#MTFLabs at Infobip
This week’s special edition podcast takes you to #MTFPula at Infobip in Croatia. Meet the founders of Infobip, the creative innovators from the MTF community, the brilliant participants from Infobip offices all around the world and go behind the scenes of one our #MTFLabs events, where we put creativity at the heart of innovation.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, mtf, ideas, labs, company, create, world, creative, community, grown, pangea, innovation, silvio, work, roberto, music, business, beginner, moment, tech fest
SPEAKERS
Tim Yates, LJ Rich, Andrew Dubber, Michela Magas, Silvio Kutic, Igor, Kelly Snook, Rafal Nowak, CJ Carr, Andrei Dmitrievich, Mariana, Darko Etinger, Ginger Leigh, Ana Maria Escobar, Monica Ivanovic, Roberto Kutic, Wesley Rose
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest, and this is the MTF podcast. And we’re going to do something a little different this week, I want to take you to our most recent event, MTF Pula, which we ran just last week in the region of Istria in Croatia. To be specific, we were running the MTF Labs at the World Headquarters of Infobip, their Pangea campus, in a place called Vodnjan.
Silvio Kutic
A good morning and welcome everybody once again to our Infobip Pangea campus, here in Vodnjan. I’m really happy that we are all here today. Creativity, Innovation is our fuel.
Andrew Dubber
Now, if you haven’t heard of info bit, don’t worry, they’ve heard of you. In fact, you probably have a message on your phone from them right now. If you’ve logged into your bank or to Facebook or WhatsApp, or Uber, or any of hundreds of other services, and you received a text message with a code to enter into the website. It was Infobip who sent you the message. That’s kind of what they do global technology company, and although you’re probably not their customer, you likely use their services pretty regularly.
Silvio Kutic
Hi, everybody. My name is Silvio Kutic, and I’m the co founder CEO of Infobip.
Andrew Dubber
The company is owned and run by Silvio and his brother Roberto along with their friend and CTO, Isobel. Not to mention close to another couple of thousand people working in over 60 locations all over the world. Pangea campus is HQ a huge, impressive new building on a site that’s been developed with all the needs of a high tech global it firm. And to say it’s a stone’s throw from where Silvio and Roberto grew up. is not an exaggeration with a good arm you could literally hit their family home with a rock from the balcony. I asked Silvio to show me around a little
Silvio Kutic
Yeah, so here we are at the pangea campus we been working on this project for two and a half years so we’ve been involved in this project Roberto and I directly and our company almost bankrupted because we’ve been just working on this here but you know, it’s like really nice now and it’s like really developed and constructed to suit our needs you know? So we are here it’s like the terrain is 17,000 square metres. This building here is our office building bunnies inside we have the restaurant the gym, squash, everything what we need to like work good and healthy. So good food also you need you know,
Andrew Dubber
and yeah, it’s incredibly impressive and beautiful stone and glass and open social kind of place and this being Istria olive trees growing right up front. And we were there thanks to the work of this woman.
Monica Ivanovic
My name is Monica Ivanovic which I work in Infobip in the office in Vodnjan and I’m the project manager in strategic growth and development department.
Silvio Kutic
So first, Monica asked me to show Okay, how we are so large company. What’s the main difference between a US company and the Croatian one, you know, like every respectable IT company, we started from a garage 200 metres from here. Let’s say this is American style garage - Croatian style garage. That’s not the picture from the garage. It’s more messy in my garage, you know.
Michela Magas
My name is Michela Magas. I am an enabler. It’s what how I describe what I do, usually. But it happens. In this case, I’m the director of MTF Labs, and I’m the curator of the experts who have cherry picked from our community.
Andrew Dubber
So if you’ve been to an MTF event, or read anything at all about Music Tech Fest, or indeed pretty much anything about European innovation policy, or if you’ve been to some kind of industry innovation, thought leader type event pretty much anywhere in the world. Michela might be familiar to you. She’s both the founder of MTF. And our point of connection here.
Michela Magas
Well, I met Monica at a conference organised by the European Commission when I was holding a keynote.
Monica Ivanovic
I heard about MTF before, and then I had this opportunity to get introduced to Michela Magas, which was like a year ago, I think, at a conference in Zagreb. And we started talking, and I found it like fascinating what she was doing.
