Entries Tagged 'english' ↓

As a café, it’s elegant, but friendly, cosy, yet professional, definitely the place for introductions to take place and partnerships to shape. As a 350 seats auditorium, is definitely the place where ideas get spread and excitement happens.

We’re referring to Benaki Museum of course and, after three Open Coffee events been hosted there, I bet we all agree that the Museum is the best place our event has ever been to, probably the most appropriate in the whole city of Athens.

φωτο απο flickr & χρηστη nektar

Today, we are excited to expand our cooperation with Benaki Museum, and announce the dates for our forthcoming events till June, all of which will be hosted in the exceptional facilities of the Museum.

So, mark your calendar and save the following dates, or plan your next trip to Athens to coincide with an Open Coffee event, to get the vibe of the greek start-up community, plus more. Here you go:

- Tuesday, November 10 2009
- Tuesday, December 22 2009
- Wednesday, January 20 2010
- Tuesday, February 23 2010
- Tuesday, March 16 2010
- Tuesday, April 13 2010
- Tuesday, May 4 2010
- Tuesday, June 8 2010

SocialWhale is a Twitter interface/client which started 8 months ago intending to cover the needs of more advanced users who consider Twitter to be somewhat lacking in features. It initially combined existing services built on top of Twitter into a single service and later tried to evolve into a ‘real-time social media client’. SocialWhale also intends to aggregate the use of five main social networks (while more are to be added later).

It’s important to note that SocialWhale has not gotten any marketing promotion as such - it has become known via world of mouth and the Greek social media and remains still closed as a service - but out of those who have access (~500 people) approximately 10% visit the site every day which may be not so bad for a team of 4 full-time developers, plus some part-time designers.

According to SocialWhale it’s too early to start talking about business plans but they aim to generate profit by offering premium services for social media professionals and in the future an API (which is operational even now albeit without documentation - please contact the team to experiment with it). An investment has already been made, at 60% of the planned development. When 100% of the development is accomplished they will start implementing their monetisation models. In addition to this, a desktop client and an iPhone app are coming up too in the next couple of months.

Invitations may still be available here.

viva is the innovative part of the 45-people strong company Realize. It started back in 2005 with the successful free-internet service enhanced with offering SMS and songs. 801 Phone followed in 2006 which was also a success (used by over 350000 households in Greece) - it was essentially an initial version of a VoIP package. Following these packages the infrastructure used for these 2 services had to be used in something new when they became commodity - enter vivanumbers. The basic offering consists of a Greek unique number that can receive calls via your mobile, your office number and your home or a combination of them as well as handle faxes. It is all configurable online and an account can be started entirely on the web while the number from an existing provider can be carried over too.

The guys behind viva managed to keep a broad target group for their service - essentially addressing the entire internet user base - by practically limiting pricing packages to the phrase “1 euro per month” and as such vivanumbers relies heavily in a micropayments system. According to it, user money is collected in a virtual wallet from a bank transfer, a credit card, paypal or a ‘dropcharge’ phonecall which can then be spent in a number of simple services they offer (fax2mail, VoIP, music, sms, etc). Perhaps the most innovative aspect of their infrastructure is that more of these virtual currency points are offered to users who introduce their friends to the service. It is using this method that they have soft launched their product with blogs, forums, social media and an AdWords campaign. Interestingly, this billing/micropayments functionality will soon be offered to third parties too.

