EU Datathon 2022 teams behind the apps: meet Hermix
_‘The teams behind the apps’ is a series of videos made by the EU
Datathon 
[//net1.cec.eu.int/homes/11/zagroju/Documents/data.europa.eu/EU%20Datathon%202022/Interviews/op.europa.eu/eudatathon]finalists.
Get to know this year’s teams and their apps over a set of 12
episodes, twice weekly, in the run-up to the competition finals. On
20 October, the teams will pitch their apps to a jury that will
select the winners. An audience will also be able to support their
favourite team through the Public Choice Award vote. Register now to
follow the finals online!
[https://scic.ec.europa.eu/ew/register/dgscic/EU_Datathon_2022/e/lk/g/43770/k/]_

 

Hermix relies on big data analytics and artificial intelligence and
has been built as a tool for strategic marketing analysis of the
business-to-government (B2G) market. The team behind the app –
Stefan Morcov and Bogdan Costea – joined us for a short interview
in which we talked about the app, the idea that led to its creation
and why they decided to participate in the EU Datathon.

 

HOW’S IT GOING WITH THE APP? WHAT’S THE CURRENT STATUS?

Hermix was launched into production on 1 October 2022
[https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6983152198964654080/].
We already have a customer base for it, enrolled business users and
are working on a pipeline of projects – it is now a minimum viable
product! The interest in Hermix was amazing, in spite of us not really
having even started to promote it; we just posted a message on
LinkedIn and then people started calling.

We are now a dedicated team of 5, plus some part-time collaborators
and have received incredible support from our friends. People were
enthusiastic about our app, and everybody supported us with feedback,
ideas, design and so on. We hope to pay them back one day. In the
meantime, thank you guys – we really owe you!

 

HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE IDEA FOR THIS APP?

We had been working for 20 years in public sector tendering, both in
Europe and beyond. We had won a ton of tenders and had delivered a
bunch of great IT projects, worth millions.

A few months before the EU Datathon, Stefan realised that everything
in public procurement was still being done manually: monitoring,
analysis and bids. Although the business-to-customer (B2C) and
business-to-business (B2B) markets were already highly automated:
(CRMs, BIs, Google Analytics, LinkedIn Insights), the B2G market was
still in its infancy. There was no_ _public sector analytics software
and no B2G intelligence or segmentation. That’s when Bogdan said:
‘if you give me enough data, I will transform it into gold.’

A huge amount of big open data was already available to us through
Tenders Electronic Daily [https://ted.europa.eu/], Cordis
[https://cordis.europa.eu/], Financial Transparency System
[https://ec.europa.eu/budget/financial-transparency-system/], etc. and
we knew how to use it. In fact, we had to design the B2G theoretical
framework from scratch, with dedicated tools such as
_governmentgraphics_ segmentation and _affinity_ mapping.

We are very proud of what we have achieved so far and super
enthusiastic about the future.

 

WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO TAKE PART IN THE EU DATATHON?

We had already been working on Hermix for a few months and when we saw
this year’s Datathon topics, we became incredibly excited – the EU
Datathon was the perfect challenge. Although we started out as a team
of 2, after seeing that there was an interest, we scaled up to 5 and
are still growing.

The key value of Hermix lies in its ability to make sense of public
sector data. Hermix is much more than just processing contract notices
and feeding them forward to end users – that’s already being done
everywhere, including TED. We instead clean up and normalise data
using our market know-how to design advanced, actionable insights and
infographics, transforming public sector data into intelligence and
knowledge.

 

To find out more about Hermix, watch this 1-minute video
[https://youtu.be/hpp9Zp8s1js].

Curious to learn more? Discover the teams and the apps on the EU
Datathon website [https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eudatathon], watch their
videos on YouTube
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jokN2NcsxCA&list=PLT5rARDev_rnik8jF6E8k5AjN5zeJmqXG] and
follow their updates on Twitter
[https://twitter.com/EU_opendata], Facebook
[https://www.facebook.com/data.europa.eu] and LinkedIn
[https://www.linkedin.com/company/publications-office-of-the-european-union/] or
via our newsletter [https://data.europa.eu/en/newsletter].

Publication Date/Time
2022-10-11T16:30:00+00:00
Understanding, predicting and recommending in the B2G market