Michela Magas
And she approached me afterwards and said, This is fantastic. And we would really love to run something like this. Have you ever heard of infobip?
Silvio Kutic
Infobip is a company high tech company and the like, we are a communication platform as a service. And basically, our like vision, what we are doing is like so we are creating seamless interaction between businesses and people. But basically, we are helping humans to interact with various services in some easier, quicker ways with all the available technologies.
Monica Ivanovic
And I think at the same point when I was telling her the story of Infobip, she also find it quite interesting and exciting that there’s a company like if Infobip in Croatia
Michela Magas
one of the most impressive European unicorns It has grown entirely based on local culture, and grown out of an area of Europe that has been politically and economically troubled in the past where you might not expect such a success story.
Andrew Dubber
And it was a success story that answers a question that often gets thrown around and European policy circles. Namely, where are the big software unicorn companies in Europe with our Google, Facebook, and in fact, info bit kind of invented Facebook before Facebook
Silvio Kutic
10th of August 2002, we presented this project, we had many people coming in the presentation, the mayors of all the big cities here from Istria, about 100 citizens also, we didn’t finish really the application, the platform was not finished for the day, we’ve been working on it and directly went to the presentation. And we said, okay, let’s present what we have. Let’s collect on the entrance, the phone numbers of everybody, you know, before this, especially for the politicians to have some good info here. And then when I click on this, some insignificant link here, everybody will receive a message Welcome to the digital community. You know, we presented this there and I just clicked this link, everybody received the message, welcome to the virtual community. And it was like a big successful presentation. After that we went like for having lunch in the small party with these politicians and all this other crew. But these are people went home started to click on the website, you know, and after a few hours, the mayor said, Guys are your normal, everybody already received 100 messages? You know, they’ve been clicking this link. So this was our first epic fail, you know.
Monica Ivanovic
So we started talking about us coming to MTF in Stockholm, but it was like, really narrow window for us. And I really couldn’t get all the people to participated at that particular moment. So we said, okay, let’s leave it for next year. And then this year, we kind of early on started talking of what to do and disagree with a great idea popped on I was like, Yeah, let’s do it here. You know, let’s, let’s invite all these people here because I think this is a really great community and great environment for people to create something completely new. And I think it’s also a great opportunity to evolve more, more beepers and more more empty efforts to to come and work together. So it was like mix and match is like, Oh, yes, perfect. Let’s do that. So, yeah, I think it kind of came natural when everything that the MTF community is doing and everything that we are doing it just kind of like, clicked and bonded at some point. And that was it. We brought over 10 selected experts from all over the world from our global community.
Michela Magas
They are specialists in a variety of different areas of research and techniques, vocal AI, somatic synesthesia, data, visualisations generative music, neural networks, really a variety of excellent skills that can be very interesting when combining with industrial API’s. Particularly in the case of infobip API’s, which deal with communication, SMS and voice.
Kelly Snook
My name is Kelly Snook. I do a large number of things. But I mostly make design new musical instruments that can be played in the physical world and on computers.
Ginger Leigh
I am Ginger Leigh I am from Orlando, Florida. I create professionally under the name Synthestruct and I visualise sound, I work with data and sensors and create interactive experiences. And basically find all different sorts of ways to merge science, and visuals and sound and all the things I love into single projects so that I can do many things at once.
Tim Yates
One is Tim Yates I’m from London, I’m here helping to run the hack and also work in various different projects with people for a kit with me and I’m kind of trying to help people with various different elements of their projects.
LJ Rich
Hi, my name is LJ Rich, and I’m from London in the UK. The reason I come to Music Tech Fest again and again, it’s not just the people, it’s not just the ideas is the opportunity for us to all grow ideas together. And it’s always good fun and always very tiring.
