OkapiReport

The Next Web, now in its 7th year online, is one of the world’s most influential technology news sites, with more than 7.2 million monthly visits and 9.5 million monthly page views. 

The Next Web is now organizing the Startup Awards in 12 countries in Europe. The online campaign that will reveal the hottest startups, entrepreneurs and best investors in each country ends with a friendly meetup.

Romania is part of this too, and the local meetup will be held on 5 February 2013 in Club Mojo, Bucharest. Check it out: http://thenextweb.com/startupawards/romania/meetup. We’re happy to see Romania increasing its presence in the world-wide startup scene. 

Always supporting innovation and startups, we (= the multidisciplinary creative agency OkapiStudio) offered to be a beer sponsor for the event, so the first drinks are on us. See you there!

According to some early 2012 statistics 51% of the Internet traffic is non-human, yes, this year we’ve been outnumbered by the “machines”. Web crawlers, APIs and other scripts access and use the Internet daily same like use: to get information or to post data. Some of this non-human traffic is not even made by personal computers or servers but rather by internet enabled devices. The concept of The Internet of Things is rather new but devices have been using the internet for some time until now when they are starting to communicate between them as well using our dear communication platform.

This concept will provide us with smarter devices capable of using the network to complete their tasks and make our lives easier. The notion of a device accessing the Internet is not new and not so spectacular but the approach of getting it to the masses and at prices so low it could be integrated in any device it sure is. We foresee two different approaches that take shape right now: one is the public version of easy setup and limited functionality brilliantly illustrated by https://cosm.com the polished and revamped Pachube service that gathered sensor data from across the globe and another closed secured version available for the high end or highly specific client that needs a turnkey solution for a set of Internet enabled devices.

From self driving cars to fridges that recommend recipes based on what food you have in it, the future sure looks to contain a lot of Internet of things related devices and we are here to build it and stepping up our game to be ready to deliver custom tailored solutions based on the clients needs.

Our friends at Inventeaza.ro are planning a series of workshops and hackatons for exploring the possibilities of the idea and basic applications to better grasp the concept. Stay tuned for more about this subject.

We are surely living exciting times with endless possibilities!

OkapiStudio is proud to work with Stanford University, considered to be the leading research institution in the United States. Stanford kids are not only smart; they also have top tier athletic abilities. As we were creating the new iStanford app to help students around campus, Stanford’s world-class athletes were dominating this year’s Olympic Games. We thought it would be cool to visualize this, so we put our designers to work to create the following info-graphic. Stanford University is truly one of a kind!

See the full size info-graphic here.