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Tag: Google Adopt a Startup

What’s Hot at the Ploughing 2024!

Posted on 19/09/2024 - 2:37 pm by

Back to the desk today after a very warm few days at our stand at the education Hub at the 2024 ploughing.

A great few days meeting clients, colleagues and even the Minister for State Malcom Noonan called by our stand. Minister Noonan, as Minister of State for Nature, Heritage and Electoral Reform and T.D. for Carlow-Kilkenny, works tirelessly for an Ireland where healthy, resilient ecosystems teem with wildlife, are conserved and made accessible to all.

CEO AnnMarie McSorley with Minister of Health of State and Nature, Malcom Noonan at Ploughing 2024 at VeriConnect stand

Speaking to agency leaders such as Kieran from National Organic Training Skillnet, Mary from the National Parks and Wild Life it was great to get a meeting of minds on bringing Sustainability Strategy to life for our clients.

Clients such as Laois Development Company, who we worked extensively on the Nore Vision Project headed up a full Laois marquee. Their new CEO Caroline Lydon and new LEADER programme Manager Brian Kelly are bringing their new programme to life at present with the Sustainability pillar a focus for the role out of their programme.

Suzanne Kearny from SECAD, the LEADER company that developed the Wild Work programme was at the ploughing and called by the stand. Their EU best Practice Interregional award winning Wild Work project continues to be rolled out this Autumn. The Veri Connect platform and eLearning toolkit with 60 units for schools are being rolled out via upskilling teachers in the content to integrate into their curriculum delivery.

We were delighted to share the stand with LANTRA, the leading provider of training, qualifications and career guidance for land based industries across the UK and Ireland. A Not for profit that was set up 50 years ago, to support upskilling of rural workers. As always working with Paula Smyth and her team at LANTRA was a great education opportunity for me. I also got to spend the day yesterday with their new Irish Trustee, Pat Griffin. Pat’s career has spanned 30+ years, working quarrying, and in the agricultural
industry. Having joined the Health and Safety Authority in 1991, Pat held several positions with responsibility for Mining and Agriculture. This included the Irish Governmental representative on the European Standing Working Party for the Extractive Industries for over 30 years, developing policy and guidance for the sector.

Kieran Cowhig our Lead Ecologist is working today on our stand and will be investigating new LANTRA programmes in Tree Identification and management for Community spaces. I also met with Leitrim team on the Social farming, and our client Leitrim Development Company. There are a number of really exciting new PEACE PLUS programmes coming up in the Biodiversity sphere. We were also really excited to share an upcoming innovative re-wilding programme in the North West which we hope to be announcing soon and may even have some VIP’s to help us kick off!

Veri Wins Google’s Adopt A Startup Programme

Posted on 15/11/2017 - 9:26 am by
Ann Marie McSorely CEO Veri at Google Adopt a Startup Programmme

 

Veri Wins Google’s Adopt A Startup Programme

13th November 2017

We won!!!! We won the Google Adopt a Startup Programme 2017What an achievement. To say we are delighted is an understatement. In a cohort of impressive competitors we excelled and it’s really a fantastic boost for our young company.

“We put a lot of time into getting the most out of Google’s Adopt A Startup programme and this win validates the team’s hard work. In our business we help digitise compliance for companies across various sectors including the health and construction. We are absolutely delighted to be named overall winner of Google’s Adopt A Startup programme and would like to thank the team and our mentors for all the help they gave us throughout the programme”.

30 start-ups competed for a place in the final, and in the end, eight were chosen to present a seven minute pitch focusing on the results they had achieved through taking part in the Adopt A Startup Programme.   Google had the difficult decision of picking the winner from a superb line up of companies.

Speaking at the final, Colin Goulding,  Director, Global Customer Care said, ”  Veri joins a stellar alumni of past winners including Food Cloud, Jobbio, Logograb; Arklu and Beats Medical, all of whom have gone on to achieve scale and growth in the intervening years.

“It wasn’t an easy decision for the judges, given the richness of talent and the achievements of our finalists over the past 12 weeks.  All our Adopt a Startup companies have shown real promise throughout the programme and I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more from them over the coming years”.

