“These are small but effective projects in terms of projects bringing students and teachers together in the development of applications and services that may be open to society. The collaboration with Universities enables us to capture talent and creativity and therefore PT has been strengthening its connections with these institutions”, says Zeinal Bava, Chief Executive Officer, PT, during the inauguration of the Sapo /UP Labs.

During this second experience with academic institutions, there will be research and development work done related to the future of web applications. The objective is to reinforce the connection of the academic to the business environment through support for academic works that contributes for underpinning the discovery of Portuguese talent, the capacity of creation of technologically differentiating and innovating products that contribute to the development of new academic trends and also to the development of new market offers. According to PT’s CEO, the expectations for this partnership are quite high. “The Lab is already working, we already have people collaborating and we have outputs to disclose to the market”, he says.

Celso Martinho, technical director of Sapo, presented the first project of the new Lab, Sapo Vox that will reach the market in November. This research-based application, presented for the first time during Sapo Codebits as Verbatim, “seeks quotations (direct or indirect) proffered by a number of entities and assigns them a topic in a fully automatic way”, he explains.

This software is being developed by members of the Sapo/UP Labs since these latter started to work informally at the Engineering Faculty in 2009. “Last year was a period of hard work to make the sharing of a vision, of what the Sapo/UP Labs are today, reach a successful conclusion”, says Celso Martinho.
 

Celso Martinho presented Voxx, a project developed at Sapo/UP Labs

• Sapo Ciclope: a number of monitoring tools for the Sapo blogs, made available at the control panel of each blog. Ciclope provides real-time information of accesses to the blog and presents statistics graphically enabling to check traffic flow;
• Marsupilami: text illustration system based on large-scale multimedia collections. Based on the presented text, from key terms to paragraphs and complete news, the application produces a list of recommended images, thus becoming possible to accept results or refine the search. By indicating the relevance of images already found, the user may help the system and explore the collections available, obtaining tailored results according to his information needs;
• BeepBeep / Sylvester: creation of automatic filters for separation by message subject on Twitter in Portuguese. The idea is to create thematic Twitter channels for users to subscribe, following what is going on in Twitter’s Portuguese-speaking world, in each one of the topics provided, in real-time.

The Sapo/UP Labs is the latest investment of Portugal Telecom, which has circa 1.2 million customers in Porto. Zeinal Bava stresses the importance of the inauguration of this project in Porto, “a place where we are investing significantly”. Highlight goes to the different bets made by PT in Porto:

• Investment worth 63 million Euros to reinforce the Porto network, over the last three years;
• Opening of the largest PT Bluestore in the country, where customers may have a unique and innovative usage experience of all PT’s telecommunications products and services and specialized technical support for homes and businesses;
• The Porto municipality was one of the first locations in Portugal to have FTTH coverage;
• TMN currently provides full 3G coverage within the municipality;
• Porto was the first city in the country where TMN made available broadband Internet via HSDPA with upload speeds up to 7.2 Mbps.

After the inauguration of the Sapo Labs at the University of Porto, Zeinal Bava was a keynote speaker at the diploma delivery ceremony at the Executive MBA program of the Porto Business School (EGP). Zeinal Bava shared PT’s activity in the market with the finalists and left a few tips for these professionals.

According to PT’s chief executive, people should be good at operations, keeping daily contact with customers and the company; be persistent, pursuing their dreams, even if they have to seek change for such purpose; have ambition, values and ethics, fundamental for personal and professional success. “To be successful in a company, we should know how to work as a team and in a transversal way. We should be humble, accept that we don’t know everything and that there is always someone that will teach us more”, concluded Zeinal Bava.