"Promotion of an High Tech Cluster: a new technological model for Algarve towards the creation of new wealth"

Lisboa
Portugal

Pedro Marín

Pedro Marín holds a 5 years degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Telecommunications and Electronics branch, by what could be thought as the Portuguese version of MIT, the IST or Technical University of Lisbon (2003). His final graduation project was done at the University of Aalborg in Denmark, focusing in advanced MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) scheduling techniques. Back to Lisbon, he pursued a master degree in MIMO applied to existing wireless technologies such as GPRS, HYPERLAN/2 and UMTS (2005). His professional experience includes a one year internship in the Security Technology Group in Cisco's HQ, San Jose, California in 2006, followed by a six months period in the leading Portuguese IT company, Novabase, and a 10 months training on several Cisco technologies in Cisco's European HQ, Amsterdam, Netherlands in 2007. He has been working as a pre-sales systems engineer with focus in IP networks security in Cisco's Portuguese office ever since. Check out our blog to read about what Pedro is going to talk at TEDxEdges.

Ricardo Sousa

Ricardo Sousa is a 17-year-old entrepreneur, award-winner webdeveloper and blogger plus actually an high school senior in "Sciences and Technologies". He's also the organizer and host of SWITCH conference in Coimbra in May 2010. Ricardo has been enrolling in school projects acting as the Editor In-Chief for the school's own publication "Jornal Rascunhos" and as the president of the students union. He also joined the project "Parlamento dos Jovens" last year where he got the final named as the spokesman for the Viseu's district. He started his early entrepreneurship journey when he was 14 years old, with a project called Textos & Companhia that aimed to let portuguese unknown authors have a place where they could easily both publish their texts and get in touch with other authors in the same situation. The project rapidly started getting media attention as well as praised by the Portuguese Ministry for Culture. Ricardo has also a great experience working with CMS's such as Joomla . With websites developed in those platforms Ricardo got hired by TemplatePlazza as their youngest support team member, and then, one year later, for NinjaForge, the leader in Joomla development. Since then, he has been responsible for a number of webdevelopment projects. For those Ricardo got awarded by such companies as Sapo and Microsoft, recognizing the technical accomplishments they represented and featured in the well known SmashingMagazine and TheNextWeb. Long time advocate that school should be complemented with extra activities and that there should be a education towards creativity and entrepreneurship, Ricardo has been blogging on the subject.