Video call

[Alejandro Avilés]

Hi everybody,

Let's arrange a video call to discuss about the future. Fill the doodle!

http://doodle.com/74248rk8arct7c48

Cheers.

[Alejandro Avilés]

Let's do it today Friday at 2pm. I'll create a room in hangouts a few minutes after and I'll send another email with the link to join.

For those who can't I'll send a sum up of what we talked about at some point during the weekend.

Cheers.

[Alejandro Avilés]

Join here:

https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/g326lkqhedbe4bd3vgdacmbrxea

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 8:06 AM, Daniel Adam Dobos <Daniel...@cern.ch> wrote:

Hi,

Perfectly fine with me, sorry for the late reply.

Cheers,

Daniel

Dr. Daniel Adam Dobos European Organization for Nuclear Research. Bat. 301-01-001 CH-1211 Geneva 23 Phone: Mobile: Fax: Email: Webpage: +41 (0)22 767-75847 +41 (0)76 487-2297 +41 (0)22 766-8556 daniel...@cern.ch http://cern.ch/ddobos

[Alejandro Avilés]

Hi everybody,

Serve this email as a brief recap of what was we discussed for those who couldn't join. Mainly, Daniel joined the conversation to encourage us moving onward and presented some of the ideas he had after discussing about people from financial background about our project. Bottom line: "people feel amazed by the idea, and if we don't do this others will". So, goals in the medium/long term:

• Funds. Look for funds to get developers (some of us?) working on the open source project. Some good opportunities to start conversations in the horizon: Mozilla Science Lab and Enterpreneurship Week, both happening in Geneva. I would be pitching Blindstore.
• Business opportunities. Given the interest shown, it would be nice to start thinking about business plan. Not for the open source project, necessarily, but for a hypothetical spin-off. CERN Knowledge Transfer may be able help on this by proposing Blindstore as one of the technologies that some business students from NTNU will be evaluating from October to January. It's not sure they will go for us, but it's worth giving a shot.
• Incubators/company. Once a plan has been streamlined, we'll be able to look for incubators, startup contests, or tutoring for starting a company.

In any case, all these steps will be quite difficult to come into fruition unless we have some legal entity to which we are affiliated and through which potential agreements and funds can be channeled. For this purpose and as we agreed we'll be founding an association in Switzerland in the upcoming weeks. This is no trivial matter and will require some paperwork and further meetings, but we'll count with the help and advice from Daniel.

Lastly, about the next hackathons:

• Webfest. It will happen in early August and another good opportunity to keep developing Blindstore. Anybody coming? 
• The Port. This year, the idea would be to have people building something upon private information retrieval (PIR) regardless of having Blindstore fully operational or not. We should provide at least a mock that could be replaced with the libraries at a later stage. The aim here is twofold: one is to finally materialize a use case Blindstore could fit, and two, to get people more focussed on marketing/business background on board.

Talk to you soon!

Cheers.

[Andrea Ieri]

Hello guys,

I'm very happy that the project is not dead! I'm sorry I couldn't participate last Friday but I am now working in Zurich and don't have the same flexibility that I had at CERN... ;)

I don't quite understand from this summary if you have reached an agreement regarding one big question we already had at The Port, that is, whether to consider finding a solid use case (to attract interest and funding) our first priority or to have a "build it and they will come" attitude and trying to work on the code. Of course both things can be done in parallel, but I'm still of the opinion that it will be hard to pitch Blindstore unless we can explain what it can be used for. I don't see VC throwing money at cool toys...

Regarding the webfest, I will be in Geneva on the 1st anyway (well, Annecy to be precise), so I think it could work out. Again, I'm not a developer, but can certainly help. Should I sign up somewhere? And is it actually on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd of August? The website mentions Friday the 1st, which would have been ok in 2014...

Cheers,

Andrea