39: UTC Startups — series III
Following suit to Series I & 2 presenting just some of UTC’s start-ups, we offer our readers the Series II which will continue on UTC’s WebTV facility and via our social network pages. They indeed are the living proof that UTC through it’s a la carte pedagogy and its training/research continuum enhances the maturing and personal development of all its students, encouraging them to express and release their creative and innovative talents.
Have you not always dreamt of a caretaking presence to set your alarm-clock, to get your morning coffee ready, switching off all unused electric appliances when you leave home? Gladys is a connected assistant programmed to deal with these repetitive tasks, in conformity with your lifestyle and routines.
| For a minimal outlay of say 50€, this smart system is capable of planning and programming the use of all electric appliances in your home, provided they are connected to a wall-plug. More than being a simple remote control device, the freeware running on theRaspberry Pi mini-computer applies scenarios and proposes tailor-made solutions by connecting with your agenda and certain user applications. Distinct from other existing home control systems, Gladys asks the user what his/her personal preferences are. Depending on the answers to these questions, Gladys will organise a certain number of tasks. Depending on your desired time of arrival at your office, Gladys will calculate the alarm clock “on” time, taking into account traffic condition and the length of the trip. With soft ambient music and light, the announcement the weather condition outside will offer an easy-going wake up routine. “An Internet user told me that during a total power black-out; all the appliances at home went down, except Gladys who with her internal clock reset everything including the wake up time” says Pierre-Gilles Leymarie, a UTC student majoring in Computer sciences and applications who is the man behind this invention and project. |
A home-made innovation
Three years ago, this computer fan spent 8 months getting his prototype in order. “It was through seeing the assistant Jarvis in Iron-Man that the idea dawned on me — the connected technology already existed and all I needed to do was to assemble them an add on a bit of AI (artificial intelligence)” adds Pierre-Gilles with a smile. A self-made electronics expert (by reading lots and lots of documents on the Internet) allowed him to complete the project alone. “Whereas “classic” domotics systems have bills of several thousand euros to install, this is a “home-made” device which allows you to offer the possibility to build a smart home with only a minimum background in electronics and programming”. The project is a success if we judge by the 11 000 downloads already. The system programme is in open-source and therefore can be adapted to specific needs. An extensive community of 450 developers continuously add on new modules to the basic set. The messages are translated into several languages, and adaptation to other connected devices or “boxes”” are some examples of improvements and developments. Using a freeware is also a guarantee to have a technology that is dedicated to home management albeit with a risk of prying, monitoring of private spheres. Since the first prototype, a second model has been assembled to match internaut expressed needs better. Pierre-Gilles is now thinking about developing a low-cost model: “The programme will still be open source, but why not envision a ready-to-use box for the public at large”? More at: www.raspberrypi.org/
We all recall that moment when, being a bit short of time, we cooked up a plateful of pastas or simply guzzled a packet of crisps. OK, it was so quick and easy but not exactly recommended for your body, if you repeated the drill too often … Antoine Boillet, well aware of this, took the easy routes, especially before exams. That was why he decided to develop powdered meals, on a formula base that included all the nutritional Ingredients a body needs, in the right proportions. That was how the idea of the start-up Smeal was born.
