Event write-up: Slush 2019

As a joint endeavor with our friends at Tech Nation, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and the Department for International Trade, Awen Collective’s CTO, Jules, attended Slush 2019 in Helsinki.

Awen Collective was invited alongside other Tech Nation alumni companies, including People Matter, Good-Loop, Wordnerds, Dream Agility, Hark, Heliocor, WorkInConfidence, See.Sense & Sano Genetics.

We began with a warm welcome at the British Embassy in Helsinki, offering an excellent opportunity to network with the other cohort companies, plus the Tech Nation, DCMS, DIT and British Embassy teams. The British Government is particularly adept at assisting UK companies with making relevant and helpful contacts within foreign countries to make conducting business there easier, and Finland is no exception.

On arrival at the venue for Slush 2019, the scale is hard to appreciate. With headline numbers including 25,000 attendees, 3500 startups, 2000 investors, 4 main stages and countless exhibitors and side-events, it’s a lot to take in. The entire event is conducted in near darkness, giving the feel more of a top-end nightclub than a conference - although you’re not missing a huge amount of daylight outside in Helsinki in November either!

Add to this the amazing lighting throughout, plus pumping music throughout the venue, and it all can get quite overwhelming! Thankfully the Secret Garden was a welcome tranquil chill-out space, including interior waterfalls!

There we’re brilliant opportunities to meet with like-minded entrepreneurial spirits at every turn, and a combination of headline speakers you’d struggle to find anywhere else on earth. Thankfully, you too can experience many of these though the magic of the internet - relive Slush 2019 here!

We’d like to thank Tech Nation, DCMS, DIT, the team at the British Embassy in Helsinki, the organisers of Slush 2019, the fantastic cohort of companies who joined us, and of course, the wonderful city of Helsinki, for a fantastic few days in Finland which we’ll never forget!

If you’re considering attending or exhibiting at Slush in the future, we can 100% suggest you do!

Awen Collective: What's in a name?

We are often asked why we chose the name “Awen Collective” as our formal business name. It is quite unlike other cyber security software companies out there. So why “Awen Collective”?

Awen Collective was founded and established in Wales. We wanted a Welsh word in the business name to reflect our founding. Awen is a Welsh (and Cornish and Breton) word, the most direct translation is “inspiration.” However, Awen is much more than that, it is a very old Celtic concept that can be translated as the flowing spirit which sustains life.

As Awen Collective was founded to improve the business and societal continuity (i.e. life) of advanced manufacturers and critical infrastructure providers in the event of disruption (e.g. cyber attacks), we felt that a word about life force in general reflects that quite well.

Other cyber security companies, especially software product companies in this space, have business names or product names which are authoritarian sounding, perhaps they could even be described as masculine. This is probably to try to enforce the nature of being reliable and disciplined, an assertive force hinting at protection.

Awen, on the other hand, is a much softer sound, it has a completely different feel reflecting a different set of attributes. It sounds as if it is willing to acknowledge vulnerabilities as being inevitable and is understanding enough to foster self-improvement, providing guidance on how best to make improvements.

Our primary corporate colour is a light green colour. This is related to the word Awen, in that the green colour symbolically represents “go,” “continue” and “good.” Traditionally it also represents life on Earth, through the primary colour of plants.

The “collective” word is because we acknowledge that all workers in the company are problem solvers. Collectively we solve large cyber security problems, and we do this through the development and offering of software. This word embodies our values and our internal business style. Although as we go forward we will be using less in public materials and eventually only in formal documentation.

There we have it, we have our reasons for choosing the name Awen Collective. We like the name, and it continues to represent who we are.