For 6 months I reached out to 200 successful people in NYC’s tech sphere. After 50+ calls with engineers, entrepreneurs, researchers, CEOs, CTOs, and managers here are my top 10 lessons to take away!
Click here to read this article I wrote on Medium.
Image Source: LinkedIn Learning.
At the time of choosing my graduate school I was an undergraduate student in the UK, where I’d moved from my home country Spain. During my years as an engineering student, my friends and I often thought of products we could build to solve some of the existing problems in society. We’d start building the product but had no idea how to start getting it out there or if people were even interested in it, which led us to giving up.
I often watched videos and read books about engineers turned entrepreneurs. I remember staying up one night watching techie videos and one of a startup born at Cornell Tech came up. I watched it and immediately felt inspired. As I read more about their engineering program I thought to myself ‘this feels just right, I have to give it a shot!’. I soon found out the deadline for applying was the next day. I stayed up all night putting together the best cover letter and scholarship application I could. As soon as I sent them, I fell asleep, feeling exhausted but hopeful.
Click here to read the full story!
The Star Quest website is up now! Sign up to learn more about this awesome gamified goal tracker for kids, and send us an email if you have any questions or suggestions for the product!
Click here to visit the Star Quest website, and follows us on Instagram and Twitter at @starquestapp!
A common struggle among the 30+ parents we’ve interviewed is the difficulty in motivating their young children to complete chores such as helping at home, doing their homework, taking care of pets, etc. Many of these parents successfully use rewards such as screen-time on the iPad as motivators for their children. We decided to merge these two concepts into a new product: Star Quest.
To find out more about it, check out this article!
Since I started getting into the field of robotics and autonomous systems, I’ve heard of the term SLAM many times. SLAM in robotics stands for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, and it consists of a set of algorithms to construct and constantly update the map of an environment that is unknown to the robot while tracking the robot’s position within that map.
To understand how it works, I am coding it from scratch. I got the algorithm working, but it is quite slow at the moment. This makes sense because I’m using a fine resolution of 0.05 meters. The next step is to optimize it to be faster and more accurate. Check the picture above for a sneak peak of the results I’m getting at the moment using SLAM with a Particle Filter (PF) of N = 50 particles, and stay tuned for the final results of the project!
At wēbē we are creating a product in the teen’s mental health space. To understand potential users, I downloaded some trending apps for mental health tracking and used them for a few weeks. Yesterday I finally deleted the last app, and it felt A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.
Read full article here!
Pitching a product is easy — pitching one that people remember is difficult. Think about the last presentation that struck a cord with you. Why did it?
Personally, I remember a talk on the importance of creating a community around your product.
As an engineer my work revolves around algorithms, but in my free time I enjoy reading about social psychology and how communities interact. For years I believed these books’ knowledge would stay in my memory under “curiosities”, rather than help me with my “engineering work”. But this talk made me realize…
Click here to read the full article!
Who hasn’t heard the phrase “fail fast” in the start-up environment? I know I have. I must say, however, that today is the day I finally understood its meaning.
At wēbē, we are working on creating a product to help parents better understand their children’s emotional and mental health. Our initial idea was to create a toy that interacts with children aged 3–8 and collects data on their emotional state, which the parents can then visualize on their phone to identify concerning trends. With this idea in mind, we set out to interview children therapists, mental health experts, and parents.
Continue reading this article on here!
As an engineer, I have a natural tendency to focus on product features — I want to use the latest technology to build the coolest gadgets. However, a couple months into my entrepreneurship journey a hard truth hit me: no matter how amazing the technology is, if it doesn’t serve a purpose, it may as well be a potato (sorry potatoes).
Want to know why? Click here to keep reading!
Photo Source: Great British Chefts
For the last couple of years I have taken every opportunity I can get to improve my presentation skills and have learnt to appreciate the power of a great product pitch. Being able to pitch your ideas correctly as an engineer definitely makes your products shine brighter!