“I first of all proposed my idea in response to the call for proposals launched by UTC’s Daniel Thomas Innovation Centre in September 2015 and my project was selected”, explains Antoine Boillet, who graduated In 2015, majoring in Mechanical Systems Engineering (GSM) with the elective specialty “Productivity and Logistics” (PL). “That led to our being ‘incubated’ at the Innovation Centre, with rooms at our disposal and a partnership with representatives of the agro-food and agro-resources communities. We also approached the UTC Culinary Laboratory to progress with our concept and project. These contacts provided a high level and important input to our work in terms of technology.” In order to prepare a perfectly ‘balanced’ meal, Antoine Boillet referred to the recommendations issued by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). “We used the same approach as nutritionists working for the benefit of high-level sports athletes and we started with nutrition tables to formulate our product”, says Antoine Boillet. Nutrition is a field that he totally ignored before launching his project ad ideas. But that was not a problem inasmuch as “UTC taught us how to acquire new skills!” Concretely, a Smeal is packaged as a powder sachet, containing the approximately equivalent of 3 meals. When a consumer is hungry he/she puts a required amount of powder in a cocktail shaker, adds a little water, shakes the mix and that’s it, it is ready. There is no conservation additive so the product can last for one year, with no problems. “The idea is just to have a sachet in a cupboard at home and a meal ready in 30 seconds, if needed”, says Antoine enthusiastically. Smeals can be consumed at any time of day and the doses is what the consumers reckons match their level of hunger. You can even buy a shaker with graduation marks to make a more accurate measure of the powder mix proportions. Smeal is a vegetarian mean, with no GMOs and Antoine is planning, in a second phase, to propose lactose free and gluten-free varieties. The most important ingredient in a Smeal is oats. But the powder is composed in fact of some 30 ingredients, so as to offer a ‘perfect’ nationally balanced composition. Moreover, “we use an innovative sugar compound which has the special characteristics of being digested slowly and this ensures the consumer has a low glycaemic index”, adds Antoine. “Soon our product will be certified compatible for diabetes sufferers”. Smeals bring consumers just the right daily prescribed amount of proteins, vitamins, etc. You could therefore eat Smeals all the time, although this is not Antoine’s objective. “We want to replace function-intensive meals, where the aim is a search for efficiency in terms of time spent eating and nutritional balance, not eating for pleasure!” After a market survey and to add a dose of pleasure, the start-up Smeals is now proposing 3 well-known flavours (vanilla, raspberries and garden vegetables). “What we want to do is to launch other flavours that would fit in with the calendar events — pumpkin for Halloween, cinnamon for Xmas”, adds Antoine. As of the coming summer, those interested will be able to order meals on-line (in France first, followed by Europe a little later). “We have ideas to develop the business, new format and associate tools!” concludes Antoine with a cheery “Bon appétit, M’ssieurs, Dames!
In 1928, Maurice Martenot* developed a musical instrument with an ‘expressive’ key, much appreciated by the musicians when modulating the sound volume they produced. Unfortunately, he died without revealing his secret. Eric Simon, a UTC graduate who specialized in industrial design, has come up with a solution that reproduces the famous touch-key, in a tactile control box called ‘Touché’.
“Basically, we are all musicians and composers”, explains Roméo Verlet, who is the sales manager for Expressive E. “Eric composes music for films, Victor Grimaldi also a UTC graduate is a musician in a trip-hop group and I am a rap composer. All of this gives us some complementary features to share”. Indeed it is the principle that drives this founders’ group. It enabled them to become aware of ‘other’ ways to work, with each musician playing his part in a different manner.
“Victor and Eric began developing the project together, following Eric’s placement at University of Paris 6 (Pierre & Marie)”, adds Roméo Verlet, “and they came knocking on the door of the SATT Lutech (a technology transfer enabling company). I was in charge of business prospects there and when we decided to invest in this project, we got on very well together. The basic idea was to set up a company to reproduce the Martenot key. We established Expressive E, with Alexandre Bellot, the 4th founder member (a qualified ICAM engineer, specialist in industrial engineering sciences)”.
“Touché” is a tactile sound controller inspired by the famous Ondes Martenot, which you connect to a synthesizer and it give the musicians a hand control over a multitude of parameters. The controller itself has a tactile wooden surface (cf. demo at their web-site); then musician ha the same range of nuances and modulations he/she would get from the same acoustic instrument. “The controller connects into any make of synthesizer and the musician can ‘reshape’ the sounds ad libitum”, explains Roméo. “With our “Touch” controller, we are running somewhat against the grain of what all the ‘synthe’ makers are doing today. Our product is very simple to use and it feels almost exactly like the sensation you get from the equivalent stringed instrument. This is the strong point of Touché, modern stringed instrumental music”.
