovation labs to enterprise rollouts and how this transforms the way technology is reshaped to solve greater problems of higher urgency.
How can startup founders, entrepreneurs, marketing and PR managers navigate their startups through a crisis like Covid by using marketing and communication with an education-first approach to help customers in uncertain times and stay ahead of the game.
How can you get access to almost unlimited knowledge? Why is it essential to meet founders who have done it before? What is that mindset thing everyone is talking about in the Valley? In this article, I will share my experiences about the ‘Learn & Share’ mindset and why it is beneficial to build a business and bring early-stage tech products to the market—with examples from meetings with founders, advisors, and investors. Here’s my background. I am the Chief Marketing Officer and President of REFLEKT Inc., the US entity of the Munich-founded tech startup simplifying industrial maintenance, operations and training with Augmented Reality. I started building our US business out of Sunnyvale in the Bay Area and turned it from zero to a recognized player within one year. In that year, I had the chance to learn from founders and advisors who have built several startups and who understand what it means to fail and learn. These meetings motivated me to share what I have learned and why I believe there is no better place to learn so much in such a short time. How can you learn in the Silicon Valley? One way is to start watching HBO’s Silicon Valley series. Seriously! This way, you don’t even need to come here. Frankly spoken, what Richard & Co. showed in the six seasons about the tech industry is not that far away from reality. If you do make it to the Valley, though, I highly recommend you to book a tour where you get an express ride through one of the big accelerators. Every day at Plug & Play , I see massive groups walking through the building where we have our office. Plug & Play is the biggest accelerator with over 50,000 visitors from 15 different countries per year during the tours and events. Once you see the companies and startups involved, you realize that you don‘t even need to leave your office to build a massive network. The ‘where’ you can learn is one thing. The ‘how’ and ‘why’ you can learn is the fascinating part for me. What is often separates The Valley from other places is the growth mindset. But, the mindset alone doesn’t make a place special—that’s true. There’s much more than the obvious phrase: in the Valley you rather get a “Yes” instead of a “No” when you come up with a crazy idea – which is something I like to do. Here are my three reasons why this area is so interesting and why you can learn faster and more (about the startup and tech world): 1. A very high number of founders, advisors, VCs involved in tech and startups, 2. All accessible within 50 miles between San Francisco and Santa Cruz, 3. People are eager to share their experiences, learnings, and failures.
These days, most of the news around Augmented Reality are about Apple and its new ARKit — a development tool to place digital objects into real scenery and display it on iPhones and iPads. Still in its beta version, ARKit has started a second wave of public awareness for AR after the most successful mobile game in history: Pokémon Go. With the consumer market now finally entering the AR world, it is little known that the enterprise sector has already been using the new technology for many years — often in stealth mode with prototypes and proof of concepts as internal apps. This is about to change completely. In this article, I want to share some thoughts about how “consumer first” announcements like the ARKit influence the enterprise business. You may think that apps like Pokémon Go and all the examples developed by nerds around the globe with the ARKit don’t have anything to do with the business sector. The same applies to Snap’s Spectacles — AR glasses that look like hipster sunglasses — or Pokémon Go, another mobile game with some hype for AR. Believe it or not: you’ll see all of this repeated in some form or another in the enterprise sector. I’m not talking about single use-case scenarios, I’m talking about how the tools from Apple as well as the AR activities from Facebook, Google and Snap inspire us to rethink the use of AR. These are the opportunities that make better enterprise applications and adapt the technology to the user — instead of educating the user to adapt to the technology. ARKit brings Augmented Reality to millions of users and developers Mapping our world with the smartphone camera and using tracking methods, like SLAM, to place virtual objects into real scenery — in a nutshell… this is exactly what the ARKit does. The more realistic the objects look, the better they merge with the real environment. Once our brain perceives the virtual content like physical objects we reach the full potential of an augmented or extended reality. Therefore the size of the objects has to fit to the environment and the objects have to react to different light conditions — just to mention two important factors. One of Apple’s first applications on iOS is in development with IKEA. It allows IKEA app users place furniture and accessories straight out of the catalogue directly into your living room using Augmented Reality. Apple’s camera and software technology supports what I described before: it identifies the room size and light conditions to scale the furniture to the right size and texture. Imagine this for planning stores, supermarkets, hotels and real estate. This powerful software is giving almost anyone the possibility to create AR applications and will have a huge impact: from September on — with the release of iOS 11 — there will be millions of new AR users and developers building apps. In the first step, we’ll see a bunch of different apps. Once the developers understand the way AR works and what the possibilities are, there will be more and more daily-use applications. It was the same with the first mobile apps — it took some time to reach the full potential. We will be able to create better and more natural user interfaces and get closer to the point where we use AR in daily business. Instead of simply placing furniture in our living room, we will be able to visualize operational knowledge in the real work environment. What would you say if I told you that there is no difference between Pokémon Go and a maintenance application for a technician? Both applications embed digital objects or information in the real world.
It is a pretty familiar scene, that of the classic morning routine of the future. A person wakes up, gets out of bed, and walks over to their window. As they gaze out at their city skyline, a hologram hovering somewhere in the sky informs them of the weather. Other floating projections display the morning news, their itinerary for the day, and whatever else may be relevant to that person at that time. After updating themselves sufficiently, they head over to their closet and virtually try on a few different outfits in a matter of seconds, finally settling on one they are happy with. As they continue to prepare for the day, all the mundane necessities which humans previously had to do manually now operate automatically, leaving the person more time to do something of importance before they embark out the door.