CJ Carr
I am CJ Carr. I publish scientific research on eliminating humans from death metal. Which is not a joke. You know, I find it when doing projects. There’s like different kinds of motivations. And there’s different emotions that you have when you work on a project. And you want to do something very, very hard, like something technical, robust programming involves reading a lot and experimenting a lot. Something like machine learning. It can be pretty easy to get frustrated along the way. But if you’re doing something that’s amusing, as like funny to you while you’re doing it, the frustration doesn’t even matter. Because it’s funny that you’re eventually
Andrew Dubber
So we’re in Croatia, we brought along a bunch of really amazing and diverse MTF innovators with different expertise. And we’ve landed at Infobip’s Pangea campus. Pangea.
Silvio Kutic
Pangea is like this super continent that was like, about 300 and 30 million years ago, you know, where were all these continents created just one continent. And so for us, this is like a metaphoric meaning, you know, because like all these people from different nationalities, different backgrounds, from different offices, geographies are coming to one place to work together, create together, innovate together, work together and drink together. Also, you know, this is very important, you know, because, like, you maybe work with somebody here for one two years. You never seen him because he is maybe in Myanmar and you are in Brazil. So this is our place of meetings. And this is like Pangea. You know, you’re super calm. Yeah, I was super continent. Yeah.
Igor
My name is Igor, I’m from Infobip. And I work in product marketing,
Ana Maria Escobar
Ana Maria Escobar and I’m from Colombia.
Wesley Rose
Yeah. So my name is Wesley Rose. I’m actually from Vancouver, British Columbia. So Canada. So my name is Nick dish. I’m from Bangalore, India.
Darko Etinger
So my name is Darko Etinger. I’m the Vice Dean and assistant professor at the Faculty of informatics at the university. You’re in the video. In Pula. What I do else, I’m a vocalist and guitarist for death metal band called infernal 10 abre. It’s a international bands. We toured throughout Europe, Japan, and some gigs around the world.
Rafal Nowak
Hi, I’m Rafal Nowak. I’m from Poland originally, but I’m working in the office in Vienna.
Mariana
Hi, I’m Mariana. I’m from Pula, I work in for me by my background. It’s music because I graduated the music academy. So this lab, it’s super interesting to put the two things together the technology of math and music together. Maybe we can Okay, fine. No problem. Yeah.
Monica Ivanovic
So here today, we are doing the MTF Labs, alphabet, which is something very new and exciting. I think I think of them as innovation laboratories where people actually get to be creative and experiment with their ideas. Some of the ideas are obviously connected to what we do here in Infobip. And our platform and the product we have, which is called voice. But I think it’s also much more than that, because people get to hear other people from different industries and different, you know, backgrounds with what they are doing and experimenting with. And I’m kind of hoping that by the end of these labs, tomorrow, we will have some really great mixtures of ideas and some really crazy things coming up as a result.
Ginger Leigh
So for example, since you can’t send me the data, could I then create something that sends back to you and manipulates the date? on your end, we can extract some kind of data from this production and export to CSV file, I guess I’ll say,
Michela Magas
Oh, it’s magic, is absolute magic. And, of course, the participants in MTF Labs tend to be people who are accomplished in particular areas of either computer science or other different types of sciences, or the arts, or the crossover, ideally, between those. So what we do is we run them through some really full on inspiration and some high level stuff that people haven’t seen before, and that they haven’t been exposed to them thought about, they are taught how to join the dots between what they do. And these moments of inspiration. And each one of them will do it in their own way.
Tim Yates
You gave 196 or something, but actually you’ve given it 360. But because it’s fallen off the end, yeah, yeah, it goes. The other way goes the other way. Let’s see if I can find this has to do with the library. Notice this is gonna be the maximum.
Andrew Dubber
And so over the course of a few days, a group of people, some of whom are extremely technically minded, some of whom thought they weren’t at all. They make things and they make things together. And the thing that stands out is that it’s not divided into experts and beginners. Everyone’s an expert, everyone’s a beginner.
Kelly Snook
And it’s you know, it’s really great. When you’re an expert in one thing, where people consider you an expert in one thing, it’s just so great to be able to keep going to places where you can employ beginner’s mind and be a beginner at a bunch of different things, and hopefully, assist other people who are beginner in whatever fields you have, or less of a beginner in, but I really like that beginner’s mind set that we have here and people kind of know their areas of particular x, they’re where they excel, but they also are not afraid to just Dive into things that maybe they don’t. And then like, you know, just be beginners. And I really like that a lot.