The physical design of Touché was handled by a French design agency. “It turned out that wood is the material best adapted to all the configurations you may want and expect from such a controller device”. The controller unit comes with its own in-built software and this allows for a very wide range of variations. Several teams are working at the start-up to make sure this controller is compatible with all the synthesizers on the market-place.
“We also met with over a hundred musicians, including those with Portishead, Massive Attack, Björk…» announces Roméo proudly. “They too participated in development of the product. Their ‘returns’ and expressed feeling when using Touché had an influence on the route we took for the device and its design characteristics”. Getting used to the controller is fairly easy but of course this will depend on each musician. “You don’t really need training as such — you just learn through your own hand movements. Anyone can have a go, and succeed”, concludes Roméo. “Touché” will be on sale before end-2016, for less than 500 € a piece. “We are preparing for a distribution of Touché in all musical instrument shops and also at international outlets”, announces Roméo. “We really would like to see our invention as a lasting actor in a very demanding industry and which call for lots of further developments.”
www.expressivee.com
In order to conquer a share on the American market-place, you need to present a product that, is ‘’trendy’, of course, but also with a name that sparks the buyer’s imagination. Grégoire Gérard, when he presented his connected alarm clock at the Las Vegas 2016 CES (Consumer Electonics Show), it had a typically French flavoured name “Bonjour”
Connected objects are nothing new for Grégoire Gérard, who graduated from UTC in 2003; they are the core business of his start-up Holî. He notably developed the ‘Smartlamp’, an i‑Phone controlled lamp distributed in all Apple Stores. It was the return on eXperience messages from clients that made Gérard decide to specialize his start-up. “A non negligible fraction of our clients were using Smartlamps mainly in their bedrooms. As of 2015, we decided to focus our activities on the bedroom and the sleep phases.
To develop new products, we worked with sleep research centres and specialist practitioners”. This introduced a more scientific side to the devices and this suited Gérard perfectly. “I chose to go to UTC because I wanted to acquire a strong technical base of skills, even though I always wanted to develop applications and products”. Holî then produced its Sleep Companion, a luminotherapeutic lamp associated with a sleep analysis “app”.
In 2016, a new challenge awaited the start-up — to conquer the American markets. “To do this, we decided to launch a new product we presented at the Las Vegs 2016 CES; we called it “Bonjour”. The Las Vegas trip allowed us to validate that the product’s functionalities were the right ones and that the name Bonjour was fine for American eyes and ears”. “Bonjour is a connected alarm clock with multiple functions. “We all begin and end our day in the bedroom and we have all sorts of automatisms when we wake up, such as checking the” weather”, says Grégoire Gérard. “But just constantly picking up and switching on an i‑Phone can be tiresome and the issue of RF emissions worries users more and more. Bonjour allows you to address this question because for those that worry about EM radiation, the Wifi function switches itself off during the night, reassures Grégoire. Moreover, the clock has built in artificial intelligence (AI), so it’s possible, for example, to ask to be awakened earlier if the weather outside is good enough or if there are expected traffic jams on the car commuter trip to the office. Bonjour also displays some useful information — weather, traffic, agenda … “The device has a loudspeaker to reproduce music. From a technical point of view Bonjour is iOS (Apple ) compatible and likewise with Android”. “The Bonjour alarm clock will also be connectable to other devices in the product range. All our products are connected via the same “app”, explains Grégoire, “and this will evolve as we produce more devices. This is much easier for the user to handle but also for us in the company. More than just being an alarm clock, Bonjour is a way to connect into one’s personal digital world and connected home. It’s a shortcut to all your connectable devices. You can, for example, control your home thermostat, your intrusion cameras or any other Holî device, such as the sleep companion”. In order to launch his alarm on the American market, Grégoire decided to start a participative financing campaign on Kickstarter, “this being a way to get a foothold in the US markets and be able to tell a great story as well”. The Kickstarter campaign should begin June 2016 and will “propose” the Bonjour device at 129 euros. Later, when ready, it will go on the international markets early 2017 at 199 euros approx. Grégoire Gérard is already indulging in some forward-thinking: “In September, we plan to present a “sleep tracker” that you place on the mattress and this will allow you to wake up at the “right time” in the sleep cycle. The sleep tracker will interconnect with Bonjour and thus trigger the alarm at just the right time”. Holî looks after you!!
