This year marks the fourth edition of ATECH Conference organized by the ATECH Foundation at Renaissance Convention Center in Aruba on October 25, 2018.

ATECH Conference has become the meeting place in the Caribbean of entrepreneurial and creative minds where startup founders, investors, innovative companies, and industry stakeholders from different parts of the world come together to exchange knowledge and ideas. IBM’s Developer Advocate, Justin Halsall, was the MC for this event. At the same time, he was also one of the keynote speakers of the event.

The conference started with an eye-opening message on information security followed by some welcome words by ATECH foundation co-founders, Kris Croes, Rudy Croes, and Tristan Every.

The first panel of the day consisted of Jemi Laclé and Indra Zaandam who discussed the Human Identity and the Aruban DNA including the importance of culture for innovation and how entrepreneurs should focus on innovation by creating a business that adds value to the people.

Up next we had the first round of semi-finals of the Startup Pitch Competition. During the semi-finals, each startup got 3 minutes to pitch and 2 minutes for Q&A. The startups pitching during this round were Redeemy, SeaGoingGreen, Keo Clinic Aruba and Perksy.

• Redeemy wants to make banking more social. Redeemy is a platform that enables bank customers to finance social projects. It is a form of charity financing and they have Scotiabank as one of their partners.
• SeaGoingGreen promotes sustainable tourism through sustainable business. SeaGoingGreen consults tourism companies with marine-related activities and is developing a mapping app for the marine environment to promote the sustainable use of the sea. They are working with the science institute of the Netherlands in order to include scientific data within the app.
• Keto Clinic Aruba wants to develop a simple low-cost dietary intervention that can be used as an adjuvant treatment for Obesity, Diabetes, Epilepsy and Metabolic Syndrome. Keto Clinic plans on creating a digital platform where patients can receive accompaniment for embarking on a ketogenic diet.
• Perksy is a next-gen consumer insights platform for brands and a category-creating rewards app for consumers. Perksy redefines data capture and makes it relevant for the mobile generation—combining elements of design, pop culture, and mobile gaming. It doesn’t feel like a survey and is basically another way of asking questions in the digital era.

The first keynote speaker of the event, Conrad Egusa, CEO of Espacio Media Incubator, discussed how to build and grow your identity online including how to formulate what you want to communicate, how to amplify your message, how to present your message, focus on outreach by considering using influencers to grow your identity online, be unrelenting and strategize. He also discussed the correlation between identity, though leadership and social media.

The second round of semi-finals consisted of the following startups pitching for their business: Global Tuturing Hub, Hi5 Solutions, findSisterhood, and LocalAventura.

• Global Tutoring Hub is personalized adaptive learning platform that offers users a unique learning experience based on their learning styles. The platform focuses on finding out how you learn and then delivers content customized to your needs.
• Hi5 Solutions provides businesses and governments a trusted system of ID and Document Digital Management Platform for identity validation and document sharing to meet their compliance requirements. Hi5’s system lowers errors, fraud risk, and costs by reducing the need for manual identity checks. Their ID scanning is ISO certified, private, secure, user-friendly and auditable.
• findSisterhood is an anonymous social network for women. findSisterhood created a safe space for women to share their story and find their strength with the support of other women. Their main target is the U.S. but they have users from around the world. Their machine learning app can identify cases and automatically provide feedback to the users. They have strong behavioral rules on the platform
• LocalAventura is a curated platform for booking authentic tours all throughout Latin America. LocalAventura connects passionate local guides with travelers who want to have local, off-the-beaten-path experiences.

Kelly Hoey accompanied the second speaker of the event, Vanessa Pestritto, Director of XSpring at Ripple to discuss frictionless digital money and game-changing open-source innovations. Vanessa also talked about the new initiative Xpring by Ripple that will invest in, incubate, acquire and provide grants to companies and projects run by proven entrepreneurs focused on blockchain and digital assets. Every entrepreneur will use the digital asset XRP and the XRP Ledger, the open-sourced, decentralized technology behind XRP, to solve their customers’ problems in a transformative way.

Up next, Renald Laing, Teacher ICT at IPA, announced Aruba’s participation in 2018 Hour of Code and asked for volunteers to enlarge the event. The Hour of Code started as a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify “code”, to show that anybody, from 4 years to 104 years, can learn the basics, and to broaden participation in the field of computer science. It has since become a worldwide effort to celebrate computer science, starting with 1-hour coding activities but expanding to all sorts of community efforts. The Hour of Code takes place each year during Computer Science Education Week. The 2018 Computer Science Education Week will be December 3-9.

The Next Keynote speaker, Justin Halsall, Developer Advocate at IBM, talked about the essentials of working with developers including when the profession started and how it changed from a women-dominated profession to a male-dominated profession in the 80s, how developers a trained to be specific and how to understand their logic and work structure.

Keynote speaker Nick Smoot, Founder of Innovation Collective, discussed his experience with unlocking economic prosperity by transforming cities into niche innovation hubs. Innovation Collective turns whole communities of unlikely places and people into accelerators by giving people access to education for free in the areas they are interested to start their business. He gave an example of how Google facilitates teachers and how participants apply what they learn and start working on their ideas in a more structured way. This gives people the opportunity to build their dreams and create things that matter. During the Q&A, the question on what can be done in Aruba which its economy highly depended on tourism. Nick mentioned how growth hacking in the tourism industry is important including creating new software, investing in startups, and experiment on new ideas that can serve the industry.

Next on the schedule are the finals of the Startup Pitch Competition. From the 8 semi-finalists, three were selected for the final round: findSisterhood, LocalAventura, and SeaGoingGreen. Each finalist had 5 minutes to pitch with 3 minutes Q&A.

The last keynote speaker of the event, Rebecca Duane, Business Developer at IBM Watson talked about the power of blockchain. The technology has been applied by IBM in the Diamond Industry, The Coffee Beans Industry, and Blueberries Food Supply Chain. In the case of the Food Supply Chain to technology give you the answer to the question: Where does your food come from? But it does not stop here, IBM is continuously working with projects in other industries where is technology can be applied.

The last panel of the day consisted of Kristel De Nobrega, Manager Information Security Department at Centrale bank van Aruba,  and Shenley Tromp, Director Information Technology at Aruba Airport Authority, who discussed the topic of cybersecurity in a seamless future.

The event finalized with the announcement of the winner of the Startup Pitch Competition: findSisterhood. Followed with cocktails to celebrate the event.

We learned from the shared experiences and insights from keynote speakers, learned practical tips and tricks, and watch the latest trends in tech come alive when startups pitched live on stage during the Startup Pitch Competition.

For more information about the event and the ATECH foundation contact Tristan Every at tristan@atechconference.com