#TechOctober with Gor Vardanyan

Itel.am continues the #TechMonth series: at the end of each month, Armenian IT specialists will conclude the month, speaking about Armenian and international tech achievements, as well as gains of their own company.

We sum up technological October with Fimetech founder Gor Vardanyan.

#TechOctober in Fimetech

October was a very saturated and interesting month in Fimetech. We took part in the annual Digitec Expo for the second time, where we presented Chessfimee and Mapato startups.

Chessfimee app scans and analyzes the chess board, allows scanning and digitalizing chess diagrams from different charts and positions, using OCR (optical character recognition) technology. At this moment the app has 20,000 downloads, 97% of them outside of Armenia. We now work on development of iOS version, which will be ready until the end of the year.

Armenia is viewed as a superpower in the world of chess. If we add the growing IT sector in the country, it’ll be clear that combination of such an initiative and team is exclusive, and it is no coincidence that the idea is implemented in Armenia. This month we participated in Startup Cup with Chessfimee as well, making it to the final.

I’ll tell about Mapato too, where Fimetech is one of the founders. It is a new company, specializing in solving localization issues both within constructions and in any other environment, where GPS system is inaccessible or doesn’t provide correct data.

The system is affordable and can be installed without any major changes in infrastructure. It will allow organizations to collect various statistical data, improve sales and other directions, and the visitors will have the opportunity to use the mobile app.

On October 14, we had yet another Tech Friday at Gyumri Technology Center, where we talked about The Mith of Work/Life Balance, and announced the opening of a new branch in Gyumri soon.

#TechOctober in Armenia

The month started with annual DigiTec Expo 2016.

photo © From personal archive

It is a true holiday for technology companies, which get the opportunity to display their innovations and innovative solutions for various issues.

Another significant event took place on October 13-15. The first international exhibition of military and defense technologies, ArmHiTec2016, was held at Yerevan Expo Complex.

The important occasion of October was also the event organized by HIVE Seed Fund, attended by representatives of Uber, Google and other world-renowned companies.

photo © HIVE

On October 17, YerevaNN scientific educational foundation was officially registered. I perform as a member of the Board of Trustees there. The foundation aims to promote global-level research on AI in Armenia and develop quality educational programs for machine learning.

#TechOctober in the world

In October, one of the Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research teams received unprecedented results in speech recognition from computer. This system can already recognize oral speech with the same errors as humans, which I think is a great advance.

October also brought DDoS attacks of a different quality. A number of largest websites in America – Netflix, Twitter and Spotify were attacked. The attacks were unique in the sense that they were mainly done through IoT (Internet of Things).

Narine Daneghyan