Having an idea for a product is easy. Making a successful business out of it isn’t just as easy. If anyone tells you otherwise, do yourself a favor, and leave that conversation. Prioritizing your mind space for creativity seems like the wise thing to do.

Founders have a difficult time launching a successful startup as they have to face various challenges in their journey. Be it running out of cash, coming to the conclusion that there is no real market need, or getting outcompeted among other reasons.

‘70% of startup tech companies fail after around 20 months after their first financing round.’

But, is failing that bad? Well, it depends on who you’re asking.

This article unveils some of the main cultural differences between American and European startups and their path toward finding success in the market.

To challenge assumptions, I, Catalin Briciu, CEO of Linnify, have embarked on multiple US journeys to better understand these differences.

#1 Failure culture

Americans seem to be more understanding and tolerant of entrepreneurial failures, as they see them as learning opportunities to get on the right track faster.

‘Try again, try harder, the only real loser is the fighter who remains down for the count’.

Having an ‘active fail’ is even considered to be a plus for some. The mantra in Silicon Valley even became ‘fail often, fail fast’. This means that the more mistakes a founder makes early on, the faster they are able to learn and perfect their business model for future success.

Europeans on the other hand, don’t necessarily see failure as a good thing. Entrepreneurialism tends to be discouraged as it will possibly end in failure. There is even a stigma that can be felt toward the founders who had a failed endeavor in their ancestry. Failure is perceived as shameful and people tend to lose their trust at this point

#2 Access to funds and investment size

Raising money for a startup is challenging.

The USA has more VC firms and individual investors than Europe.

(…)

Continue reading here to:

1. understand the practical solution that bridges the two markets regardless of their differences.
2. get the downloadable scheme graphically explaining the solution any entrepreneur needs to build a solid foundation for their product.

Article originally posted on our Resource page.

Your product was first a concept daring to change the ways things are done in the industry, right?

It all begins to get real when you properly start exploring it, setting goals, failing, and starting from scratch. This is when the concept transforms into an actual (young) product.

To become healthy brands, able to scale up, products need special care, especially in their first years of growth. They are defined within the company by a series of factors that influence their direction as well as their development speed rate.

What influences the healthy development of an innovative product?

Governance | Organization | People | Culture

says Magnus Mackaldener, awardee of The Ferdinand Porsche Prize, Senior VP of Scania’s R&D.

Let’s explore the first two dimensions of the big four:

1. Governance — defining processes, and decision-making patterns
2. Organization — the influence people have on the product: from ‘what’ to ‘how’ they are doing it.

Are companies typically engineering or sales-led? Yes.

• Engineering-led company = building focusing on the tech solutions resolving a problem.

‘It is rooted in the strength of the development team and what is possible with technology.’

says Brian de Haaff, CEO of Aha!

Instead of focusing on developing customer empathy, developers are given the space to come up with great ideas to improve the overall user experience.

• Sales-led company = building focusing on revenue.

‘the sales team is the driving force behind customer acquisition and retention.’

This approach often follows the traditional marketing funnel where leads are qualified into marketing-qualified leads nurtured to become sales-qualified leads.

Is that a problem? Yes, if not balanced well.

In a world where 8 out of 10 products fail, it’s not the production anymore as much as it is, in fact, about the retention of the users on your platform or app.

To do so, you need to go beyond what we’ve been told about the development of a product.

What does that mean? To reinterpret product development by using a different, more complex mindset focusing on the value the product brings, the vision, and the why behind it.

In short, it means switching gears to operate with a product mindset.

‘Many recognize the need for transformation to become product-led, but the path to get there is often foggy.’

To make sense comprehensively within the entire organization, this needs to be understood by the Governance and Organization sides, to then naturally extend towards People and Culture.

How to bring clarity to a healthier mindset for your product?

To understand what it means to be vision-driven product-wise, you need to understand the main difference between a project manager and a product manager.

• A project manager is passionate about delivering a set of features. That’s the engineering-led mindset.
• A product manager thinks about the change we want to bring to the world and is passionate about delivering that change to the user. That’s the vision-led mindset.

What happens when your development mindset does not update to the rhythm of the fast-changing software industry and user behaviors? The product is prone to ‘get sick’, aka not responding to the reality of the users that it’s been born into.

What diseases can your product get if not handled well?

1. Obsessive Sales Disorder (OSD)

‘Customer-centric means we give customers what they want.’

Context

The team is constantly trading off long-term goals against short-term ones.

You focus on the short term and forget about the long term sometimes

Results

Features are delivered for individual customers, thus the product is fragmented, and the engineers are distracted.

2. Hypermetricemia

‘Measure everything! Test everything!’

Context

Obsession with metrics and analytics.

Results

The incremental product improvement is stuck at a local maximum.

It can happen that all metrics are awesome, but they do not cover the real problems or perspectives.

3. Narcissus Complex

‘If we just add this feature I know customers will use it. I know I would’

Context

The team is focused inward and thinks about their own needs.

Result

A product that is disconnected from users’ needs.

The cure: How to treat these product diseases?

Find the root problem of the disease

These diseases happen because we are often focusing too much on iterations, and on execution, and we are not driving those iterations with a clear vision and strategy. Thus, the main issue stands in the way we organize our work and how we weigh as priorities.

As this is usually a top-down responsibility, we address the above-mentioned Governance, and then, of course, Organization, to first acknowledge and start treating these matters.

The treatment breakdown: Velocity

Velocity = Speed + Direction

1. Speed

Lean and Agile are important feedback-driven execution methodologies that give us Speed.