More and more French people are taking to auto-medication, without necessarily knowing the right way to take their drugs or aware of the potential interactions and possible side side-effects. Having made this observation, Pascal Huynh, Cédric Tang and Kevin Tan developed Medicamentum, a web and smartphone ‘app’ they presented at the Assurance Maladie Hackathon* competition, the final round of which will take place on May 10, 2016 in Paris.
After establishing his first start-up, Beyowi, in Bangkok Thailand, Pascal Huynh, a UTC-GI graduate (2008) who majored in computer sciences and their applications, decided to open a web agency to develop smartphone ‘apps’ and web sites in France as of January 2015. He was rapidly joined by Cédric Tang, UTC-GM graduate (2008) who majored in Mechanical Engineering, Kevin Tan, UTC-GI (00 and Chloé Fasquel, a digital graphic designer. It was via the development of a project for a chemist to provide information about medical drugs that they decided to register for the Assurance Maladie Hakathon*, where they presented their project baptized ”Medicamentum’.
“Medicamentum” is an eco-system and takes the form of a web site and smartphone ‘app’ ”, explains Pascal Luynh which enables users to be informed and to forewarn them about the correct intervals and doses and possible drug interactions or risks of allergies …”. To this end, Medicamentum makes use of data provided by the Assurance Maladie and its subsidiaries. The platform site will thus warn the user if there is a risk in taking several drugs simultaneously, or a risk of overdose, notably when the patient changes his/her family doctor. “However, we must not be considered as a substitute for practitioners or health specialists”, confirms Pascal.
“Our ‘app’ provides better communication, with serious, valid information”. Medicamentum therefore preferentially targets users who wish to have reliable information about drugs, such as the health professionals, the pharmaceutical sector, the faculties of medicine and the pharmaceutical laboratories. As for the interference with private spheres, Pascal Huyn and his associates are clear: “anonymization is primordial to the impartiality of our platform and we shall never be storing any private sphere data about the users on our servers.“As far as the Business Model is concerned, Medicamentum will be free for users.
“We want afterwards to build up partnerships with the pharmaceutical sector and the laboratories, so that they too can adapt and improve on their drugs”, says Pascal. “The more our eco-system is used, the better will be our possibility to draw statistical conclusions, thanks notably to the users to accept to fill out ‘after care’ questionnaires. Naturally the questionnaires will remain totally anonymous and we shall be collecting only general data such as age, disorder frequencies, allergies …
The answers to the questionnaires might, for example, lea to pinpointing certain drug interactions or side-effects that had not been detected during the clinical test phases”.A prototype will be finalized in the month of May, ready for the competition final round.
The Medicinal Drug Hackathon aims at creating services or applications that will benefit the population at large, the health sector professionals, the health institutions or the public authorities who use or work with medicinal drugs and to gather together the data available in the French ‘Assurance Maladie’s EDP system, or data made public by other organizations and/or institutions.
How do you proceed when you want to rapidly visualize the interrelationships between millions of data elements, whether they represent key-words, surnames or even banking transactions? The solution developed by the Linkurious start-up proposes a tool designed to explore graphs derive from complex data bases. Financial enquiries, reliability factors for EDP networks, scientific investigations … there is a host of applications and they continue to develop.
On the screen, a group of differently coloured dots interconnected by arrows (more or less big) and what we have is a graphic restitution of the financial flows and geographic locations that connect a myriad companies together.
As an example amongst many others, we can see some astounding data-driven cartographic work proposed by Linkurious. “We offer an intuitive Interface that allows the professionals to use and handle the process easily”, underlines Sébastien Heymann, co-founder of Linkurious. With his UTC-GI engineering diploma (majoring in computer sciences and their applications) and the elective specialty “Philosophy of Cognitive Technologies (PTC), our entrepreneur Heymann is no novice to the game of visualising graphs. When he was still an undergraduate, he set up a project group with the UTC lecturer Franck Ghitalla (UTC-Costech Lab) and with some other student friends an “associative” freeware package called Gephi, a tool to visualize graphs, notably useful for social science enquiries and displays.