Silvio Kutic
Yeah, so I wrote this like few years ago, you know, like, maybe we don’t have well defined like this American companies, our culture, you know, values and all these fluffy things, you know, but we think this, you know, we are humble engineers, what means humble engineers, not everybody here are engineers by profession, you know, but humbleness is like a really good thing for us, like an attitude to be humble, you know, but engineers, that means understanding the things, trying to build better things, better products, better optimization, searching, it’s trying to build new ideas, you know, this means engineering mentality. And for salespeople. That’s our culture here.
Monica Ivanovic
And I think it’s also very important for us to go back to our roots as a company, because innovation has always been like a part of DNA of, of infobase. But sometimes we get very busy with our daily works, we kind of forget to stop and think and innovate. So I’m kind of thinking that this is the perfect place for people to be creative and innovative. And also, I think it’s a great way to also go back to the community, because we also invited a couple of people from the University of Pula, we’ve also been cooperating the MTF Pula with the university. So it’s kind of like this good mixture of business and education, and just like creative things popping up. So
Michela Magas
it’s really a match made in heaven when it works. And it seems to be working really, really well. On a second day of the labs, the atmosphere in the room has been the performance of the museum has been palpable, and the atmosphere has has, the volume in the room has grown. And it all happened at a particular moment when all of them collectively joined a few dots and realised the potential of linking their own API’s with some of the new kinds of thinking and new sorts of applications that our innovators have been developing using is beta
Ginger Leigh
to theta ratio, and so it’s analysing his brainwaves in real time. And it’s using that to detect the level of focus in the present environment in front of him. And so this gives him an object to focus on. And the more focused he becomes, the more active it becomes. So it gives him a reward and something to focus more on. It’s usually it’s actually larger, focusing on vacation, instead of talking about numbers, or
Kelly Snook
just your left hand, your left hand, one finger point is a melody. So
this, oh,
Kelly Snook
this is the defined arpeggio there. And as you’re going up and down, make a one punch proper when
I’m ready, don’t get on this.
Okay.
LJ Rich
So I’m going to be more than one that’s really taxing and amusing as these crying while laughing, how do you represent that in under a second?
I was just afraid to really squeeze them, then that’s why we
believe the one that’s pretty funny.
Michela Magas
The engagement by Infobip employees, the reactions to what they were shown, the surprise journalist who came up with an innovation idea
Andrei Dmitrievich
Andrei Dmitrievich, TV journalist, until recently, now, I mean, online,
Michela Magas
he came back to report, he never thought he would come up with an idea. He said, he got so inspired, because I’m
Andrei Dmitrievich
a journalist, and I care for people, I have to work for the people. So why not do something that goes in line with maybe my activism
Michela Magas
idea, which then everybody, everybody got to the task of building
Andrei Dmitrievich
an application that’s free for download for everybody. And then they can take that application, the citizens and rates their mood from one to 10 or the situation in the city. And then to give their voice comment or two, right, okay, today is good. town is okay, or today is terrible, because another criminal was liberated, whatever. So that would go into algorithm or AI, who would then transform all of it into happy or sad, distorted music, and then that would play out on the monitor, with speakers in front of government building or city hall.
Michela Magas
So that sense of camaraderie, surprise element. That’s great fun.
So the most valuable thing that I’ve gotten from this workshop is pushing my own mental boundaries, because you’re
challenging yourself to really
create something
that is not business related, but it’s
mostly your own creativity. Taking into account your background with your skills and also using other people’s skills, which is very interesting to
Ana Maria Escobar
put into, like
Ginger Leigh
play. So the point MTF Labs, I find is to bring together many, many different people from different backgrounds that all have something to offer, that may not even realise that they do, and to put them in a room together, and to have them explore ideas and open up. And really just experiment. And I think that’s the the most important part is the experimentation. Because when you remove any limitations of the, if you focus on what’s possible, then you’re not going to really, maybe invent something new or interesting. But if you remove that limitation, and you allow yourself to experiment and explore, just really anything that you want to try, then that’s where interesting things emerge. And you have these amazing inventions and ideas that may not have been possible had you not brought everybody in this room together,
and not feeling like an outsider. And I thought I would since I don’t have like a real tech background, and I don’t play any instruments, I just love music, and I find myself creative. But here, the guys didn’t make me feel like an outsider, I contributed and like the same amount as everybody else. So that’s probably the favourite part.
