On the 18th and 19th of March, the START Summit, the leading conference for student entrepreneurship in Europe, takes place in St. Gallen. prisma covers the summit live with multiple people on the ground. Abbreviations: Dominik Mayer (dm), Oscar Hong (oh), Simone Brunner (sb), Moritz Haegi (mh) & Kevin Kohler (kk)
Post-Summit Short interviews with participants (German & English)
Here you can find the interview with Mike Hearn
Here you can find the interview with Jose Luis Cordeiro as an article
Here you can find a photo gallery
20:53 Grand Finale The START Summit 2016 has closed with the START Summiteer Award. 8 Start-Ups made it to the final of the pitching contest: Minebox, Metrilus, Towsh, Kasko, Gamaya, Carzada, Reactive Robotics & Splendit. And the winner is…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW2TM6JhElg
A huge compliment to all those who helped organizing this event. I think I can speak for all participants, when I say, that you’ve done an absolutely phenomenal job! Chapeau!
As from now on, the on-the-fly reporting is over, however, we have amassed a lot of great material, including really interesting interviews with Jose Luis Cordeiro, Bibop Gresta & Mike Hearn, which we will publish in the coming days. So, stay tuned & see you at the afterparty! (kk)
17:58 Krschzptthh! Could you hear that? That was the sound of male egos being crushed by Dr. Gerhard Lohmann of Swiss Re. The data isn’t ambiguous: “Men have a systematically higher risk of being involved in accidents than women”. (kk)
17:30 What makes Israel a “start-up nation“? Answers can be found on main stage right now. (dm)
15:45 Bitcoin civil war The debate about the scalability of Bitcoin also makes waves at the summit. First, Andreas Antonopoulos, a “bitcoin-maximalist“, was on the main stage with a sometimes quite angry tirade against the government and big banks, in which he also alluded to the current debate about an FBI backdoor in iPhones and said: “No, Mr. President, I don’t have a Swiss bank account in my pocket, I have a Swiss bank in there!” Directly afterwards Mike Hearn, whose article about the failure of Bitcoin at the beginning of the year caused the Bitcoin price to crash, took on the START Arena and shared his vision of the future usage of the blockchain. More on that later.(kk)
15:32 Some impressions (sb)
13:46 Changing times Mining resources looks differently nowadays… 
12:35 Uber showcase Uber disrupts the taxi industry – no news there. Interesting: With UberEATS they also started to tackle Instacart & other “last yarders”. More interesting: Will decentralized Apps (dapps) disrupt the sharing economy apps? Looking forward to get Mike Hearn’s take on that! (kk)
11:36 Burn noticed So, yes, nobody of us is a native speaker and we do this ticker live from our smartphones, mistakes happen! As the moderator said today “regret is greater than rejection”, you won’t improve if you’re afraid of someone mocking you anonymously. Anyway, if you really are good at writing in English, you’re more than welcome to join prisma and show off your skills ;) (kk)
11:10 Wow! Amazing keynote by Bibop Gresta from Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. They are building their first tracks in Qual Valley right now and have just announced a contract with the government of Slovakia about a week ago, with six or seven additional governments coming up soon. As Bibop alluded, one of them is situated very close to Switzerland! Hyperloop really is the future for travel between (relatively close) cities, with Uber / self-driving cars picking up from there. Interview upcoming! (kk)
20:50 You always meet twice (at least) Some belated notes: This morning, we ran into the president of the University of St. Gallen, Thomas Bieger, and I pressed him a little concerning the further integration of technology into University courses and apparently there really are some interesting developments going on. As Bieger told us the industry & commerce chamber of St. Gallen is financing a feasibility study on this issue. Especially, quantitative methods and coding may be upgraded in the curriculum in the near future.
Also, I saw some of the Technion guys from the Starthack again. Best luck at the pitch tomorrow! (kk)
18:45 HSG Founder of the Year HSG alumnus Caspar Coppetti was awarded with this years prize for his sports shoes start-up “On” and won 10’000 CHF (oh)
18:35 Just write a cool quote next to the photo, they said (oh)
18:11 Our student radio toxic.fm was also present at today’s summit activities – encountering extraordinary ideas and a deligthed Thomas Bieger.
Here is toxic.fm’s radio segment for Summit Day 1 (mh)
16:55 Mildly interesting fact Here’s an overview of the countries the participants of the summit come from (kk)
16:38 A discussion about singularities So, I finally managed to upload the Interview with Jose Luis Cordeiro. I will write up an actual article with some background info later ;) (kk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72EvIqn5luY
14:58 Eric Giler knows (where) his stuff (is) Just coming from his talk on the company Origin Wireless. Fascinating, they’re able to locate things at relatively short distance without triangulation and with lots of interference extremely accurately. Interesting applications for IoT/ Home Security Systems (kk)
14:55 Ran out of battery power Thank technology they have these great battery packs here. (kk)
13:44 start-up pitch competition! Their chance to shine and convince not only a experienced jury, but also a tech-enthusiastic crowd! Here’s where you engage with early adopters ;) Minebox on stage right now (dm)
13:19 Lunch? Sorry, no time to try. Too many interesting workshops and speeches going on right now;) Heard it’s great though (dm)
13:13 Interview upcoming Just had a great interview with Jose Luis Cordero. Will post it later ;) (kk/oh)
13.10 Missing out Speaking about farming: how’s lunch over there at Olma? I heard F&B is always crucial at such events ;-) (na)
13:00 The future of farming! Gamaya believes that it’s possible to make agriculture carbon neutral. (dm)
12.05 Jose Luis Cordeiro impressed everyone with his speech about the exponential growth of emerging & future technologies as well as with his mickey mouse head. (oh)
11:00 Watch out Jose Luis Cordeiro: “In 5 years everyone will have decoded their DNA”, “You’re part of the last human generation that happened by mistake” (kk)
10:45 Achievement unlocked Jonas could hand over a bottle of Vodka to University president Thomas Bieger, nice! (kk)
10:35 It has begun! Jonas Muff has opened the conference, followed by the mayor of St. Gallen, Thomas Scheitlin, & now Thomas Bieger is on stage. Slight technical difficulties handled with humor. All highlight how crucial entrepreneurship & innovation are for city & university & society. (kk)
09:55 “The most interesting coke I’ve ever drunk!” As we’re waiting for the opening ceremony to begin, Dominik gets really excited about the coke here ;) (kk)
09:15 Good morning! By the way, don’t trust these words, that’s exactly the event you’re looking for.(oh)
20:47 On Times Square By the way, since I already mentioned the FB page of START. The photo of a huge ad on Times Square in New York that attracted a lot of attention about a week ago is 100% legit. Apparently Nasdaq is looking to become a partner at the next summit. (kk)
20:38 A small downer ahead of the summit As the START team posted on Facebook, keynote speaker Tom Mueller of SpaceX unfortunately won’t be able to attend the conference:
Having read the interesting Musk biography written by Ashlee Vance, I suspect that Musk may has introduced this policy not out of concerns about information security alone. According to Vance he really does like to be in control of everything (including the media) and isn’t always the best at sharing credit. However, let’s not delve into further speculation here. As long as SpaceX brings me to Mars I’m more than happy ;) (kk)
Pre-Summit Some impressions from the Hackathon that took place one week prior to the summit
We also conducted an interview with Jonas Muff the president of START Global a few weeks ahead of the summit (german)
You can read up on last year’s summit as well. Here’s an interview with Omid Scheybani from Google. (german)