Think of Lean and Agile as the equivalent of a fast car — they help us innovate faster.

Now, consider customer feedback idling your fast car to ask for directions to make sure you’re heading in the right direction. Your foot is still next to the gas pedal, so no worries there.

Both driving a fast car and stopping to ask for directions are super important.

You can use speed and you get information about your direction.

But where are you going? Before you drive your fast car or ask for directions, you have to know where you want to go — you are in the driver’s seat.

1. First define the destination — the goal for your product

2. Have a rough idea of how are you going to get there — map out the first steps

3. Make the courage to ‘stop and ask for directions’ — measure the need your product responds to

Each step is essential.

Create balance with these steps to get closer to the success you desire for the product.

If you only focus on one of them, you will sabotage your product.

Being Agile doesn’t work well without initially set goals. There is such a thing as taking the customers’ feedback too much into consideration. Frankly, Obsessive Sales Disorder (OSD) could grow on you without actually knowing it.

Being Agile doesn’t work well without customer feedback either, as you’d fuel the Narcissus Complex.

Adjust, but keep in mind your product’s unique value, and its phases to achieve that.

Speed can look like this, where we are all moving in different directions, but moving fast. That can still look like chaos.

To create velocity, speed is not enough. We need direction.

2. Direction

You need to define the direction of your speed so that all the arrows are pointing in the same direction. That’s what gives us velocity.

Remember

To maintain the health of your product, and create clarity in your direction (vision) should articulate the

• Who: Whose world are you changing?
• What: What does their world look like today?
• Why: What does their world need to change?
• When: When will you know you’ve arrived?
• How: How are you going to change it for them?

The product is not your end goal, the change you bring is the end goal. Once you think about your product and the change separately, you can write the vision statement.

Bonus

Use the Radical Vision Statement that lets you focus on the essentials, so you’re not all caught up in too many words.

Follow us on LinkedIn to stay up to date.

About the author

Andreea Ghic is the Head of the Product Management department at Linnify. She brings more than six years of experience in the startup ecosystem. Andreea has a clear, logical mind with a practical approach to problem-solving and a drive to see things through to completion.‍

She successfully manages the decision-making process in product-building prioritization, while always maintaining a genuine customer-centric mindset. Andreea is fueled by creativity and brave ideas and always knows where the limits are — which are sometimes higher than the rest of the team predicts.

Andreea Ghic also co-authored, together with Catalin Briciu our latest free downloadable Essential Guide for rising entrepreneurs who want to futureproof their ideas and investments. This whitepaper comes together to provide you with a set of must-knows before you launch your next product or to bring clarity to your building process for the ideas already in construction. It focuses on market-responsive product strategies to make sure your idea isn’t only great — it’s also in great use. Download it now. You’ll thank yourself later.

Further reads and resources:

The Essential Guide

Radical Product Thinking, by R. Dutt

Beyond the “Product Mindset” | Aha! software

Four ways to influence product development | Magnus Mackaldener

The Product-Led Organization vs. the Engineering-Led Organization | Aha! software

Product-Led Growth vs Sales-Led Growth: Which One’s Right For You?

This article, written by fellow designer and guest writer, Liviu Maxim is part of the educational series about UI/UX design. From functionality to planning and all those other matters that surpass the beauty phase of design, this article includes everything. Enjoy.

Hello fellow entrepreneurs, developers, investors, managers, recruiters, different tech wizards with long and overly complicated job titles, and tech enthusiasts in general.

Welcome to the dawn of 2022, the year we finally made it to space travel, Boston Dynamics cyborgs, autonomous driving, electric cars and drones, robotic process automation and artificial intelligence, 8K displays, and cryptocurrencies.

This really reminds me that in the last few years, nothing really changed in terms of understanding what is the role of a User Experience designer inside a company.

You’re not just a designer anymore. Look around, above and beyond

A User Experience Designer is one of the most misunderstood jobs even in 2021. I assume that some of the UX designers themselves have no clear understanding of what they should focus on when designing a product. And I have an idea about why this continues to happen.

We have evolved from graphic designers to web designers, from UI designers to UX designers, from customer experience designers to product designers, and so on. Along with our titles, the medium has changed, the tools, the frameworks, the users, the screens, the culture, the technologies, the rules, and laws have changed, basically, the whole world changed around us.

Over the last 13 years, I’ve had a complicated relationship with design. This means that I have evolved somehow naturally from different kinds of mediums, environments, or sources of gathering information and insights. The truth is, that regardless of how many designer ‘titles’ I owned on the business cards from the companies I have worked for, one thing came into my mind in the last months. Nowadays, we are not just designers anymore.

Back in the day, being a designer implied delivering outstanding designs for an audience defined by other members of your team. Generally speaking, you were stuck within a well-defined brief from a Strategy Director, Head of Account Management, and so on.

Nowadays, your visual skills are not very important anymore.

It is about being spot on about calibrating the vision of a product or service with the right audience through your work.

Is it a plane, is it a hat? What does a designer actually stand for?

Of course, there are so many bombastic or rather vague definitions of this job that it is almost impossible to comply with everyone’s point of view, of course. So, this is a simple, yet straightforward and complete definition that I totally agree with.

Let’s simplify this job title to its core and assume we are just designers.

The Cambridge definition of a designer:

‘A person who imagines how something could be made and draws plans for it’

Now, I am doing my best not to let myself be biased by philosophical interpretations, as the matter is abstract and needs further analysis, but this article should be interpreted as a ‘design thinking exercise’ that can be adapted further to many other topics as well, of course.