Silvio Kutic
We can go here to the Academy, if you want. So like, here, every bit better that we employ, like anywhere in the world for any department is first coming here for two weeks orientation week on our academy. And so they have like two weeks, about the company about the industry, they are learning about the departments how to communicate with whom what we are doing about our products, you know, about the landscape, the market where we are going, where the market is growing, how to position ourselves here. So after these two weeks, they are like fully charged to start already in this new world. Let’s say now, it’s like not anybody here, but on Monday, we have a new Academy, it will be our 65th. And yes, so like we are at this moment employing about from 80 to 100 people monthly. So we have two academies 40 to 50 people each month,
Michela Magas
they cultivate the local community aspect, and they have somehow miraculously managed to scale a company without losing that sense of community. And that was particularly palpable the moment that their employees from other sites around the globe turned up. And the way they talked about the company in the way they talked about their sense of community, even from those distant locations. This seems to be an incredibly important element of influence culture. And it is wonderful, because obviously community is something that’s central to our way of thinking and MTF and our global community. Also, whenever they gather there is this incredible sense of cohesion. And just thinking of versus MTF, Stockholm, under the main labs, they’re the expert labs, which grew from 30 people to 90 people from all over the world. And everybody understands the benefits of having this community ethos, how much each person then benefit from the common intelligence that believes infopath is built in much the same way.
Andrew Dubber
I have to ask what would you like as a child? What were you into? What were we making things? We were an engineering brain when you’re at school?
Silvio Kutic
Yeah, I always liked you know, mathematics, physics. And I was the programming developing already at the elementary school. Of course, it’s a spectrum if you know, this type of computer. You know, I started with the spectrum from this was my first computer. And, you know, like, I really like to play games, you know, but they forbidden me to play games. And then I started this to programme games.
Andrew Dubber
Was this a ZX81?
Silvio Kutic
ZX48, yeah, plus. With these gum buttons? Yes. Yeah. The
Andrew Dubber
rubber buttons?
Silvio Kutic
Yeah. Okay. Maybe we can go upstairs to see what the robot is doing. Getting on this MTF Labs, three tall.
Michela Magas
They’re guys that get on with their stuff. The guys that know their stuff, and they get on with it. And they don’t shout about it.
Andrew Dubber
This looks like the week of all the big decisions are made.
Silvio Kutic
Yeah. Every Monday we have our board meetings here. about it a few minutes just sitting here. So
Andrew Dubber
Do you want to, just very quickly say who you are what you do?
Roberto Kutic
A very interesting question. Thank you for the question. I’m Roberto Kutic, the COO of Infobip. Though,
Andrew Dubber
right, you’re the carbon dioxide. Fantastic. And so what does that mean? What do you do?
Roberto Kutic
I’m organising and disorganising the company.
Michela Magas
And they seem to have great awareness when you ask them questions about all kinds of things. And obviously, they’ve had to make some very serious business decisions and deal with major global players. So they obviously very aware of how to conduct business or how to scale their company, how to take risks, but at the heart, they are still located in the local community. Also, they have grown this company in the country that has been troubled by serious wars and serious economic issues and transformations. And they have learned to navigate major challenges in order to get out. So basically, they’re very impressive guys.
Andrew Dubber
What’s it like working with your brother? What? What is it like working with your brother,
Roberto Kutic
it’s very difficult, very challenging, like, every time with brothers.
Ginger Leigh
So we’re finding the best way to quantify the information. And so one option is for her to manually craned a set of it. And so she’s asking how long that would take for her to basically, like break down the keywords. Yes, those are
very efficient,
Tim Yates
they’re going to transfer the heat very effectively. So you need enough solder on the tail, you need to put a little bit of salt on the tip. So that then that transfers the heat, you see how that works. Yeah, and then it transfers the heat more easily. Yeah. And that’s all you’re doing with the salt,
CJ Carr
you want to make something that’s controlled, some parameter of it, that’s mood wise. And those are currently not my audio next, they don’t have that kind of control yet. But,
LJ Rich
but trying to create sonic idents for emojis, so that we can listen to the sentiments in text messages around the world.
