Summary from Slush 2017, Europe’s Leading Startup and Tech Event. Slush was held in Helsinki, Finland during November 30 and December 1, 2017.

1. Summary from Europe’s Leading Startup and Tech Event 2017
Photo credit: Petri Anttila

2. ● What is Slush, who was there in 2017? 3
● AI ending the 100,000-year human brain era 4
● Data – the new oxygen 5
● AR ready to explode 6
● Corporations are waking up 7
● Other interesting findings 8
● Interesting startups with a big enough vision 9
Contents

3. What is Slush, who was there in 2017?
Europe’s leading startup and tech event, held in Helsinki, Finland:
● 2,600 startups. 1,500 investors and 20,000 visitors from 130 countries
● Speakers like:
○ Al Gore, politician and environmentalist
○ Martin Lau, President of Tencent
○ Young Sohn, President and Chief Strategy Officer of Samsung Electronics
○ Mark Pincus, Founder of Zynga

4. AI ending the 100,000-year human brain era
● Today AI is missing:
○ Human-like deliberate thinking
○ Rich models of objects and their interaction
→ Internal modeling (decision making) has to be hardcoded to AI
● In a few years AI will have these capabilities, Kahneman’s System 2
→ AI co-workers will read those 90M patents, 25k researches and guide us forward
● AI living in blockchain – both complement each other:
○ AI: probabilistic, changing, algorithms to guess reality
○ BC: deterministic, permanent, algorithms and cryptography to record reality
Sources: speakers’ presentations and conversations of Petteri Hannonen at Slush 2017

5. Data – the new oxygen
● The data game has just started:
○ Currently only 3% tagged, 0.5% analyzed
○ 160 zettabytes in 2025, 10x the volume in 2016
● The quality of data and data-driven environment define winners
(everyone has an access to same tools: AI, machine learning, algorithms...)
● Data becomes individual’s most important asset and possession
→ Attention to data ownership and privacy: e.g. WhatsApp vs. Telegram
Sources: speakers’ presentations and conversations of Petteri Hannonen at Slush 2017

6. AR ready to explode
AR in retail will become the new normal:
● By 2020 retail AR will be $30B
● 4M chain stores in the US and EU want AR
● By the end of 2018 already 900M consumers enabled to use AR
(users of ARKit, ARCore, FB Camera Effects)
Sources: speakers’ presentations and conversations of Petteri Hannonen at Slush 2017

7. Corporations are waking up
Corporations have noticed the need of tech talent to prosper in the future:
● Corporate VC and startup collaboration gaining traction:
○ Big ones have own accelerator programs (Salesforce, Airbus…)
○ Smaller ones partnering with existing accelerators
● Heavy Industry pushing the 4th
industrial revolution by leveraging e.g. AR
● Intrapreneurship seen as a part of corporations’ transformation journey
Sources: speakers’ presentations and conversations of Petteri Hannonen at Slush 2017

8. Other interesting findings
● China will soon lead every tech investment category
(In 2016: fintech 1st
, VR 2nd
, robotics 2nd
, AI 3rd
, edtech 2nd
, autonomous driving 2nd
)
● Tencent: “Ecosystem-approach for creating the best UX.”
● Japanese VR entrepreneurs and investors: “Post-smartphone era starts in 2019.”
● Stomach microorganism research challenges current medicine
(gene expressions tell what happens, new medicine via genomics and microbes)
Sources: speakers’ presentations and conversations of Petteri Hannonen at Slush 2017

9. Interesting startups with a big enough vision
● StoreDot – Charge your EV in 5 minutes, funding $126M
● Viome – Discovering predictive biomarkers to eradicate all diseases, funding $15M
● The Curious AI Company – Building future AI components, funding $6M
● Qidni Labs – Building an implantable artificial kidney, closing soon a $2.5M round
Sources: speakers’ presentations and conversations of Petteri Hannonen at Slush 2017

10. Questions, comments?
More about Slush? Click the logo.
Petteri “Peter” Hannonen: linkedin.com/in/hannoin
Photo credit: Petri Anttila