Bassam
Jalgha: Lebanon is still a fresh market for innovation and Entrepreneurship
take a lot of time to pay off.
Inspirational People
from the Lebanese Online Community
In an attempt to promote
inspiring stories about people from the Lebanese Online Community, we, at
Cloud961, have decided to dedicate a monthly column to interview an inspiring
figure that has left a mark in the Lebanese online sphere. For your suggestions
for this column, feel free to email me on
mhijazi@cloud961.com.
Bassam Jalgha was born and raised in Beirut. Got his BE in
Mechanical Engineering from the American University of Beirut and continued his
Masters in the same field with a concentration in Mechatronics. His graduate
research topic was in robotics, specifically in fall avoidance of embedded
humanoid robots. Previously he worked as an instructor at AUB teaching
Mechatronics and Control systems labs. Bassam also has a personal devotion to
music. He studied Oud instrumental music at the Lebanese National Conservatoire
and spent most of his life learning and developing his musical skills. In 2009,
Bassam won first prize in “Stars of Science” season 1 a Pan-Arab innovation
contest. His project, “Dozan” was an automated tuning device for string musical
instruments. During the three-month competition, he was able to build the
device and pass all the stages from engineering to product design to business
and finally marketing. Since then Bassam has been devoted to developing the
product, discovering the difficulties ahead, and overcoming them. You can find
him @bassamjalgha.
Tell us a little about how you got
started in the innovation field in Lebanon and why did you decide to take this
track (instead of looking for a job or a master's program abroad like most AUB
engineers)?
I was never satisfied with the job opportunities available
for a fresh engineering graduate in Lebanon. When I finished my undergrad I was
like the majority of other students: lost in the noise of what society expects
me to be versus what I really wanted to be. There was this one course I took
that changed all that, it was mechatronics. This was the first time in my life
where I applied engineering knowledge to build (with my own hands) something
intelligent that moves! I instantly knew that this what I want to do in my
life, so I did my masters in robotics and at the same time I continued having
fun learning how to build robots and other random electronics projects (that
you can check on my unmaintained depotbassam.com blog).
I believe it was a wise choice for me
not to leave Lebanon then. Lebanon is still a fresh market for innovation; innovation
is highly needed and valued by our society! As contradictory as it might sound,
being in Lebanon at this very early stage opened up a lot of opportunities that
otherwise would have not been available for me.
What is Roadie Turner and why are
you investing so much of your time and efforts to develop it?
I have two contradictory personalities:
the musician and the engineer.
Roadie’s story goes back to when I was 12
years old. I learned to play the Oud which is an Arabic instrument that is very
difficult to tune. So, being the geek I was, I decided to build a robot to tune
it for me. In 2009, I participated and won Stars of Science the premier
pan-arab competition for innovation for my project Dozan and 4 years later and about
5 different prototypes, Dozan became Roadie Tuner.
Roadie Tuner is an automatic tuning
device for guitars; it connects to the tuning peg of the guitar and performs
the tuning automatically, quickly and accurately. Roadie has an instrument
doctor feature where it can also keep track of the elasticity of guitar strings
and would inform users about their quality and when it is time to restring.
Two years ago, you debuted a
prototype of this product at TEDxBeirut. What has changed since then?
Back in TEDxBeirut I had a prototype
made of two parts: a base and a handheld tuner. Alot has changed since then, I
partnered with Hassane Slaibi, a longtime friend and fellow musician, and we
started the R&D for building not only a tuner but rather an assistant for
the guitarists, and we moved from a prototype to a production ready product. We
decided to harness the computing power in mobile devices so we dropped the base
(no pun intended) and Roadie became a handheld device that connects via
Bluetooth with a mobile device.
A lot of the new features came after
initial contact of Roadie with musicians. So now Roadie not only will tune the
guitar, it lets musicians switch between different tunings seamlessly and will
even help wind and unwind the strings. The instrument doctor feature is a
proprietary technology that steams from the research done during that period.
