Three wines, three speakers, the smartest crowd in town.
Date: 12th May from 7 to 9PM
Location: The Collective, 14 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3JA
On Tuesday, May 12th, we kick off our global e-commerce speakers’ series. We will meet and hear the COO of Shopcade.com, Marie-Barbe Girard.
Shopcade.com is a social shopping startup founded in London in 2011, by Marie-Barbe and Nathalie Gaveau, who was the founder of PriceMinister.com, a French startup that was acquired by Rakuten in 2010 for 200M Euros.
Shopcade currently counts over 90 million products. Shopcade is a personal app that allows users to discover new products, list what they want and get exclusive deals.
The 20 person company has offices in New York and London and is backed by leading investors, including Lord Birt of the BBC, Daniel Bernard of Kingfisher and Carrefour and Ian Livingstone of Eidos and Working Games.
Today the site attracts over 23 million visitors per month, offering over 127 million discounted products. They have received to date $4.5 million in investments to accelerate its mobile growth and expansion to emerging economies.
Investors in Shopcade include Pascal Cagni, formerly head of Apple’s European Business, and Michael Combes, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent and ex-CEO of Vodafone Europe.
We will hear about the commercial application of drones for wineries from Dr. Ashutosh Natraj, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. Dr. Natraj a.k.a Dr. Drone (as fondly addressed by BBC) is an enthusiastic Robotics engineer with a PhD in Robotics and Computer Vision for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (or drones). Click here to read about his research on The Economist.
Prior to his PhD he obtained 3 joint Master degrees in Robotics and Computer Vision from UK, Spain and France under the European Commission’s Erasmus Mundus Scholarship awarded to 25 people from across the world.
Dr. Ashutosh is the co-founder and CTO of Vinerangers (www.vinerangers.com) Their tagline is: “Drones make better wine”.
In their words: “Once we understand what’s important to the farmer, we use sensors, aerial and ground drones for disease detection, stress, yield, quality, leaf respiration, climate and irrigation management. We load the data into VinePilot, a mobile and web application, where the farmer then enters their counter measures which could be more or less water, pesticides, leak repair, etc. At the end of the growing season the farmer knows how much resources they used, why and where. Now they can more efficiently plan for the upcoming growing season. Getting more and more efficient each year.”
“Tasting is intelligent drinking. It is paying attention. It is not hedonistic.” Steven Spurrier
Tech Tastes Wine brings together tech entrepreneurs, investors, and industry experts for tech talks and tastings. Tech Tastes Wine founder, Mrs. Plentz, chooses wineries and importers of fine wines that have an interesting story to tell, so participants learn about wine production methods and wine history, as much as varietals. “We see wine in a broader context: it is culture, history, geography. We go beyond organoleptic appreciation. We learn about wines and meet influential professionals, investors, and founders from the food, fashion, and wine industries.” says Mrs. Plentz.
We will taste wine in Riedel’s impeccable wine glasses.
techtaste.org 