A floating solar farm that chases the sun 🌞
A floating solar farm that chases the sun 🌞
#47 2022 | Sparkmate
Hope you and your teams are doing well ;)
Here’s what we’ve put together for your weekly Spark News:
Notion AI is now in Alpha ✍️
Make customer-driven product decisions with Producter ⚙️
Fastest swimming robots to date: inspired by the butterfly stroke, hair clips and manta rays 🏊♀️
A floating solar farm that chases the sun 🌞
Giving the Spark with one of France’s best entrepreneurs: a success! 💥
💙 NEWS FROM OUR MATESNotion AI is now in Alpha ✍️
Our mates at Notion are bringing the magic of collaborative AI writing onto their platform 🎉 The waitlist is open for anyone who’d want to be one of the first few to try the Alpha version (well, the list is at 240K as we speak.. 😂)
We’re pretty excited for the features it’ll bring, it’s literally your writing assistant! From a simple input of what you need (i.e. A blog post/tweet on effective product development): it can help you “continue your writing”, “help you write” so you can start from a finished blog post, to bullet-pointing and brainstorming ideas on i.e. ways you can launch a product, to helping you summarize meeting notes so you don’t have to. It can also fix your spelling and grammar, and even translate everything into another language - perfect for global teams.
If you haven’t joined Notion yet, we do have a 🌟 perk 🌟 - to get US$$1,000 off their Team or Enterprise Plans. Just fill in this form with code SparkmateStartups to get started!
🤸♀️ FUN PRODUCT WE LOVEMake customer-driven product decisions with Producter ⚙️
It’s easy to get lost in the excitement of building a product… that you forget to listen to users and therefore build one that doesn’t speak to the problems they’re trying to solve… or just isn’t aligned with the main values you initially wanted to bring!
Good thing we’ve got tools like Producter to help ;)
Features:
💬 Feedback Management
Collect user feedback from your customers and teammates. Inform stakeholders with automated notifications!
Collect insight with widgets and feedback links while your users are on your product - if they’re not, send them a link they can easily access.
Share product progress. Show what your team is currently working on with your users. Let them know about their feedback’s status.
🖍️ Issue Management
Prioritize what matters as you decide what to build next around the customer insight and your product strategy. Align across teams effortlessly.
Run effective sprints by ensuring the team doesn’t have roadblocks and the workload is balanced.
Know the need behind tasks when each is connected with customer feedback or a roadmap item. So you confidently prioritize the need.
📄 Product Documentation
Keep product-related docs and add related tasks, feedback, and roadmap items.
Single source of truth so it’s easy to make critical product decisions.
📣 Changelog
Share product updates on the user portal.
Close the feedback loop to make a smooth transition from collecting product feedback to prioritizing and launching in your changelog.
🛣️ Public Roadmap
Focus on the big picture, zoom in and out easily to achieve product success with their calendar views
Beware of roadblocks because plans change — the critical thing is how you and other teams stay up-to-date to avoid delays.
🔗 Integration with your fav apps including Slack, Github, JIRA and Chrome
Who it’s for: Product and dev teams!
Price: FREE ⭐️ until you need more than 5 editors and viewers, and 5GB of storage. Pricing starts at US$12/month, with a free trial!
💭 TECH FOOD FOR THOUGHTFastest swimming robots to date: inspired by the butterfly stroke, hair clips and manta rays 🏊♀️
Researchers from the North Carolina State University are developing energy-efficient soft robots that can swim 4x faster than previous soft robots: at average speeds of 3.7 body lengths PER SECOND 🤯
The soft robots were inspired by 3 different sources: metal snap hair clip, the butterfly stroke (swimming style for fast body movement in the water) and the manta ray fish (they can swim up to 35 km/h!). The robots work exactly like birds in the sea, flapping its “wings” to push through the water - here’s a video on how it works and its actuation process!
They’ve also been working on a maneuverable prototype, which isn’t as fast to be able to turn left or right, but still reaches speeds of 1.7 body lengths per second.
What do you think we can use these for? Perhaps ones that capture eDNA to collect data of animals and their states in the ocean - fast? And imagine ones that could look like this:
🌱 TECH FOR SUSTAINABILITYA floating solar farm that chases the sun 🌞
When you don’t have enough surfaces or land for solar panels, make use of the water! Which is what Portuguese company Solaris Float is doing with their circular island of solar panels called “Proteus”.
It is a 38 metre-wide solar farm filled with 180 double-sided solar panels that track the sun as it passes through the sky, to maximize energy yield - and it’s working well: it can produce 40% more energy than non-moving panels on land!
It currently sits on Oostvoornse Meer, a lake in the southwest Netherlands. On sunny days, it can produce about 73 kilowatts of power. In good locations and normal conditions, 7 Proteus islands could generate up to 2GW per year - which is enough to power 1.5 million homes!
💥 WHAT’S ON @ SPARKMATEGiving the Spark with one of France’s best entrepreneurs: a success! 💥
Last Wednesday, we had the honor to have Aurélien de Meaux, Co-Founder and CEO of Electra at our Paris hub to answer ANY question on starting Hardware Startups, from a full-house of mobility experts, entrepreneurs and those likeminded!
And least to say, it was a blast!
We learnt:
🔋 How Electra prototyped, tested and mastered their hardware product: ultra-fast EV chargers in months
⛽️ Preparing your product for scalability and industrialization
🇪🇺 Implementing and deploying your mobility infrastructure across Europe FAST
💰 Captivating investors to invest (big) in you (How they locked in €15M and €160M)
... and many more!
We’re releasing the recording of the event in our Vault (where you can also access previous event recordings + a bunch of resources and perks!). Go ahead and log in to stay tuned!
Exciting things are happening every day ⚡️ Follow us on social media to stay tuned!