START Summit 2018: SGBA is a Smart Choice for Startups

Come spring, come the annual START Summit! This year’s edition on March 15-16 was frequented by 2500 participants from more than 80 countries, among them close to 600 startups, more than 1000 students and 256 investors, who congregated in the city of St.Gallen for inspiring exchanges on the leading topic „Where Innovation Happens“. With its mere size and quality, the START Summit has firmly established itself as one of the leading conferences of the European startup sector.

With an emphasis on technologies such as Blockchain, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) this year’s summit was a great match with the St.GallenBodenseeArea (SGBA), particularly with its focus on cluster industries such as ICT and Precision.

This year’s START Summit saw the SGBA’s economic development team partnering up with St.Gallen Public Services (www.sgsw.ch) and the award-winning startup Advertima (www.advertima.com). Following the motto „Smart City In A Smart Region” the three partners had a shared purpose: To illustrate for the summit’s participants why the SGBA holds an ideal combination of benefits for up-and-coming startups.

Advertima, proud and recent winner of the “Coolest Startup Award 2017”, presented its Experience Management System, an AI-based self-learning software the company developed to address and communicate with different target audiences more directly and concisely than ever before.

The Public Services St.Gallen, in a cooperation with IOT Accelerator (https://iotaccelerator.ch/) and the local Schützengarten Brewery (www.schuetzengarten.ch) exhibited a project based on a LoRaWAN application allowing for a whole range of beer keg temperature and storage control options (LoRa is a protocol for Low-Power Wide-Area Networks and a basic prerequisite for the IoT – see www.lora-alliance.org for more information).

Furthermore, delegates of the SGBA were on call to answer any questions of startups interested in opening shop in the SGBA, and to tell them in detail which benefits and advantages make the “Smart Region” SGBA their business environment of choice.

Missed the summit? Visit the START Summit website for impressions and after-movie: https://startsummit.ch/