Well, let me break this definition into two distinct parts:

A person who imagines how something could be made

A person drawing plans for his imagined something

Within my previous experience, I have found that there are two types of designers: the ones that have great ideas, insights and the ones who implement them. Of course, the best ones are at the intersection of a Venn diagram containing both profiles right in the middle.

Imagine the world. This is your true mission

When imagining things, we should always keep in mind that the world of Product Design and User Experience has clear boundaries. It is not a no man’s land in terms of what you can do to solve a problem. So, the imagination phase should reuse and re-polish some stable and simple solutions, already confirmed to work and certified by the users.

Now, this is an important phase, because it sets the direction of your actual implementation when you will need to draw and prototype, write specifications and test or analyze your assumptions and statements. In UX this phase is also known as the “Discovery phase” if your team has a Lean approach, in other teams, this phase can also be known as the “Exploration phase” and some UX designers are really good at this phase, and some of them don’t.

To be honest, the imagination phase should always be approached with no visual implications in terms of design. Actually, you don’t need any tools, besides your pen, and sketchbook. Keep in mind that this is an important part of testing and qualifying your hypothesis with your users.

Now, User Testing and User Research have evolved over the years into specific jobs and need a lot of Psychology and Anthropology background in order to be a helpful part of your project.

Yet, as a User Experience Designer, you should always pay attention and participate in the User Interview, User Testing sessions, and set your heat maps accordingly.

You are the juggler on the edge of facts, own hunches, and users’ biases

But, over the years I have witnessed a lot of forced and false conclusions, misinterpretations, and biased assumptions, so in order to reduce the impact of the negative effect of being wrong about your users, always remember these simple rules of thumb:

• Never rely 100% on your user’s responses. In many situations, they have no idea what they expect and want until they see it.
• Don’t expect to have all the answers from your User Research. Try to use the research to only validate your theories and hypothesis. Use the Assumption map method instead to incrementally validate your needs.
• Use cognitive process tasks when interviewing…

If you want to read the rest of the article, go to our website: https://www.linnify.com/blog/design-is-planned-imagination-dream-big-plan-better

About the Author

Liviu Maxim is a User Experience and product design manager at Uppercase-Peregrin, with over 13 years of design experience in Branding, Digital Advertising agencies, and Product Development companies.

He has managed design teams for various start-ups and Advertising Agencies, and since 2017 he is an entrepreneur and User Experience design consultant, building two small start-up companies, Red Route Digital and Uppercase Peregrin, both developing digital products and digital marketing services for the Tourism and Horeca industry from Romania and Bulgaria.

You too want to simplify your customers’ experience, create a design that matters, and set a product successfully on the market? Download our white paper and find out everything you need to know.

There are a lot of answers to this question, but why? Well, because it depends on who you ask. People are raised and taught in certain cultures, and this can influence their perception on almost everything around them, many times without them knowing that for others, some things might be different.

We tend to form models and categories that we think are universal, but are they? If you care to take a trip to another country and you venture on a shopping spree, for example, you might find yourself not being understood when it comes to some shades of colours. The boundary of where a colour starts and where it ends varies a lot depending on the culture, this being a very mundane example of how experience reflects in one’s everyday life.

If you ever argued with someone or maybe had a small debate, there is a chance that you asked yourself “Why does this person think like this?” or if you ever brainstormed with someone who came up with an idea that never crossed your mind, you might’ve thought “How can this person see things from this perspective?”. Maybe you don’t always think about such details, but you’ve definitely watched at least once on National Geographic animals behaving in a certain way and wondered “Why did that animal act like that?”.

You can find answers to these questions, but ironically, for every single issue you can find a variety of answers. Let’s go back to the problem of the chicken crossing the street and dive together through different perspectives regarding this question.

From an evolutionary standpoint, the chicken might have seen an appealing male on the other side of the road and crossed the street to reproduce. The reason for this could be that, in time, chickens that did not cross the street to mate left fewer copies of their genes and due to evolution, this chicken crossed the street in order to breed, as it is prone to crossing the street whenever is sees an opportunity to mate as an inherited trait from its parents.

Another point of view could come from a molecular geneticist who could tell you that maybe the chicken’s parents did not give it a gene to cross the street after all. Still, the chicken could have had a mutation in one of its genes, that made it move to the other side of the road when it got dehydrated, for example, thus forming an if-then clause type of behaviour: if the chicken is dehydrated, it will cross the street.

A different perspective could come from a behavioural geneticist who could argue that maybe when the chicken was a baby chic, it used to cross the street very often together with its mother, so that when it grew older it crossed the road by itself.

Maybe the chicken is used to receiving food after it crosses the street and so because it wanted the food, it went to the other side of the road. In the eyes of a cognitive ethologist, this could be the best explanation of the phenomenon.

A neuroscientist might join the discussion and say that maybe the chicken got scared and its fight or flight instinct triggered, and it chose to run to the other side of the road, thus crossing the street while doing so.

We think in categories. Explaining something from only one point of view is not enough. We can easily miss the bigger picture. Understanding behaviour only through genes,neurotransmitters,childhood trauma,environment or any other factor, while taking into account only one of these will make us not see the others. Essential aspects of a problem might slip right past.

This categorical thinking is not present just in biology, or shopping, but in every part of our lives. In order to not have our minds stuck in one category or on a particular model that we’re used to, we need to overcome that barrier by seeing things from different perspectives.