Why did you decide to go for a
crowd-funding campaign to raise money to produce Roadie Turner? Tell us a
little bit about your progress so far.
Crowdfunding is a perfect concept for
hardware startup looking to bootstrap for 3 main reasons:
- It
helps determine if there is a market for the product long before bringing it to
market, hence reducing the risk on the company.
- If
you can prove that there is market for the product it becomes much easier to approach
potential investors, and easier even to reach distributors and retailers at an
early stage.
- With
crowdfunding you are fundraising to cover for production costs without losing
equity in the company and without taking any bank loans.
So far it’s been only 12 days into our
campaign and we have raised more than $100K, about 167% of our initial goal of
$60K.
I've noticed that on Kickstarter,
most of the perks are US based, where international backers have to pay extra
for shipping. Does this mean that your start-up is based in the States? If so,
why did you move it there rather than having it in Beirut?
Our company is in fact an international collaboration.
Development is in Lebanon, design is in Europe and manufacturing is in China.
The reason international backers only have to pay
for shipping is that Kickstarter doesn’t allow charging for shipment inside the
US. This is something that has to do purely with Kickstarter policies.
Do you believe that the Lebanese
community does not support entrepreneurs and innovators well?
On the contrary, the Lebanese community
has witnessed a boom in the entrepreneurship scene in the past 5 years that
cannot but give me hope for a better future.
What is really missing is the proper
infrastructure for startup development: the basic needs (electricity, internet
etc.), political stability, startup support from the government etc.
This is especially true for a hardware
startup; unfortunately Lebanon still lacks a lot of expertise and facilities
for modern manufacturing techniques. This is mainly why we moved production to
China.
What was the reaction of the
Lebanese Online Community to your start-up?
The reaction of the Lebanese Online
Community to the launch of our Kickstarter campaign has been awesome. If it
wasn’t for all the shares and tweets that we got, we wouldn’t have been
featured on Kickstarter as a popular item of the week and most probably we
wouldn’t have reached our funding goal in the first 4 days. I personally was
overwhelmed with the reaction and it kind of made me proud to belong to such a
community.
What is Lamba Labs and how are you
involved in it?
Lamba Labs is Beirut’s first
hackerspace, it is a community of enthusiasts that likes to build things. With
the purpose of spreading open access to information and knowledge, Lamba Labs
is a physical space filled with tools and equipment where people would join in
not only to build their projects and collaborate but also to give/attend
workshops and teach. Hassane, my partner and I, are both founding members of
the hackerspace.
How was your experience with Stars
of Science? Do you believe it gave you the necessary push or
motivation to undertake this career track?
My experience with Stars of Science was
life changing. Winning the competition not only gave me the financial means to
move along in this project, but it opened up an opportunity in my life that
otherwise I wouldn’t have pursued. Stars of Science taught me that if you have
an idea the only thing missing is just you going ahead and implementing it.
What advice do you give to people
who are interested in an innovation or entrepreneurial career track?
If you can’t find a job, it is simple:
just create one. However, from my little experience I can say that the
innovation path is not an easy one. Not easy at all. If you decide to be an
“entrepreneur” you have to know that it will be a very long way before you can
afford to have a decent meal and be able to take your girlfriend/boyfriend on a
decent date. But if it works the satisfaction is outstanding. I finally felt this
satisfaction after people started putting their first pre-orders once we
launched last week.
Like I said before, Lebanon is still a
fresh market for innovation. It is highly needed and valued by our society. So
don’t be afraid and start building your ideas, and share your experience! Personally
I made it my goal to get Roadie into market and to gain as much experience
doing so only so that one day I can bring this experience back home and share
it with my community.
When asked for the reason for creating this site, Mustapha
said “blog readers shouldn't waste their time searching for cool new Lebanese
blogs and digging around for new posts. At the same time, bloggers shouldn't
feel pressured to post everyday so that readers visit their blogs. This website
hopes to solve both these problems and create a space for blog readers to visit
every day to find cool posts.”
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