IO’s week: frustrating chats and broken connections

By Bart Brouwers

Each week, in our Sunday newsletter, we look back on the past seven days. Regarding content, we always do so at the initiative of our cartoonist, Albert Jan Rasker. He chooses a subject, draws a picture, and we take it from there.

Long wait times, slow responses, and inefficient solutions can make contacting corporate customer service quite frustrating. Recently, more and more companies have been opting for automated chats, but a lack of proper implementation and inflexible software-based solutions only lead to more dissatisfaction among both companies and consumers. That Albert Jan chose this story as his topic of the week, by the way, does not surprise us at all: any self-respecting cartoonist gets warmed up by a little frustration.

We, on our side, warm to startups that, like Engaige, claim to have a solution to the problem. Colleague Thales Dibo visited the Rotterdam-based AI startup and spoke to its CEO.

Fundfest

Last Tuesday, we celebrated our first Fundfest: a quarterly meeting organized by the Dutch Startup Association that, for the first time, took place simultaneously in Amsterdam and Eindhoven. Although there were technical glitches with the broken connection between the two startup capitals of the Netherlands, we still look back on a successful experiment that certainly leaves us wanting more. So, in early January, we will make room again for this party to which only startups that have raised funding in the past quarter and the investors responsible are invited. Read the report Aafke Eppinga made about it here.

*(Still puzzling over the correct connection between Amsterdam and Eindhoven)*

Patents

Meanwhile, we already arrived at the seventh episode of Marco Coolen’s patent series. What does it take to protect your trade secrets best? What is the difference between copyrights and a patent? When is a secret already safe simply because it is, well, secret? Interesting questions with often nuanced answers. A new blog post by Marco appears every Sunday at 11 a.m. on Innovation Origins. So again today. Marco is a Dutch and European patent attorney at AOMB and knows all about intellectual property.

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Pitch it!

We mentioned it before: we are media partners of the AI Pitch Competition. Today, we are well over halfway through introducing the ten finalists. On November 7, they will compete for the grand prize of no less than 50,000 euros. Read how they plan to change the world with artificial intelligence here.