Guest post by Gabriel Ortiz of [The Startup Digest] London.
Volcanic Ash did not stop the bright minds of Cambridge from holding their first ever TEDxCam event last weekend. The sun shone brightly upon the Cambridge campus venue – showcasing a wealth of forward thinkers and brilliant speakers. TEDx is a new program that enables local communities to organize, design and host their own independent, TED-like events. Luckily it doesn’t involve the high prices TED usually charges for its events.
Cambridge is well known for some of the world’s greatest discoveries, this event combined a diverse range of people to share stories and ideas with Cambridge’s long tradition of revolutionary thinking. There was also a wealth of High Tech Startups.
Including:
• Duo Fertility – The new and advanced fertility monitor that fits in with your life.
• EmotionAI – A web platform for emotional communications.
• Pneuma Care – A Non-Contact Medical Monitoring system.
• Audio Analytic who demonstrated their software’s ability to separate sounds by measuring the audience applause for each speaker and displaying their results in the form of a bar graph.
TEDxCam even created their own Startup through a pre-event called Hackathon – a one day caffeine-fueled event inspired by web father Tim Berners-Lee: “40 hackers, 7 teams, 6 advisors, 3 organisers, 30 pizzas, 200 cans of coke, 1kg of fruit pastilles, and, 9 hours of hacking later, we had 7 awesome applications and one new data type!”
The winner of Hackathon resulted in Ventropy.org a mashup of TechCrunch’s Crunchbase and Kiva.org.
Their goal is to portray the Global value of Venture funding by seeking to “…succinctly illustrate the huge disparity between funding for technology start-ups in the Western world (data provided by CrunchBase) and loans provided by the non-profit organisation Kiva for assisting entrepreneurial activity in developing nations.
Sobia Hamid of Ventropy.org said she hopes to move the concept forward and will be thinking of ways to make this service more diverse through different comparisons.
Special thanks go to Dawson King and Cong Congo Bo who took the time to organize what will no doubt be the first event of many.
This weekend’s TEDxCam and Volcanic ash also came together to inspire a spontaneous one-off TEDxVolcano event in London.