OpenAgile Romania 2010 took place in Bucharest between the 14 and 15 of May. The conference was aimed at putting the local Agile practitioners in front of some of the top international domain experts and speakers.
The organizers did a great job at inviting some of the people that were part of the Agile movement from the very beginning and this definitely made a difference in the level of experience and expertise showed by the speakers.
With the organizers being domain experts as well (experienced agile practitioners and coaches), they very well understood the need to have the talks focused on answering questions as opposed to raising new ones. All the talks were focused on practical approaches to improving Agile methodologies as well as methods to implement Agile in organizations just getting started. Not a single talk was focused on theory or theoretic approaches to methodologies or frameworks.
I’m sure that most if not all of the attendees left the conference with a clear view on how to improve on their company’s Agile approach. There were talks on coaching, writing user stories, testing, product ownership as well as other topics, but the most important aspect was the general openness of the speakers to give advice and discuss about problems one might have with implementing Agile to their organization.
More info on the conference talks and speakers can be found at http://openagile.ro/talks/. From what I understood from the organizers, sooner than later they will publish on the website the talks along with interviews with the speakers.
Photo made by Lucian Daniliuc
May 18th, 2010 in
Bucharest,
Meetings,
Romania | tags:
agile,
Alexandru Bolboaca,
Bucharest,
Ciprian Stăvar,
conference,
Daniel Nicolescu,
David Hussman,
Iulia Rusu,
Janet Gregory,
Maria Diaconu,
Michel Goldenberg,
openagile,
Paul Klipp,
Rachel Davies,
Radu Ticiu,
Robert Dempsey,
Vlad Stan |
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I was invited to be a mentor on a local entrepreneurship event called Arena Ursilor. The idea for the event was to put 10 promising entrepreneurs and their projects in front of the best mentors and business angels Romania has to offer and help them push their projects forward by advice and possibly financing.
The level of the projects was surprisingly high as the vast majority of the entrepreneurs pitched project with some level of technical implementation, at least at proof of concept stage. The others were domain experts, having worked in their line of expertise for many years and having the necessary experience to move to stating a business on their own.
The projects with the greatest potential to make a difference in the near future from the ones pitched at the event, in my opinion, are (in no particular order):
- VideoGuide.ro is a built to order video tour platform. Emanoil Serban, the project’s founder and CEO came to the event to raise money to develop the project further. He was asking for 60.000€ for 20%, giving the project a 300.000€ valuation. Currently they have 150 clients for their video tour filming and publishing service at a revenue of 300-600€ / client / year. The company is operational for around 2 years now and Emanoil plans to raise money to expand the sales effort to more cities in Romania.
- Tjobs.ro is a job platform with a twist. The twist comes from the fact its co-founders are domain experts in recruiting romanian employees for foreign employers and they formed a union of local recruiting companies. Those over 300 companies then submit their open job positions to Tjobs, while Tjobs makes sure that the end-users submit CVs only to verified companies that have a proven track record. This makes for a great win-win relationship for both the end-user and the employment agencies, with Tjobs being more like a trust partner for both than a usual recruiting platform. The Tjobs founders came to the event to raise money, asking for 150.000€ for 5% at a 3.000.000€ valuation.
- Fantasy Accelerator is an animated comic project. The project, in the idea state at the moment, is started by a young ambitious romanian guy who studied in the UK for all his university years. He came back with an idea of how to make online comics more interactive. Guy’s name is Claudiu Revnic and you can find him on Facebook.
The event went really well, with both the investors and mentors getting to know about new projects and the mentees and participants getting to interact with a group of experienced and successful local technology people.
Heroku, the San Francisco based platform as a service startup, has just announced it has raised an additional $15 million in the second round of venture capital investment.
As one of the first cloud providers, Heroku were incubated in Y-Combinator, following an investment round of $5 million afterwards.
Heroku is currently hosting over 60.000 app on their service. Anyone can host for free an app there, as long as their database doesn’t exceed 5MB of storage.
The system provided by Heroku offers the simplest deployment and scalability solution for Ruby on Rails, by pushing the app via Git and moving up and down a couple sliders when additional concurrency or background processing is needed.
Many people see the investment actually being directed at Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and as a bet to the future that more and more startups will choose this framework and programming language and host their apps in a cloud environment as opposed to dedicated servers.