“This project allowed us to sharpen our teeth in the development of an International scaled project. These are elements you don’t learn in first degree class-rooms. But we were awarded the Engineer of the Year prize by the magazine L’Usine Nouvelle. In the field of computer sciences, money is not really essential to start a project but you must know (or learn) how to get organized and secure partners”, recalls our computer specialist. Some highly satisfactory collaborative agreements have been reached, with the RTGI (acronym for Territories and Geography of Information Networks), the CNRS and the University Paris 6 (Pierre & Marie Curie). To date the Gephi package has been downloaded 1.5 million times!
The structure, however — based as it is on volunteer work and freeware — is not as yet adapted to a commercial environment. In 2013, Sébastien Heymann decided to set up Linkurious as a company proposing a graph visual package adapted to entrepreneurial needs. The then 30 odd year odd engineer started again from scratch: “Uses for graph analyses are very different in enterprise settings and certainly very different from the academic approach and Web technologies have become the recognized standard”, he explains
Facilitating data analysis
Linkurious works somewhat like a visual search engine. Starting with a key-word, you can display a network of dots and dashes that materialize the relationship of the entity being investigated with other data sources. The underlying principle is to explore the data locally as a function of the available knowledge bases and the paths the analyst chooses to follow. Navigation and manipulation facilitate access to the various levels of information and serve to gain in speed for the analyses.
Innovations in this field used to be restricted to home office society information services or for advanced scientific research. Now they are accessible for a wide-ranging professional world. The major banks, the EDP groups will be the priority targets as potential clientele for Linkurious. There are numerous areas where the need for such a tool can be felt — from checking the links of an offshore company with personalities, identifying the hidden links of certain bank accounts with criminal illegal activities, working out what the repercussions would be with a major blackout of an EDP service and/or its infrastructures.
It was using this technology that the 370 journalists in the consortium (ICIJ) were recently able to establish links between the offshore accounts identified in the so-called “Panama Papers” and certain personalities. The banks and the French ministry for Finance already use Linkurious to detect possible money laundering and fraudulent transactions. Faced with such success, the as yet young and self-financed company now wants to engage in a fund-raising campaign to accelerate the company’s development.
The objective of the start-up MyScienceWork is to make science accessible to the public at large, thanks to on-line archiving of scientific papers and to use of the social networks. The company was established in 2010, by Virginie Simon, a UTC graduate who majored in Biotechnologies, with co-founder Tristan Davaille, a financial engineer with a degree in economics who graduated from Reims Management School; with its 15 staff members, it is based in the USA with offices in Europe. The University of Stanford, Ca, the Institute Henri Poincaré (Paris) and the ARC (Cancer research) Foundation are among the clients.
It was during a placement with a large pharmaceutical laboratory that the then UTC undergraduate, Virginie Simon, became aware of the importance of keeping up to date with research work ongoing round the world. Hyperspecialization tends to makes you forget that there is a global scientific context out there”, Virginie insists, recalling the very special topic she had worked on in the placement. With her engineering diploma tucked under the belt, she followed suit with a PhD at University of Paris 6 (Pierre & Marie Curie) on the use that could be made of nanotechnologies in the search for cancer care and remedial action. It was during this experience that the idea germinated to mutualize science on line. “I spent an enormous amount of time on the Internet monitoring the scene to try to identify the right people, with as my only aid the free on-line summaries of scientific papers”, she recalls. While doing her CIFRE (industrially supported) PhD thesis, she also ran into the difficulties of pluridisciplinary research. That was when she imagined a one-stop portal where the papers from different specialties could be archived. The idea of MyScienceWork was born. With his diploma from the Reims Management School, Tristan Davaille joined the adventure fairly soon after, bringing with him his talents and skills in management and finance. “The key feature when you want to launch a start-up is to find the right people as your associates”, explains Virginie. An investment fund and the Luxemburg Government were quick to approve the potential of the project. “This enabled us to be among the laureates of a start-up competition and to enjoy a 3 month stay in the Silicon Valley, Ca”. It was this enriching period that led to setting up the MyScienceWork’s home office in San Francisco, where Virginie Simon now resides. A recent partnership with Google Scholar reinforces this presence outside France. From a financial point of view, the two co-founders have raised 4 Meuros to date.
