2020 at DAC.digital: summary

2020 is coming to an end and we admit that it was extremely active in DAC.digital! On this occasion, we have prepared a short summary of what has happened with us in the last months.

February 2020 – DAC.digital at many events

We were invited by Gdansk Economic Development Agency Ltd. (InvestGDA) to join their event. Our CEO, Przemek Szleter, shared experiences with entrepreneurs and local authorities about our upcoming expansion to the USA.

On February 20th in Brussels, Deloitte and VVA presented the “Study on the impact of ECSEL funded actions”. The event gathered, among others, representatives of the European Commission and delegates of permanent representations of EU member states. Our CIO, Mateusz Bonecki, shared insights on benefits resulting from the participation in ECSEL projects. He presented the R&D path DAC.digital went through the Productive 4.0 and Arrowhead Tools projects to develop technologies that we apply in our products. Mateusz took a closer look at our data authentication technology built on top of blockchain and hardware encryption modules.

March 2020 – new colaborations

New collaboration announcement! Ocean Protocol started to work with DAC.digital to create Data-Driven Marketplaces, powered by blockchain! Ocean Protocol is enabling the safe and secure sharing of data and services to fuel the advancement of AI development. Using advanced blockchain technology and an innovative tokenized ecosystem, Ocean Protocol is able to safely connect data providers and data consumers to unlock data and value-added data services. DAC.digital joined Ocean Protocol in the efforts to build safe data-driven marketplaces with blockchain. Read more on our blog!

April 2020 – journey to the USA

We were selected to take part in an acceleration program InNEVator, hosted by the University of Nevada, Reno, The Innevation Center—Powered By Switch, and made possible by lead collaborator Blockchains, LLC. The program was focused on blockchain technologies. More than 60 companies applied to participate and four were selected. We were one of them! 

We have successfully closed the second year of the Arrowhead Tools project where our R&D team is working on reducing the time of sensors’ deployment to the IoT networks. DAC.digital are developing an initial version (PoC) of the sensors’ onboarding toolchain, where the public key of an IoT node is used for its authorization to a particular field gateway. It means that cloud management infrastructure and the onboarding tool will be developed in their initial versions and linked together.

May 2020 – sharing Java experience

One of our teammates, Adrian Nicos, shared his experiences with Java applications during Tech3camp. He was talking about how to monitor Java applications in Kubernetes? He answered also how to synchronize data in a crazy world of microservices, where everyone has an independent database and how to use Kafka so that MongoDB does not have a hiccup?

June 2020 – blockchain for satellite imagery

We announced a new collaboration with Latitudo 40, an Italian company providing a digital platform turning satellite imagery into geospatial information. The goal of this new collaboration is to provide the highest possible data authenticity to Latitudo40 customers. 

What’s more, we joined Tech3camp once again! This time our CTO, Krzysztof Radecki, introduced participants to the topic of securing communication and interaction between computers and with distributed registers (e.g., blockchain) using hardware trust mechanisms.

July 2020 – DAC.digital as a Leading Provider by Clutch

We were named as a leading provider of emerging technologies by Clutch. Clutch’s 2020 research says that we’re one of the top IoT developers in Poland.

Clutch is a leading B2B directory and research platform based in Washington, DC. They cover a variety of industries from graphic design to accounting and development. Their team publishes in-depth client reviews and data-driven content that businesses can access for free.

August 2020 – a collaboration with Hyperledger

Our team collaborated with Hyperledger on an IoT Deployment Tutorial. Our goal with part I, Deployment of Private Hyperledger Besu on AWS with Hardware Layer for Externally Owned Account, was to provide an introduction to the topic as well as guidance for getting started. The tutorial detailed how to connect a hardware node to the network and configure it to interact with the blockchain. In part II, Ratified Smart Contract for Constrained Delivery with Oraclized Data, we created an automated solution covering the entire supply process.

Read part I and part II if you want to know more.