There were plenty of people throughout history who saw things from only one point of view and while they taught humanity a great lesson, their practices did not have a positive outcome. One of those people was Antonio Egas Moniz, who invented frontal lobotomy. He thought that faulty synapses are the only cause for mental disorders, and if you remove them, the missing systems will be redirected through the remaining channels. He considered that this treatment had no failures.

If you want to take a closer look at the outcomes of this technique, you can find information here, but if you don’t, all you need to consider is that there is a reason why when people suffer from disorders like depression, doctors don’t go around trying to disconnect the frontal lobe from the rest of their brains by drilling holes into their heads.

After all that has been said here, it is essential to accept that different perspectives exist, BUT it is also not wrong to choose to focus on a single category or a couple of them at first.

It is tough to take into account so many possibilities as there are always scenarios that we don’t even think about. Choosing what we think is most influential when forming an opinion, while being aware that there are also other factors is the best compromise that we can make.

People are able, in time, to extend the number of categories that they focus on when solving a problem, so not taking into account as many categories as they’d like at first is not an issue.

Every day we make choices, whether it is treating a patient,programming an app, or just doing our groceries. If we try to be aware of as many things as possible, there will be a day in which we could find and take into account all factors that influence any type of a decision, and the number of what-ifs in our lives could be reduced immensely.

We are the ones who can make this future happen, so by each and any one of us doing our small part of getting out of our comfort zones and trying to see things from as many different perspectives as we can, we bring ourselves closer to that future.

The inspiration for this article is one of the best professors whom I have seen in action so far, prof Robert Sapolsky from Stanford University. I did not have the chance to attend his lectures in person. Still, due to the generosity of Stanford, all his lectures from the Human Behavioural Biology course, the course that guides you through the categories mentioned above and some others, are available on Youtube. I also recommend all of Mr Sapolkys books, but especially Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.

Written by Iulia Bunescu

Market Researcher at Linnify

The adoption of machine learning in an era that has embraced technology has given us the power to utilize information as a resource of immense value — if interpreted correctly. Its value on the business side has increased tremendously and it is still growing since we can extract information from the client side in great volumes while still retaining a high quality. With this newfound knowledge we are now (ideally) able to accurately predict patterns, forecast trends and understand the behaviour and habits of the application’s users.

In order to uncover this outstanding treasure of useful information in a vast sea of noise, we can implement a variety of algorithms. One particular category under which all of these fall, are called neural networks. Their ability to mimic the human activity makes them the perfect candidate for any real-world problem.

This article is part of a series which will focus on one of the most remarkable applications developed in the last decades: the Recurrent Neural Network.

A short introduction to RNN

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) have been enjoying great popularity in the Machine Learning field since they were first proposed in the 1980s as a way of handling and forecasting sequential information, which is classified as order-dependent data.

RNNs are called recurrent because they perform the same task for every element of a sequence, with the output being dependent on the previous computations.

When it comes to their application, using RNN over more traditional ANN (Artificial Neural Networks) has proven advantageous in systems that involve speech recognition, time-series prediction, handwriting recognition, music composition or short-term traffic forecast.

One of the most prominent applications of RNNs can be found in the field of sentiment analysis. Often applied in Market Research, sentiment analysis is considered to be a powerful tool when it is used to collect information about some aspects of the market, such as the audience reaction to a product.

Sentiment analysis is one of the most exciting applications of recurrent neural networks. The reason for that is simple — versatility.

The RNN concept

Before diving deeper into the RNN field, let’s have a glance at the traditional artificial neural networks, also known as feed-forward neural networks. In traditional neural networks, the information moves linearly in one direction, starting from the input layer, sequentially passing through the hidden layers, until it reaches the output layer.

An illustration of ANN’s architecture can be seen in Figure 1. It consists of: an input layer, followed by the hidden one and finally the output layer.

In contrast to this, just like the human brain, RNN has a “memory” that contains all the information, which has been computed in the previous step. This information is being carried over time, through the so-called “hidden state”.

A visual representation of a recurrent neural network can be seen in Figure 2:

Now, let us unpack the RNN and present it as a sequence of neural networks, through which information can circulate. In order to do this, we will take a glance at Figure 3 below, which illustrates an unrolled recurrent neural network.

Structurally speaking, this type of network consists of a chain of multiple feed forward neural networks (labelled A) that receive a vector of inputs (labelled x) in order to produce a vector of outputs (labelled y). During the feedforward process, at every timestep, the network receives not only the input, but also the information of the previous timestamp in order to create an output.

Supposing we are feeding the RNN with a sentence, we will first encode every word of it. So, when it has to read the second word in the sentence, x2, instead of only predicting y2 using x2, it also receives some information from the timestamp 1. This process is repeated and the information received at every timestep is passed on as activation to the next timestep.

In order to train the network, the feedforward process has to be followed by the back-propagation one.

Back-propagation through time

RNN follows a back-propagation through time technique, developed by different researchers, in order to memorise the information.

Being an extension of the back-propagation algorithm, BPTT is applied to sequential data, like time series.

For a better understanding of the BPTT process, we will present the steps that describe it:

1. First, the network receives a sequence of input-output pairs. In figure 4, X represents the input sequence while y is the output vector.
2. After being unrolled in time, it computes each error across each time-step in order to add them up. For a better understanding, in Figure 4 we have illustrated how all the losses are accumulated together in a new variable called L<total>.
3. The next step consists of computing the gradient with respect to each parameter and adjusting the weights in order to minimise the loss function.

“BPTT can be computationally expensive as the number of timesteps increases.”

