TRACKING EMOTIONS
H
elsinki in November is a dark, cold, dreary place, but the temperature is definitely rising inside the Helsinki Exhibition & Convention Centre. Hopeful startup founders are sweating it out, feverishly pitching their business ideas to investors. For Camilla Tuominen, CEO of Emotion Tracker, Slush is all about mingling – you never know who might end up spreading the word to about your business. Tuominen and her team have created a mobile app called Emotion Tracker that helps you identify, track and analyse your emotions. Before taking the leap she worked at Accenture. Today at Slush, she has experienced a whole gamut of emotions from raw fear to pure elation. “Another startup entrepreneur asked me whether I’m mind-numbingly scared. I’m trying to remind myself that everyone here, including the investors, are ordinary people with human emotions,” she says.
Her company has already won the hearts of six angel investors. Recent funding has enabled the company to employ two people. But there’s still a long way to go before Tuominen’s grand vision becomes a reality: people and organisations feeling and performing better thanks to a deepened awareness of emotions. At times, developing the software is painfully slow. Tuominen is surrounded by a flurry of media attention on her first day at Slush. Around 9 pm, she is interviewed live by a national current affairs television programme side by side with Slush CEO Miki Kuusi. The second day brings an emotional hangover. “I feel like a nobody today. I’m comparing myself to others who look so dazzling on stage,” says Tuominen. Some startups follow a strict linear plan at Slush, but Tuominen prefers to stay true to her own bubbly, spontaneous ways. At the beginning of an investor meet-
ing, she offered her listeners a choice: she could either give her presentation in the average ‘10-point font’ consultant style familiar from her previous life at Accenture, or she could rock the stage with all she has. And rock it she did. At the end of Slush, Tuominen comes up with a great new idea. At next year’s Slush, she plans to have the app available to all participants. Their tracked emotions could be anonymously projected onto a big screen in real time. “We could see the whole wide spectrum of their emotions. This event isn’t all about euphoria,” she says. → HOW IS EMOTION TRACKER DOING IN NOVEMBER 2015? A renewed version of the app is being tested, with plans to develop emotion tracking for new tech platforms such as watches. The team is also launching emotion-related training for companies. Tuominen’s book on emotions, which she has illustrated, will be published in April.