September 2020 – emerging technologies

The Pomeranian IT sector’s strength is small and medium-sized enterprises, many of which conduct their research and development activities and direct their offer to foreign markets. From their perspective, the multitude of potential competitors in the region is, paradoxically, an advantage – competing globally, everyone will find a piece of the “cake.”  

Our CEO, Przemek Szleter, gave an interview for Pomeranian Economic Review (Pomorski Przegląd Gospodarczy) about our approach to business and international collaborations. Read the whole article on their website.

DAC.digital took part in Infoshare 2020. Our Chief Innovation Officer, Mateusz Bonecki, was representing DAC.digital in the Live more. Pomerania series of webinars at Infoshare. His presentation’s title was ”MachineLearning, Mislearning, and Unlearning. How AI Poisoning Changed the Game?”. He talked about how the risk of AI poisoning affects the contemporary digital landscape: what the policy- and law-makers say, how much can it cost us in industry, and whether there are any measures to deal with it.

It’s not everything! Our CTO, Krzysztof Radecki, joined Diffusion Digital 2020 event to share knowledge and experiences with almost 900 participants! He was talking to Ryan Rugg, Madeline Bailey, and Jack Prescott in a panel about Trust in the New Normal and the role of blockchain in the process of building digital trust. Watch the video on Youtube.

As if that was not enough, our company appointed an official representative in Switzerland. Patrick Ramseyer, an experienced manager and entrepreneur specializing in cybersecurity, data classification and protection, Machine Learning, and treasury solutions joined our team to support us in project management and delivery activities in Switzerland. Patrick is available for meetings in DAC.digital Swiss Representative Office in Romanshorn.

October 2020 – more about R&D

Mateusz Bonecki and Krzysztof Radecki took part in a conference called “How to effectively create R&D strategies in the Polish industry?”. As part of the Partnership Session in the Horizon Europe Program, they presented their success stories. Mateusz was talking about digital technologies in global value chains. What does KDT partnership have to offer the Polish economy? Krzysztof presented our path from the ECSEL 2016 competition to spin-off investments. 

Not only do we have achieved success. The football team, which our company supports for the second season, became the team of the week in the R-GOL Tricity Football League. From the very beginning of participation in R-GOL (2019), the team performed great and last season during the group stage of the indoor edition it got to the highest level. In autumn 2020, the team decided to try their hand at competing on the grass and immediately joined the second league, where they found themselves quite quickly and has been undefeated since October.

November 2020 – blockchain projects

DAC.digital is one of the companies that qualified for the Block.IS program in 2020 edition. It is an acceleration program that aims to build an open and collaborative cross-border, cross-sectoral innovation ecosystem that fosters the use of blockchain technology in three vital sectors for the European economy: agrifood, logistics and finance. We started the Innovate Stage. Keep your fingers crossed!

Our Chief Technology Officer, Krzysztof Radecki, was one of the speakers during the online workshop “What’s next with blockchain?”, organized by Digital Banking Academy. Digital Banking Academy is a series of trainings and workshops that will enable you to gain comprehensive knowledge in the field of modern digital solutions that can be used in banking.

What’s more, we took part in Odyssey Momentum 2020 hackathon. We tried to solve the problem revolved around Returnable Transport Items (RTIs) — reusable containers used for moving or transporting goods. Did you know that RTIs loss or damage may cost a single transporter €150,000 to €3,000,000 a year? Therefore, an adequate system for tracking and tracing of not only the transported goods but the RTIs as well could reduce the financial burden of logistic companies. Now we are looking forward to pilot implementations and testing of our solution in a real-life environment. Check our hackathon story on our blog and technical details on our Medium blog.

December 2020 – DAC.digital awarded

Here we are. Last but not least – December. Our company opened a North America representative office. Despite the progressing digitization of business relationships, maintaining intercontinental connections requires significantly more effort. We address this challenge by setting up a representative office intended to serve customers from the USA and Canada.

And we are pleased to announce that the Jury of the “Polish Company – International Champion” competition awarded us the title “The Debutant on Foreign Markets”. Check our story of internationalization on our blog.