Advantages and disadvantages of RNNs

Advantages of Recurrent Neural Networks:

• RNN is an extremely useful type of neural network when it comes to time series prediction, because of the feature of remembering previous inputs.
• RNN can process inputs of any lengths and the model size doesn’t increase. This makes the network more flexible than the traditional artificial neural networks.
• In a RNN, weights are shared across time, which results in a lower computational cost.

Disadvantages of Recurrent Neural Networks:

• The occurrence of “Vanishing Gradient” or “Exploding Gradient”. (*This will be later explained in the series).
• The computation is a slow process and the training of RNN can become very difficult.
• It becomes difficult to access any information that was given to the network if a long time period has passed.

Conclusion

Recurrent Neural Networks as a concept represent a good option of processing large amounts of information but they are not an all-around solution, having both advantages and disadvantages compared to other types of networks.

They facilitate an advanced and exciting way of developing applications, by first simulating and subsequently taking advantage of the versatility of the human brain.

Stay tuned to find out more about RNN and their types in our next articles.

Further reading

A Gentle Tutorial of Recurrent Neural Network with Error Back-propagation

Back-propagation through time — Recurrent Neural Networks

Recurrent Neural Networks Applications Guide

Reccurent Neural Networks, Part 1 — Introduction to RNNs

Thanks to Denisa Buzan

Our brain can easily be described as the organ inside the head that controls thought, memory, feelings, and activity. Scientists have been recording brain activity for decades now and have been trying to understand how the brain can act like this incredible command center.

As mentioned before, the question here is how does the brain control our bodies? The answer is quite a complex one and you can find out more about it here, but long story short the brain is part of the nervous system which is responsible for controlling and regulating bodily functions and activity.

The nervous system is made up of nerve cells called neurons. Neurons receive and transmit electrical impulses. These electrical impulses are like messages between the brain — which gives instructions, and the rest of the body — which acts as instructed and gives feedback. These messages are the main point of interest when it comes to understanding the brain.

Technology has developed ways of decoding the messages that neurons transmit and even stepped a little further. Scientists created what are the so-called BMIs — brain-machine interfaces, or BCIs — brain-computer interfaces. BMIs are a direct communication pathway between the brain and an external device.

They are definitely not a new interest topic in the scientific community as there has been research on BMIs since the 1970s, but what is new is the technology that has been developed in the last couple of years.

Alright, so scientists have done some discoveries and now more new technology is being developed. What does this mean for the average person?

The impressive part about these new technologies we are about to cover in this article is that we are not talking about lab technology, we are talking about wearable, every day, easy to use at-home devices that can be easily paired up with your phone or your computer and help you increase the quality of your health and life.

We all have dreams about our future and how we want it to be. We want to become certain people and have certain careers, but we don’t always know how to get there.

One thing we know for sure is that we need knowledge. Knowledge will path your way up to wherever you want to go. The beauty of the times we live in is that we have access to all the knowledge we can handle and even more.

As one problem is solved, another one comes to light. How can we absorb all the knowledge that we need? That one key ingredient is focus. With all the information available, distractions have increased in number, but our attention span decreased along with them. Here’s where BMIs can come into play and help with our focus issue.

A company named BrainCo came up with a solution. Their technology measures and analyzes one’s focus and helps them improve it. Their device is called Focus1 Headband and is said to be a light, easy to use, and a comfortable device that evaluates the electrical activity in the brain.

One of their many applications for this device is called FocusFit and it is a brain fitness training system for athletes in order to improve their performance, as well as to help them recover faster. Besides their own applications for the device, they have partnered with many other companies in order to broaden the reach of their technology in as many domains as possible. Some of these domains are education, mental health, memory training, and even race driving.

Our mental health is essential when it comes to the successful career and balanced life we all aim to have. Because sometimes we need a little time for ourselves in order to give our day maximum devotion, people have found a lot of different ways to escape the everyday rush.

One particularly popular escape is meditation. Many people appreciate the outcomes of meditation and want or have tried practicing it. As easy as it may seem, meditation can be a challenging task. BMIs found a way to help us in this domain too.

Muse is a company that developed a device that can help improve one’s journey through meditation. Their devices connect via Bluetooth to your phone; all you need is to download their mobile app and you are ready to go. The devices passively sense one’s brain activity and translate it into sounds that help you focus on your meditation.

They have two available device models, Muse S and Muse 2, both of them having the purpose of helping you build a consistent meditation practice. Their app provides progress tracking data after each session and users can have access to meditation courses.

Another very important aspect when it comes to a balanced life is knowing how to help your body help you. Yes, it is very important to eat healthily and do daily physical activities, but these are things that you have total control of. What about the things you cannot control and that are also crucial in accomplishing your goals?

Sleep is one of them. As mundane as it may seem, an activity as simple as sleep is what charges our batteries for the next day. If not charged right, no device won’t be able to function at full capacity. BMIs have a solution to this struggle too.

A company called Dreem has developed a device named Dreem 2, which is also an easy-to-use headband, but this time designed for sleep monitoring. The device measures your brain activity, heart rate, respiratory frequency, movement, and it also comes with some audio features. Dreem 2 can easily be paired with your smartphone through the Dreem app.

The great thing about all these new devices that bring the latest technology into our own homes and can easily blend into our daily routine is that they offer not just general advice on how to improve our health and life, but they give us particularised solutions and insights based on our own bodies. All these technologies are proof of another step forward in our evolution.

If you think these technologies were “cool”, just wait as the future is even brighter.

