The AI Europe conference, organised by Events Corp, was located on the third floor of the Queen Elizabeth II conference halls (just off Houses of Parliament) in central London on Nov 21-22, 2017.
Score: 3/5, worth a visit if you are local (1/5 = go if you need to get out of the office; 5/5 you’re missing out by not going)
Note: We did not listen to any of the presentations. Our primary goal was to see the exhibiting companies and have conversations. It is also worth noting that our main interest is to talk to retail related technology companies, those that are not immediately relevant to us may
We arrived on Nov 22nd, just before 11am.
The organisation was super, no problems with getting a badge printed on the day, the free wardrobe or getting up to the third floor with plenty of lifts available. Very easy entrance from the lift. Full catering laid on for visitors.
Two speaking slots: Workshops and Conference talks. The Workshop talks were located in the main hall together with all exhibitors and was pretty much a space for the exhibitors to showcase their products to the audience. Despite our press pass we did not get free entrance to the conference talks and budged out of attending these.
We estimate the number of visitors, including exhibitors, at about 100. There may have been more in the main conference.
Slightly disappointing was the number of exhibitors with about 15 companies exhibiting in an open hall. However, overall the quality was excellent and we had conversations with the following companies:
- Allo Media
- Allo Media (France) closed a $8m round a week ago and have raised a total of $11.5m. The team is currently made up of 22 staff but will now scale to 44.
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We were shown a small snippet of a French real-time transcript and think it was very good. The company quote 88% accuracy over a normal telephone line, which is excellent considering that other solutions transcribe high definition audio with a 15-20% accuracy. Most of these solutions fall to 20-30% accuracy when using a standard telephone line.
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SamaSource (Netherlands) is a visual tagging solution focusing on the car industry.
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Gyana (UK) provide competitive information including benchmarking on high street store performance. The way it does this is by collecting 70 different data points including weather, and much more.
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In common with other such solutions, Gyana has partnered with numerous app providers to generate geo-location data acting as a proxy for store footfall in a particular store.
- FYI apparently Gyana means wisdom in Sanscrit... hope we're quoting correctly here...
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PNY (France, global) is a hardware reseller and integrator for Nvidia. Their hardware power a lot of startups in AI but also more established businesses.
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Starting price for one of their “desktop” models (this word is used lightly to denote that this is a machine that can be used in your office) is c. £75,000
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Echbox targets publishers with their augmented social marketing platform. Echobox analyse articles on news outlets and magazines websites and publish a variety of content to social channels using insights into popular material.
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The predictive function allow Echobox to pick out the material that will be popular on social channel to create traffic to the main site.
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Clients include Conde Nast, Le Monde, The Guardian, among others
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All in all we have given this conference 3/5. No doubt this will improve as the event increase its spread. There were some good companies exhibiting, but our main interest is retail technology which kind of limits the scope we can score on.