Tim Yates
What’s special, I think, is the the way that ideas that there’s space in these events for ideas to bounce around, people can try things that they never tried before you can leverage other people’s expertise. ideas can go in different directions that somebody on their own will be able to, to push them in because they wouldn’t actually have the expertise or the knowledge of a particular area to take them in. It means that everybody can broaden their creative practice and output and learn from each other, which is a rare opportunity.
Mariana
It’s super, I mean, it’s incredible that all these people can gather together to exchange thoughts, thinking, their experience, and put put it together from different films, to create something new, whether it be used for something or just creation on its own, but it’s really amazing. So I’m super happy because I didn’t think to meet so much different people with different from different fields and different experiences,
Michela Magas
real beautiful. And all of a sudden, everybody just jumped on it and started to develop new ideas, and literally happen at the same time for everybody. And this was really nice to see there was a moment where they connected their talents, which they tend to use outside their workplace. So it turns out most bippers that they have, in fact, I think every single one that is part of our labs and has 44 of them either plays in a band or plays an instrument or is creative in other ways, like creative because cuisine or is into woodworking or some other kind of creative skill. And they never thought about combining those with their, with their everyday work. And, and all of a sudden, the combination of inputs and ideas and there’s going to new directions. And the idea that they could actually they were allowed to combine this creative thinking that they sometimes use with everyday skills turned out to be really quite explosive, actually the whole kind of the volume of discussion and and ideas coming out of everyone, literally rows. So So that sort of impact is wonderful to see. And then the sort of new kinds of ideas and applications that have been coming out and also very interesting. They are early prototypes because we have very short time available to us, but the same time. They were now looking at how they can be applied to various different businesses.
Andrew Dubber
Right. Or you can you can or Couldn’t you take
them and bring and it becomes
as long as the string doesn’t.
Roberto Kutic
You can see from the people that are doing they’re interacting, they’re thinking about innovation, small innovation projects that also today, they will present to us smaller ideas So for the future, and how to connect together different technology and arts, and science, like music and our products, and then how to make it on some a better level of human interaction with technology.
Monica Ivanovic
My favourite part of the MTF is probably the people. I just love how we started out with two quite separate groups, and one working with like really creative stuff and the musicians and creatives. And then we had the engineering group who was very much into what is the output of this? And what are we going to do. And it was really interesting to see how are we this just a couple of days, this two weeks kind of mixed and matched. And now they’ve done some brilliant work together.
Roberto Kutic
So the company culture is to challenge is to think differently in to motivate our people, our employees, to be part of what we have trying to achieving, to help them to understand that technology is something that is not physically here, but we have to reinvent, to invent, and then to connect the things differently. So this is also this type of people, that is an MTF, they are very creative. You can see how they dress, how they act, and the solution that they are giving, and the ideas which are coming out. So this is like a core belief for us that things can be better. Um,
Monica Ivanovic
well, for me personally, I think it’s a really, I’m really honoured that the MTF crew kind of came here and decided to work with us because this is something quite new for us. And the the level of the creativity and innovation that comes out of the synergy of both Infobippers and the MTF. community working together is amazing. So at first, I was a bit scared if this is really going to work because I thought oh my god, this is two very different groups and what’s going to happen. But in the end, everything was just fell into place. And I guess, on a personal level, I have more confidence that it’s really possible to do this. And that we can actually do innovation in a quite different way and see what happens. And something really good will probably happen when you put a lot of intelligent people in the same room. And they said we’re working together. And I think this is also the value for him from it as well, to have the possibility to include our employees to work with such great creative people and for them to be able to express their creativity because more often than not, our daily jobs don’t provide this opportunity for us to work in such environment. And I think this is really necessary for people to really grow and drive with their business. So I think this is very big important of us being an innovative company and having events like this more often.
Andrew Dubber
Fantastic. And what an amazing place to do it. No.
Roberto Kutic
I hope you like it here. Yes, it seems like in New Zealand
Andrew Dubber
it’s like New Zealand. You’re right. Yeah.