Brain-to-brain conversations are no longer an untouchable dream. Scientists are developing brain networks so we won’t have to use the phrase “If only you could see what I see” anymore. Another incredible future use for BMIs is the usage of the data acquired from monitoring brain signals. We could replicate and replace body parts and be able to use them as if they were always there, without any differences in feeling or control. We could become superhumans. We could use our brains to instantly connect to any device in our proximity. Imagine making a long-awaited cup of coffee just by thinking about it, and this is just a mundane example of the benefits that mind-controlling devices could have.

The best part about this future is that we no longer have to worry about technology controlling us because we are the brains behind everything. Quite literally.

Written by Iulia Bunescu

Market Researcher at Linnify

All product names, trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners. All company, product and service names used in this article are for identification purposes only. Use of these names, trademarks and brands does not imply endorsement.

The word serverless became a hot topic in the world of Computer Programming. You might have heard the word Serverless a couple of times, either by going to conferences or by talking with other people who work in the digital development industry.

What will we learn today?

• When to use serverless functions
• How to create a data processing pipeline
• How to use Google Cloud technologies in order to process data

We chose to use Google as our cloud provider, although everything presented in this article can be achieved using other cloud providers like Amazon, Azure and so on.

What we are going to build

In this article we will see how we can take advantage of serverless functions in order to build a Processing Data Pipeline for analyzing and processing data.

Let’s imagine that we are working at an IT Company and every couple of weeks we receive files that contain information about issues (tasks) from a variety of projects. Our managers look from time to time into our application where they want to see statistics from all projects.

The project managers look every month to see what the status of the projects is, such as seeing the number of issues that were done in total from when the project was started and the number of story points done on that project so far. Sometimes they also want to see all the issues that were not of type bugs and were finished when the file was received.

In order to fulfill their needs, we are going to build a pipeline that filters and aggregates the data they are interested in.

Why are serverless technologies good in this case?

• Single event that starts our processing pipeline
• Server not running 24/7
• Small functions with a single purpose
• Paying only while running

The pipeline:

1. Upload the file into the application
2. Upload the data into a data warehouse
3. Filter the data we uploaded and put that into another table
4. Aggregate the data and update the statistics

In this article we will see how we can implement a processing data pipeline using Google technologies. The same concept applies to any Cloud Provider that has Serverless technologies.

Technologies stack:

• Google Cloud Functions — serverless functions used to process the data
• BigQuery — data warehouse
• Node.js 8 — as our programming language

We are going to present the technologies we are going to use and then see how we can build this pipeline.

Serverless functions

Serverless functions are isolated functions that have only one purpose. Keeping this in mind, we can think about our functions as being a black box with an input and an output.

Serverless functions shouldn’t be the replacement of a REST API, they should be additions to the main API that have a single, isolated dedicated purpose.

A good example would be when uploading a file into our system, we want to apply some filtering and do some calculations on that file.

There are multiple types of events that can trigger a serverless function. The types that we are going to use today are:

• Google Cloud Storage — this type of event triggers when we upload a file into google cloud in a bucket that we specify
• Pub/Sub Triggers — this will allow us to communicate between our functions

For communicating between our functions, we can have 2 approaches using services from google:

• Cloud Tasks — this is a service that allows us to manage distributed tasks. We can use this to trigger the next function of our pipeline after a function finishes. All we need to do is to create a Cloud Task which will call our HTTP Serverless function.
• Pub/Sub — this is a real-time messaging service that allows us to trigger a function that listens on a topic. In the example we are building today, we are going to use this technology.

BigQuery

BigQuery is a serverless data warehouse. In BigQuery the data is organized in datasets and tables.

We are going to use this service for storing our data and analyzing it.

In our system we are going to upload csv files that have the following structure:

Pipeline implementation

Upload the data to BigQuery

Our first serverless function will get the data from the file uploaded to Cloud Storage and upload it to BigQuery.

Trigger Type — Google Cloud Storage Finalize

This will be triggered when the file was uploaded successfully into our storage. This type of function will receive as parameters

• data — the event payload
• context — the event metadata

A cool thing when working with multiple services from the same cloud provider is that we do not need to authenticate the services we are working with because they are automatically authenticated when deployed in the cloud.

In this function we are getting the reference of the file that we just uploaded and we load its contents into a BigQuery table.

The function bigQuerySafeName creates a table name from the file name that respects the following conditions:

• Contain up to 1,024 characters
• Contain letters (upper or lower case), numbers, and underscores

After we loaded the data into the table we publish a message on the filter-uploaded-data in order to trigger the second function from our pipeline.

Deploying the function

We just wrote our first function, now all we need to do is deploy it in the cloud. Google provides a cli that can be used for achieving this.

gcloud functions deploy upload-to-bigquery
    --region us-central1
    --entry-point uploadToBigQuery
    --runtime nodejs8
    --trigger-resource projects_files
    --trigger-event google.storage.object.finalize
    --memory 2048MB
    --timeout 540
    --project projectName

With this command we say that we want to deploy a function named upload-to-bigquery in the region us-central1. The name of the function (entry point) in our application is uploadToBigQuery. We want this function to trigger when a new file finished uploading in the bucket projects_files. We give our function the maximum memory allowed by Google (which is 2GB) and we specify the maximum amount of time our function is allowed to run (which is 9 minutes).

Filter the data

We are receiving .csv files that contain a lot of data. Our analytics team is interested to see all the issues that are done and that are not bugs.

This brings us to our second function of the pipeline which filters the data and saves it into another table in our data warehouse. The function listens to a Pub Sub topic and when a message it’s published, the function is run automatically.