A multivalent platform
In contradistinction with other offers on the market, the key feature off this tool is to have conjugated the power of a 30 million paper data base with the exchange possibilities offered by a social network. There is a better visibility and a worldwide accessibility for scientific research for the benefit not only of the scientific communities but also anyone keen on science or the journalists who specialize in these themes. The business model involves sales of the platforms, called Polaris, to universities, foundations and engineering schools.
Each client’s structure has a data storage capacity for his/her chosen publications, plus a profile system for the authors and an interface to its colours. Statistical tools also enable the site administrators to measure the audience for works hits and to set a profile for the internauts connected, which offer an interesting decision aid tool to help frame research policy strategies. Polaris likewise facilitates exchanges among scientific authors by making accessible 500 000 research scientist profiles representing different specialties. Tailor-made system arrangements can be proposed as well as communication/dissemination services for the public at large and for the media contacts. “Our aim above all, is to democratize knowledge and take it down Main Street”, concludes Virginie, our corporate, entrepreneurial, executive boss.
With the Belight project, a simple mobile phone is all cyclists need to be seen and safe. More than being just a light on a phone, as is the case for numerous “apps”, this new road bound companion allows the cyclist to signal changes in direction and stops. It is also a connected object whereby the position of the cyclist can be forwarded to nearby car drivers (via a geolocalization function)
Three UTC students working at the Btwin Village in Lille are at the origin of this project: Lancelot et Colin, doing their end-of-studies placement and their tutor Yue Hue. “Side-lights, headlights and traffic indicators are obligatory for cars, so why should cyclists be content with less security?” notes Colin Gallois, one of the three co-designers of Belight. Like his comrade Lancelot Durand, Colin is finishing his major in Mechanical Engineering (UTC-GM) with the specialty Engineering and Industrial Design (IDI) and he underlines the benefits of ‘polyvalence’ and ‘adaptation’, acquired during his UTC studies.
“UTC made me curious and gave me then capacity to solve problems by simplifying them and at Btwin, we are busy also with the efficiency and design of their products”. It was during the first edition of the Hackathon, launched by Decathlon last February and targeting Btwin staff that the idea took shape. Yue Hue, their tutor, himself also a graduate from UTC suggested they participate. In 2016 the theme was that of connected objects, given that the equipment maker was interested in the promising development of this market segment and the ideas their staff might propose. “The initial subject was framed “If our objects had a soul”. That was where we imagined a sort of guardian angel for cyclists without having a lamp to hand”, sums up Lancelot Durant.
During the 48h the participants had, the trio came up with a concept and imagined its possible commercial forms. Yue dealt with the software coding, while Lancelot and Colin covered the graphic ID, the communication aspects and made the video, as well as some textile prototypes. The simplicity and relevance of the product was found most attractive by the Jury who awarded them the Innovation Prize. This free and constantly available tool replaces former, cumbersome lighting systems that were easy to forget, to steal and even break. The underlying idea was to propose a back-up lighting system which would work no matter where you are. Our trio of designers are now working on a direct clip-on system to attach the device to the cyclists’ shirts (or shorts). Another strong feature of Blight is that it can be interconnected with car-mounted geolocalization ‘apps’, such as Google Maps.
This community dimension will enable drivers to signal the presence of cyclists advancing on the same route. The three engineers are also now considering how to integrate their concept into the Decathlon range of products. “We are in phase with the corporate Decathlon philosophy that proposes sports equipment accessible for all its customers”, Coin notes enthusiastically.
