Northern Ireland to Help HSE Students Develop Business

Grigory Tareev and Kirill Chekanov

The HSE student project Chill has been selected by the StartPlanetNI business accelerator which is funded in partnership with the Northern Ireland government investment programme. The 10 best projects were chosen out of 350 teams from around the world and Chill is the only team from Russia.  

Chill is an app for communicating without using text or voice, originally designed for smartwatches like Apple Watch. It uses symbols in the context of specific situations to communicate, for example instead of writing ‘In Starbucks near the office’ you can just send the icon for coffee. Instead of writing, ‘I’m held up’ use the rocket icon. Three people designed the app, two of whom are at HSE - Grigory Tareev is a second-year Software Engineering student and Kirill Chekanov is in his second year at the Economics programme.   

‘Kirill and I have been working together since Apple disclosed its plans to launch the iWatch,’ says Grigory, ‘we all understood it would turn the market in wearable devices upside down, the same way the iphone did. We are devoted to minimalism and love wearable devices and we decided to make an app for communicating on a smartwatch. The idea was that it should be super-minimalist and easy to use. The name Chill (ie, Relax!) came out of the idea that it should be hassle free. Initially we thought of a screen with a list of friends you could send your location to, or a photo and a screen where you could see the messages. We thought it was ideal for Apple Watch users because the tiny screen is too small for reading text messages and we didn’t see any point in overloading the device with mobile app functionality.’      

‘Gradually, Chill evolved, literally from just a smartwatch app into a new language,’ says Kirill. ‘Now it works equally well with Apple Watch and mobiles. Essentially the way it works is the icon provides the context and the next ten symbols refine the situation.’ 

Kirill already had experience of working on apps for wearable devices on HippFlow for Google Glass when he met Grigory. It was users’ responses about interaction with mobiles that made him realise a new kind of app was needed.  He had also worked with Chinaccelerator.

‘That’s where I learnt how accelerators in the SOSVentures family (which StartPlanetNI is part of) work with startups,’ says Kirill. The work in China led us to taking part in SPNI. As soon as we realised that our product was ready to get involved with an accelerator, we contacted the SPNI team. They advised us to apply through f6s.com and after that we had several stages of interviews.’ To be taken up by an accelerator, a company has to be working in a dynamic, developing market (the market for smartwatch apps is a case in point) and the product must be fully operational and already in use. You also need to know how to cultivate relations with accelerator representatives and convince them you are a dynamic company. 

Selected teams are given £15,000 to develop their project, mentoring and useful contacts of investors and experienced entrepreneurs. 

‘One year on our team has grown, we are writing apps for new platforms, Apple Watch, Pebble, Android and others, and we are inviting anyone who wants to to try them out,’ say Grigory and Kirill. ‘Soon we will launch a Chill platform for our supporters.’