Good morning! Here’s your weekly update about the Dutch startup scene last week. What’s new?
Funding
Athom, a startup from Enschede that designed the voice controlled assistant (Homey) for smart devices in your home, secured 1 million euro from a group of private investors.
Updates
Urban navigation app Citymapper cleaned up at The Europas last Wednesday, bagging a total three awards at what’s billed as the premier awards evening for Europe’s hottest tech startups. The fast-growing London company won best mobile startup, best travel startup and the grand prix award.
Social enterprise Fairphone, producer of “fairer electronics” last week introduced the Fairphone 2.
Amsterdam and New York City will work together in order to stimulate tech startups. Amsterdam’s deputy mayor Kajsa Ollongren and her New York City colleague Alicia Glen have discussed this during a meeting last week.
Events
Starterslift organises the Lean Startup Machine Weekend in Incubator Breda from 9-11 July. The first event of this kind in the province of Brabant. Check out more here.
Are you a data journalist, journalist who wants to learn how to use data in your stories, techie who is good with data sets and scraping or visualizing data or anyone who just wants to learn about the process? Join Data Journalism 101on June 22.
UtrechtInc, an incubator, and online platform Computable will link startups and co-founders during ‘Meet Your Co-founder’. This event takes place in Jaarbeurs Utrecht on June 23 2015. It starts at 18:00 until 20:30 and participation is free of charge.
Check out our events page for more
Monday morning read
Grab some coffee (or tea) and read this!
When it first launched, DuckDuckGo seemed like it couldn’t possibly be serious. A tiny, Philadelphia-based search engine going up against Google? Indeed, its early growth was glacial, despite offering itself as a less invasive search engine that doesn’t track your online behavior. But then history intervened: Two years ago, Edward Snowden blew the whistle on NSA spying and American attitudes about privacy shifted. DuckDuckGo been exploding ever since.
The concept of deep learning has been a frequent topic of conversation in recent months because of the commitment of some of the world’s largest search companies. With organizations like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Baidu buying into this technology, we are starting to see a huge acceleration of the applications and uses for this relatively new artificial intelligence (AI).
Cuba, one of the Western Hemisphere’s least-wired countries, is poised to expand access to the Internet by introducing about three dozen Wi-Fi hot spots around the island and reducing the steep fees that Cubans pay to spend time online.