© Albert Armengol
Víctor Bautista, creator of the Social Diabetes application

Two and a half years ago, Víctor Bautista was diagnosed with diabetes mellitus. His life changed completely as of that moment: Bautista suddenly became dependent on insulin, a substance his body could not create, and the absence of which prevented it from regulating his blood-sugar level.

His days now revolved around what he ate, when he ate and the periods when he did not eat. Like so many other diabetics, he had to self-inject insulin at regular intervals and also count the carbohydrate intake of each kind of food, which eventually led him to eat monotonously in order to avoid over-complicated calculations.

However, far from becoming demoralised, Víctor leveraged his professional experience in IT to improve his quality of life and that of other diabetics around the world. He decided to create an app for the Android mobile operating system that could calculate the calories per gram of each type of food he was going to eat, and he named it “Social Diabetes”.

This would give him a clear idea of the carbohydrates he would eat at a restaurant with a given meal, thus enabling him to adapt his insulin dose depending on his meal. This initial function of Social Diabetes significantly increased his freedom to enjoy meals out with his wife or friends, but it was not the only advantage. The application can also set up a warning system to remind the user about injection times and the amount of carbohydrates consumed throughout the course of the day.

This latter function is very important because it prevents nocturnal hypoglycaemia, a highly dangerous condition caused by going to bed with low blood-sugar levels. If a diabetic goes to bed without a sufficient sugar intake, Social Diabetes puts out a warning and advises the user on what type of food to eat before going to bed.

Once the app was created, Víctor partnered up with a former university colleague to launch it commercially. They developed an app for purchase as well as a free, simpler version for mobiles and tablets. Since its release it has been downloaded more than 11,000 times and has been translated into 8 languages, but what is most interesting is that, according to Bautista’s calculations, the use of Social Diabetes could save the government up to 1,500 euros per patient in hospital expenses, ambulances, etc. In 2012, UNESCO gave them the WSA Mobile Content award for the best health application, which they picked up in Abu Dhabi in January.

© Albert Armengol
Francesc Sistach, co-founder of Appically, a company specialising in applications for people with special needs.

As far as Francesc Sistach is concerned, youth is a question of attitude rather than age. Already well into his forties, this IT engineer decided to go against the grain by founding his own start-up company with the initial capital put up by his family and some friends. Perhaps it is Francesc’s seven-year-old daughter, Sara, who keeps him young at heart. She suffers severe autism, which was detected in the first few months of her life. Although she does not speak and is totally withdrawn, Sara serves as a daily inspiration to Francesc to be a better father and challenge her disease.

It could be said that the most important moment in this fight came three years ago, when Francesc bought an iPad. There was nothing deliberate about it, but the fact is that the tablet became a ray of light at the end of a dark tunnel. Francesc was stunned on seeing how Sara picked up the iPad and began to interact with it much more naturally than she had ever done with any person or object.

He started to look for information on the interaction of autistic children and other people with special needs with technological devices. He uploaded all the information he found to the www.iAutism.info site, which eventually became a reference website on the topic and received mentions in The New York Times and on CNN.

Many therapeutic apps for mobiles and tablets had already been developed in view of the spectacular reaction of autistic people to tactile screens. Even so, Francesc could not find any app that focused on recreation or leisure, i.e. one which allowed the autistic person not only to learn, but also to play and enjoy themselves, and even do so in a way that was integrated in the family environment.

He thus decided to create Happy Geese, a variation on the Game of the Goose for the iPad, which can be simplified to suit each person’s profile and increases in complexity as the autistic person gradually progresses. For example, the dice are not labelled with numbers but rather with colours, and the same goes for the squares that allow the player to “jump from goose to goose”.

The game has a freemium business model; it is a basic free app plus with different add-ons available for purchase in the Apple Store. The company behind Happy Geese is called Appically and was founded by Francesc and his partner, thanks to private investments to the value of 50,000 euros. After the success of Happy Geese, with 65,000 downloads in 130 countries, they intend to test more apps for people with special needs.

Marc Cercós, a young enterpreneur who has already built up considerable experience in the IT field, and is the co-creator of eyeOS and developer of Archy.

With almost a decade of business adventures behind him, twenty-five-year-old Marc Cercós is an experienced entrepreneur. Alongside Pau Garcia-Milà, he was the whizz-kid of Catalan IT thanks to eyeOS, the desktop that is installed on a server and which can then be operated from any computer. He created it at the tender age of eighteen, when nobody had even heard of cloud computing.

The eyeOS experience was not only successful in business; it also conquered the social sphere. Garcia-Milà’s youth and media pull earned them a spot at conferences and symposia and also on the main mass media television programmes, which touted them as proof that Spain had plenty of up-and-coming talent for the future. His clients included Telefònica and IBM.

Marc left Pau in command so that he could focus more on technical development. This distribution of roles worked well for them, albeit the situation was sometimes tense. The whole media circus that had been whipped up around eyeOS was not Marc’s forte, and when the company had to adopt a stronger business angle and begin to focus on corporate clients to the detriment of household users, Marc realised that his future lay elsewhere. He saw eyeOS as a contribution to everyday people; it had served them in the past and could now do the same for others.

Marc spoke to Pau and sold him his part of the business. All of a sudden he was a twenty-something with a lot of money and no specific project. His first idea was to go California and enrol in the Computer Engineering programme at Stanford, the university where Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, had studied. However, he soon realised that with his experience, going to university might be a step back and he decided to take some time off to think.

During this period he made two decisions: firstly, to re­locate to San Francisco to be close to Silicon Valley; secondly, to launch Archy, an application for Apple computers that uses the Google Drive platform as a file sharing system and virtual hard drive. Archy allows users to perform tasks such as uploading files to a server or sending documents between people, without the need for email.

The system caught Google’s attention and they invited Marc to present it to the entire company at Google I/O 2013, the most recent edition of its worldwide congress for de­velopers, held last May.