BigQuery allows us to run queries and save the results into a table. The main thing that we are doing here is making a query, running an asynchronous job and waiting for the results. After the results are returned, we are publishing a message on the update-final-table topic to trigger the last step of our pipeline.

Update the final data

The last step we want to do in our pipeline is to update the data in the last table where we keep the number of issues done and the number of story points done from when the project began.

This function runs a Job to update the data in the final BigQuery table.

Conclusion

Serveless technologies can be used in multiple cases and have many benefits from cost reduction to using small, readable chunks of code. As shown today in our implementation, the serverless functions should be small, isolated functions with a single purpose. With serverless functions we can also create complex data processing pipelines, taking data processing further than ever before.

Written by Darius Bogdan

Full Stack Web Developer at Linnify

Our organs are made of tissues that are made of different types of cells. A brief knowledge of how cells work would be useful for a better understanding of how some of the following technologies work. Genes are part of the cell, more specifically, they store the hereditary information and form the genome. In other words, different genes give one’s body different characteristics like gender, eye color, skin color and so on.

One can say that the cell is the most basic component of the body. The life of the cell is a simple one, it is created, it fulfills its purpose and then dies and gets eliminated. Some of the cells face changes in their genome, also called mutations. These changes can be anything from missing genes to added or copied ones. When this happens, the cell starts dividing abnormally and does not fulfill its purpose anymore. If it is not eliminated, it forms tumors.

In the following paragraphs, using the previously presented knowledge, you will be able to understand how the latest trends in the Biotech industry work. Six different technologies have been chosen, based on their revolutionary impact and usage.

Targeted treatments

Chemotherapy is, at the moment, one of the most used methods in treating cancer. It is harmful to both the cancer cells and the healthy cells. Fortunately, there are some other treatments available, but they are still not enough on their own and work together with standard treatments like chemotherapy. When working together, the alternative treatments reduce the damage caused by the standard methods. Some of these alternative methods are targeted therapy and immuno-oncology.

Targeted treatments can be used in different ways. They can stop the tumor from spreading by not letting it form blood vessels, which assure nutrition. Without these, it is impossible for the tumor to grow.

One more feature that targeted treatments have is to act as a protector for targets around the cancer cells. The name “targeted” comes from their particular characteristic of acting differently, not only from one type of cancer to another but also from one patient to another. New types of targeted treatments are being developed every day and there is much more room for development.

Cell and Gene Therapy (CRISPR)

Cell and Gene Therapy, more specifically, the CRISPR gene-editing technique, is a genetic engineering technique in molecular biology by which the genomes of living organisms can be modified without any surgical procedure. This process is said to take place in vivo, meaning without extracting the target from the host. As mentioned earlier, cells may suffer from mutations. These mutations cause many diseases, such as cancer, autism, and hemophilia (more about genetic disorders here).

The CRISPR is using the bacterial antiviral defense system of the Cas9 protein. The protein is inserted in the organism together with a synthetic guide sequence of RNA. Once inserted, the protein detects the sequence identical to the one of the synthetic guide. By using the defense mechanism, it slices the desired sequence from the cell’s genome. In other words, the altered genes or sequences of genes caused by mutations can be removed from the organism. (more about this technique here).

Scientists are still trying to figure out how the human genome works, so even if the discovery of this technique was made public in 2012, it is still a developing field, and there is much more room for new innovative breakthroughs. It also brought with it many conflicts among specialists, most of them on an ethical and legal basis. The most talked-about one was in 2019 when a scientist helped create the first genome-edited babies. As a result, the process of genome-editing on humans was considered unethical and, for now, is not encouraged.

Even if this is a sensitive subject at the moment, CRISPR is still under development and already used in some medical areas. Other proteins that work even more precisely than Cas9 have been discovered. One example is protein Cas14.

BMIs

The BMIs are so en vogue that even Elon Musk has a start-up in the field. BMI stands for Brain-Machine Interface, and it is a technology that links the brain (or muscle) stimuli with the computer. As a result, it can provide a lot of benefits, from helping disabled people to improving human bodies, helping them overcome their physical limitations.

There is a lot of research taking place in this domain. One of the researches aims to transform brain signals into audible responses to support individuals who suffered traumatic injuries or have paralysis. Some aim to connect multiple brains to form human brain networks. Others want to mimic and use the muscular stimuli from parts of the body, like hands. A lot of novel technologies are developed here, technologies that can change how we operate a computer or even our own bodies.

Augmented reality for surgery

Augmented reality has become remarkably popular and is a significantly useful tool for surgeons. It helps minimize the possible damages which can take place during surgery and increase the success rate of the procedure. It gives the surgeon easy visual access to areas around the targeted location, and so provides the specialist with an ensemble view.

It consists of complex setups using cameras, sensors and some processing units like computers (check out the collaboration between Philips and Microsoft and their product Hololenses 2 for a more detailed understanding of how these setups work). The technology still has room for development, and there are many people already trying to take it to the next level.

Telemedicine

Telemedicine is divided into two main parts: one that consists of electronic medical records and one that focuses on providing users with online medical assistance. Electronic medical records can facilitate cross-border interoperability and reduce the cost of healthcare significantly. This will allow better and faster innovation while respecting one’s privacy. Online medical assistance could spare both the patient and the doctor a lot of trouble, in the case of a minor injury, and might make the examination more comfortable for the patient.

A lot of private companies, as well as a handful of governmental initiatives, have already jumped on this bandwagon. The electronic health record (DMP) system in France, a free service adopted voluntarily through French territories since its launch in 2011, is a good example of the safe and successful application of EHRs for better healthcare. Another example is Belgian-American Andaman7, which allows patients to create a personal health record (PHR) on their smartphone.

