IT ARENA 2021: highlights and afterwords
Conference Tracks
- Startup – tech entrepreneurs, emerging companies and viable startups exchange ideas, find partners and discover growth hacks.
- Business – focuses on global markets, strategic outsourcing and product development. Founders and CEOs with a proven track-record shared their expertise and growth secrets.
- Product – passionate product managers and analysts, UX pros who helped to shape the product or solution you are working on.
- Technology – trending technologies and evergreen coding tricks, AR and Robotics.
- October 7, the 1st day of IT Arena, was an online day only, within which attendees listened to speakers, asked questions, and networked using the web platform and mobile app.
- October 8, the 2nd day of IT Arena, was talk with star guest from the USA and keynote speaker Maye Musk – a role model, trend maker and rule changer with a fascinating family. Her book, A Woman Makes A Plan, has been published by Penguin Random House in the USA and Canada. It is an international best-seller, soon to be in over 50 countries with more to come. Maye concentrated on women’s empowerment and their impact on the development of the tech industry.
If you know you’re good at something, make sure you find people who appreciate you.
We had a pleasure to visit the 3rd day of the conference that was dedicated to meetups and full of insightful talks, discussions, fireside chats, presentations – a perfect chance to meet industry related people, learn new things, dive into growth breaking tendencies in tech, and for sure get inspiration.
This year the meetups, the same as the IT Arena speakers lineup, was traditionally divided into topic groups: business, product, and technology.
During productive day we listened to several panel discussions:
- “Employment via the Diia City” with Vitaliy Sedler, IТ Ukraine Association, Alex Bornyakov, Ministry of Digital Transformation , Olga Magaletska, Office of the National Investment Council of Ukraine, Vitalii Odzhykovskyi, Sayenko Kharenko.
Every country is fighting for talents, but if Ukraine doesn’t have a tax system that suits all tech companies, we will lose this war,” said Alex Bornyakov.
- “The future of content transformation with ML” with Dima Shvets, Oles Petriv, Ivan Altsybieiev, Brad Wells (all from Reface, Refacians: People of Reface), shared how AI/ML transforming content, undercovered creative potential of synthetic media, and product opportunities at Reface.
- AIN.UA LIVE with Ilya Kabachynsky and Stepan Veselovskyi, CEO of Lviv ІТ Cluster & ІТ Arena:
IT Arena Startup Competition has become one of the most important startup events in Ukraine. Lviv IT Cluster has been thinking about additional initiatives to support local startups. Therefore last year we launched the angel investment club Lviv Tech Angels.
- Panel discussion “How to put a city on a global tech map” with Andriy Sadovyi, Lviv mayor, where also presented the project LvivTech matchmaking platform with the support of USAID Competetive Economy Program.
- “Vimeo and Asana. How to build a partnership for 4 million users” with Oleg Svirskyi:
Customers expect BIG from big brands. That’s why pure lean or agile doesn’t always fit. Over-communicate is better than lack of comms. Enterprise customers require an extreme level of confidence in privacy and security.
During the Startup Competition Finals 10 startups fired up with incredible pitches right from the Lviv National Opera stage, and the names of the winners are:
- Mosqitter – a mosquito-repellent device powered with software, received a $20,000 money prize.
- Zeely – a dedicated app for creating corporate websites from mobile devices, won the $18,000 grand prize.
- Caretech.human – a special gadget that enables anybody to monitor their health and identify disease at an early stage, directly at home, won third place and a total of $15,000 prize.
“Winning IT Arena is a start for new opportunities. Mosqitter team is honored to receive the Best Startup award 2021. Pitching on the Lviv National Opera stage was a unique and memorable experience. We are incredibly grateful to be part of such a mature and supportive ecosystem. Receiving contributions from both financial and knowledge perspectives is difficult to overestimate. USF, CRDF Global, USAID programs, EO Business Incubators, Tech Ukraine are among many more entities and experts who are helping Mosqitter to grow and scale. Now, as we have already introduced our non-toxic culture to almost every continent, it is important to prevent the growing risk of pandemics and further reduce the negative impact of existing repellent methods. Mosqitter greatly appreciates that we are strongly supported on this route,” says Anastasiia Romanova, CEO and Founder at Mosqitter.
