Budapest Startup Safari
23 Apr 2019Budapest Startup Safari
Startup SAFARI is basically days of open doors for startup ecosystems: startups, companies, VCs and accelerators open their doors for attendees. Attendees register for sessions hosted by participating companies in their offices, travel around the city following their individual programs, interacting, learning and networking. Everyone is welcome to join.
/ https://budapest.startupsafari.com/how-it-works/ /
This conference took 3 day from which the last only has one event I did not attend to.
By nature it involved a lot more self organising and travel. By the time that I have the ticket, a few presentation was fully booked. It is kinda both good and bad, it is good because you do not travel a lot without getting in, but bad because I saw the signs that not everybody went to the presentation who made a booking. Possible there could be some space to fill in, or one could choose to sit on the floor. But anyway, it required a lot of planning between sessions.
The list below does not cover all of the presentation I have attended, just a few I though at least worth mentioning.
Intellectual Property Protection
Recently the topic got my attention, as this area is mostly unknown by developers but should be important as well. For example when somebody choose to use a component. This presentation was mostly about some facts, and general advise based on their experience prior to IP. It covered - mostly Hungarian - rules about patent, copyright, design protection.
One of the interesting thing was that the presenter estimated that a patent eligible worldwide would rathly cost 70-80 million Hungarian forint (~220000 Euro), and the time it take is about 0 to 20 year; I mean the time to acquire. I still think the 20 year seems unrealistic as it gives you a protection for the exact same amount of time.
There were a few more tips like do not publish paper on your patent before applying; as prior publication - even if you were the on published - make your patent claim void. That kinda strange to me, but hey that’s the rule to follow.
There were stories about abusing the patent system by some company (like companies creating medicine) as submitting a request for a patent does not cost you the amount of money described above, or the amount one patent would cost. But it can prevent other companies using the technology described in the patent, as other company could get a patent for it. By the time it turns out the original submitter do not want to commit to that patent, it does not matter as the technology became obsolete.
I would say I did not get what I wanted originally, but this presentation with examples was good to hear.
HOW TO BUILD A CYBERSECURITY STARTUP FROM ZERO!
This presentation was held by Balázs Scheidler (one of the founder of the company I was last hired).
I could not find a recording on this, but it would made this description just and much shorter. He told two stories happened in parallel during the life-cycle of Balabit. One of the part focused on the business part, including points where he fought was critical phase. One of the example was about external founding, in order to get founding sooner.
He also spoke about syslog-ng, and how it became and why was it initially open source. What steps led to the current state of syslog-ng. This was interesting to me as I am working on the syslog-ng project as a full time developer.
DRONE FLYING…
I went there mostly because of go with embedded chips. There were nice demos with a drone flying, doing flips and following human face if it is in WiFi range… I wanted to see the code doing all of this, but that was not a focus of the presentation. Hey there is a cool project called gobot.io: *Gobot is a framework for robots, drones, and the Internet of Things *. It supports things like Arduino or openCV, seems a reasonable thing to check out for automation.
A HISTORICAL OUTLOOK ON X86 PLATFORM SECURITY
For me this was the best presentation, which was mostly about Intel Management Engine, that kinda has access to everything (ram, disk, CPU) even if the machine is turned off. The good thing there is no official way to turn it off :)
The Intel ME is actually a computer on the motherboard, which runs MINIX! The strange thing about ME, that Intel does not give an official way to turn it off despite a lot of request. Because of the effort people put into this to hack it, and reverse engineer, it turned out that there is an option to disable it, which Intel confirmed: As Intel has confirmed the ME contains a switch to enable government authorities such as the NSA to make the ME go into High-Assurance Platform (HAP) mode after boot.
The presentation went on 30 minutes, which gradually became more like a conversation, things like Talos II come up, or RISC-V based open design.
Conclusion
Generally I disliked the involved travel, because I missed a few presentation or been late; well majority of people were late as everything got delayed. Also I though that more development is going to be involved, but a few presentation was just directly marketing. What would made the experience better to provide some way to plan route to reach each session. For example it could ask me for my main transportation (like public transport, car, etc) and ask some API like google maps to give estimate time between sessions, that would helped a lot, and possible I could attend more presentation.