Artificial organs

The main issue when it comes to a transplant is finding a donor. Fortunately, this is becoming less and less of a struggle. Another new trend in surgery is using 3D printed organs for transplants. The 3D printers use bio-ink, a printable material made from living cells that can be used to model tissues. Bio-inks can contain one or more types of cells, depending on the necessity. They are usually blended with suspension cells, which are cells that guide them towards fulfilling the desired purpose. The guiding cells can come from a donor, or even from the patient itself, in order to produce a personalized organ that will easily adapt inside the body.

So far, the technology of 3D printed tissue has created some fully functional organs, which led to successful transplants all around the world. Some of the successfully 3D printed organs which are also available on the “market” are kidney, liver, heart, cornea, and bones (check this article about the 3D Printed Organ Market).

All of these discoveries are huge steps in improving our bodies and health. Ideals like never getting sick or old or even living forever are closer to us than ever before. We are ready to enjoy the change and the future that could be even more fabulous than the present.

Written by Iulia Bunescu

Market Researcher at Linnify

6 Directions of the Biotech Industry was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Vision — the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom. Or at least that’s what the dictionary says. But what does vision mean, in a digital world that’s faster and faster? When we think of the future, what do we think of?

Some would arguably say the future looks like one (or several) Black Mirror episodes. Others claim the future is already here.

In 2020, NASA will send a life-seeking mission to Mars — and Artificial Intelligence will be guiding the way. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, scientists are developing a fleet of autonomous robots to travel 33 million miles in search of life on one of Earth’s closest neighboring planets.

The mission’s ultimate goal is to one day establish a colony in which humans can survive in Mars’s 96% carbon dioxide atmosphere. And we’ve been promised that we’ll be driving cars on Mars in less than 10 years. The future seems incredibly promising.

Sarah Hill, CEO and Chief Storyteller of Healium, an AR/VR platform told Inc.com: “With the rise of spatial computing environments like virtual, mixed, and augmented realities and the rise of 5G enabling more real-time capture of biometric data from your wearables, we’re about to see a shift in how people use their biometric data. No longer are people just tracking their data on a flat dashboard sequestered to their wrists, they’re interacting with it… by using their heart rate and brain waves as inputs to control spatial computing environments and other content”.

“Users aren’t just watching stories. They’re feeling them. For decades, people thought of meditation as a closed-eyed experience that you practiced with an earbud with your eyes closed. But with virtual and augmented reality, meditation is now an eyes-open experience that you don’t just passively watch, you can actually feel these spatial environments with the data collected from your smartwatch or brain-sensing headband. These new kinds of meditation are harnessing the power of your body’s own electricity via your wearables to allow the user to feel content in ways that have never been done before” concluded Sarah. We find Sarah’s predictions to be exciting, especially when thinking about all the doors and the fields where AR and VR could completely change our experience and interaction with the real world.

Our vision is based on the promise of a better tomorrow, simplified through advancements in technology and problem-solving. We believe that experiences should be simplified and made available to as many people as possible, allowing for better education through access to information, better wellbeing and transport as well as increased focus on mental health.

This vision implies that once we walk through this particular door of progress and innovation, there’s a good chance we won’t be able to come back. The world as we know it is constantly changing, and will keep on changing in so many ways that the previous generations of humans wouldn’t recognize us — or the world around us for that matter.

When we discuss the future, however, we have to take a glance at what our history is. What started a few years ago as a vision by a few close friends, turned into an ever-growing team of brilliant individuals, carrying out a mission of vision and innovation. The need to simplify things people do daily became the birth of a delivery service, and then the vision of a better life expanded into an IT company that’s ready to take on the future, along with the challenges along the way.

Even through the passing of time, the Linnify vision of the future remains the same: simplifying life through innovation. Although the world can’t precisely tell how it will change in the near or far future, we’re excited, hopeful and ready for a better future, built by all of us, for everyone.

When powered by innovation, vision always finds a way.

A fundamental success factor of teams is a three-syllable word: to-ge-ther. The word in itself conveys team spirit and unity. Business organisations are very much alike with sports teams, as there is one common goal and a constant journey that team members are all part of.

A team can only truly shine when the combination of skills and perspectives present in each of the team members is put into light by unity as a defining core value for the team. From having different opinions, different work experience and different takes on a certain topic, a single person’s idea can be made so much better with additional insight. An old saying used to say “Unity is when intelligence meets integrity” — and I couldn’t agree more.

Of course, team spirit often produces a healthy dose of friendly competition; it’s not that each individual is trying to outdo their co-workers, but the group will constantly contribute to the overall success of the company, as team members work assiduously to avoid holding the team back.

At the same time, innate trust in a colleague’s abilities enables one to concentrate with no interruptions on certain tasks and responsibilities. Knowing there is someone to back you up, give you helpful new ideas or even give you a perspective you didn’t think of is an incredibly important part of a healthy, united team.

I have mentioned in the previous article that the core values of Linnify are authenticity, unity and vision. I cannot emphasise enough how important unity is in order to bind authenticity to vision.

On a personal level, authenticity enables you to share your true self through your work and through your way of being while vision provides a goal to be working for; unity, however, encapsulates all of the elements of teamwork, care and dedication to one another that one could never possibly do by themselves. Vision will then surely follow.

Unity helps us tell the same story, using different words; and we’re incredibly excited to read the next chapter of our story of innovation, together. Here's to an incredible 2019, an exciting 2020, and incredible stories that authenticity, unity and vision will tell in the future.