What winning Google Adopt a Startup Means

The Adopt a Startup Programme forms part of Google’s commitment to supporting the Startup community in Ireland.  Over 100 companies have participated in the programme since its inception and many have gone on to raise significant capital funding and greatly increase their employee numbers.

Other supports provided by Google to Ireland’s StartUp community include mentoring events such as Ireland’s Best Young Entrepreneur, hosting community events with partners like Startup Weekend and Enterprise Ireland and its partnership with Dogpatch Labs. Irish Startups can also avail of work spaces from Google for Entrepreneurs programmes in Dublin, London and the US.

We will receive €10,000 in AdWords credit and will become eligible for the Google Cloud Platform for Startups which comes with $100,000 Google Cloud Credits.

 

Betting on change at the Websummit

Posted on 10/11/2017 - 12:13 pm by

A VERI good 48 hours in Lisbon

An opportunity to attend “The largest tech conference in the world” arose last week for us as Founders at VERI. Outside of our planned budget, cheap flights meant a round trip of Faro, Lisbon, Amsterdam and Dublin in 48 hours. But, as a business based on education, digitization and innovation, the only decision was who would go?
A crazy month for us as our CTO Shane had a new baby girl, we graduated from early stage to closing funding round as a High Potential Start-Up (HPSU) company with EI and were adopted by Google in Ireland as a finalist for their Adopt a Start-Up Programme with €120,000 to play for, we flipped a coin and a few days later I joined the other 60,000 followers of disruption to Lisbon.

These are my takeaways on skills-based training and digitalisation change management from our first Web Summit.
Skills based training: Robots abounded at the web summit, with Sophia the Robot taking a talk on centre stage. Her creator Ben Goertzel, Hanson Robotics said that
“Artificial intelligence will free humans from work. We will be able to move on to a more meaningful existence”
However, it is being voted for and agreed that “Skilled workers will be less affected by increasing AI & tech”

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said that every time there has been a big shift in technology, go back to cars or airplanes, people thought the industries were going to die, people were going to be out of work. What happened is it shifted, and it actually augmented and allowed, even more, jobs, more opportunity, more commerce and so AI is going to do the same thing. The opportunity for skilled workers will increase rather than decrease according to the Krzanich.
Digitalisation: Change “Innovation is not only in Technology, innovation is a mindset”
Since we launched 12 months ago I have met with decision makers in private, public and voluntary groups. Those with an innovation mindset take the risk of doing things differently and coming on board with us at Veri, but the risk is negated by potential of doing things better. This was really well illustrated at the recent QQI digitalisation agenda conference,  where progress and disruption was received really well by the 400 Plus Education professionals in the room.
Des Trainer Co-founder of Intercom encouraged young companies to work with other young companies as decision making in larger less agile environments slows everything down so much that they never catch up to capture the real benefit of the new technological advances in their sector.
Blended Learning: Hanging out at the Google Augmented Reality stand with their dozens of coaches supporting bigdata #education via #google Expeditions, a quote from a speaker resonated with me
“we need to learn how to learn what we do today we won’t do tomorrow”
Google didn’t put 30 screens on their stand to give technologist e-learning content or access to their Google Expeditions. The coach was the chosen medium for learning. Whether a leaner is a construction site labourer, or a healthcare worker, or an apprentice on the job, the resources for learning have changed radically. Blended learning is the ideal, with information transfer fine for e-leaning but the need for skills based training always there and will be increased as the value of their crafts increases.

At the opening Stephen Hawking, the famed physicist, said that the said technology could be “the worst event in the history of our civilization.” But he also said it could be our biggest opportunity.
In summary the Web Summit illustrated that Digitisation doesn’t mean there are less skilled workers, it means they are able to focus and we’re able to work smarter … we’re able to serve more of mankind with the skills that we have. Veri’s software helps trainers to track and review training performance from their mobile phone – making the use of paper forms redundant, reducing administration time by up to 30% and allowing users to get insights of the quality process via analytics of the outputs of their training.

We at Veri have this as our aim, to assist the improvement of quality and outcomes from skills based training while reducing the costs and ensuring compliance for more information visit Veri.ie