Mindworks started as an advertising company back in 2003 with a few thousand euros of starting capital. In 2005 they decided to focus in search marketing - cutting about 90% of their income which up until then also involved website building, print layout etc. Really early they started blogging and that helped them get known in the market and in essence ‘train’ it and create their niche. At the end of 2006, they managed having a Google-qualified individual among their ranks while in mid-2008 they become a Google qualified company with - among others - a 100K budget in 3 months. Then came the Silver Effie Award in a very difficult to win competition and soon after that ATCom buyed them. Mindworks is currently offering SEO, Paid Search Marketing, Usability Studies and Web Analytics. The lessons they learned can be summarised in the following list:

1. Build a team you can trust
2. Do not underestimate marketing
3. Make friends (e.g. via blogging) - even with competitors
4. Mind the cashflow gap
5. Make the right deal when getting funded - it’s not about the money (e.g. how well you can communicate with the buyers, customer exchange, etc)
6. Work-life balance

(photo by penlix)

Favit is yet another startup which is here to address the problem of information overload. They do this combining a number of techniques but their core idea lies in collecting all news sources the user might need at a single point so that the information comes to the user rather the other way round. That’s why allegedly Favit is superior to other services like Google Reader because it allows integrations of multiple services. They also have some other interesting features such as allowing users to import sources of interest not by adding links but just keywords - in their native language. The interface is not just text based - you can also view news in images. You can also search the news sources you are following and the results appear in reverse chronological order. Hiding, liking and voting capabilities are also available and they feed learning algorithms that improve the user experience further while another central concept is that of groups of people from which you can learn and also push news to.

When it comes to the Bulgarian startup scene where Favit originates from it is still nascent - most investing is in non-IT-related projects - and OpenCoffee-like events are quite rare too. To get started, Favit contacted a 40M Bulgarian fund specialising in IT and got funded to do localisation in order to ensure easy usage by simple humans and not just geeks. Interestingly, they secured that funding with not much more than the idea and at the very early stage it was pushed forward by a single, non-IT person - which is quite unorthodox. What is also intriguing is that the Machine Learning alogorithms are drawn from another company of the fund which also plans to setup a datacentre and generally create a ecosystem of mutually helped companies.

Pragmaticomm was founded in 2005, is now employing 8 people across 4 countries and is operating in the field of Voice over IP which has recently seen huge growth due to the advent of phone applications (iPhone, Android etc). MvoIP is their flagship product and it is already a mature application that offers transparent, telco-independent communication. MvoIP basically offers free calls across the world between MvoIP users and ~10 times cheaper prices when talking to non-MvoIP users (incl. landlines). Compared to the first competitor that comes to mind - Skype - their difference is that they are open-source and use a different technology (they are SIP-based instead of Jabber-based) thus offering another type of product in an attempt to get their share of the market.

Its main features are ease of use, ubuiquitus availability, good integration with the mobile device and has a good quality of services due to its maturity. On the downside, no encryption is implemented (although they are planning to include it soon) and voice continuity when going from wireless to GSM and back is not in place either.

Their business model is another difference with Skype - they are offering B2B services: they are providing a VoIP services bundle to providers who in turn sell it to the end-user. Currently, they have secured a major customer in Vyke which uses their technology while at the same time they are planning to port their application to the iPhone.

Joomlaworks started as a group of freelancers who back in 2006 turned their expertise with Joomla CMS to a startup. It was as ’simple’ as seeing a gap in the market of Joomla extensions and decided to take the plunge and start a company.

Six people are working now in joomlaworks.gr and have created 16 free GPL extensions and 3 commercial ones (available for a life-time fee). They boast 2M+ downloads in 3 years (out of 150M websites running Joomla in total - not a small fraction). They run 7 content websites, 2 community websites and 8 demo websites in order to have a strong presence in the community - and they attribute to that presence their achievement of including 7 of their apps in the Top-100 Joomla directory. This is their company’s core philosophy: make a few excellent apps and release them for free to attract attention and users - which can then be converted to customers who will buy the premium apps. As programmers the philosophy (of the Greek part of their company at least) is to create websites for customers but they also give back to the developers’ community. In other words, they leverage the community for help but also are there to return the favour.

So far they have established a good and steady revenue allowing them to experiment with further business models and create new products. Their main experimental product-to-come is K2 which is currently free and combines the best bits of existing CMS packages like Wordpress. Their other product is TemplateWorks - i.e. creating templates for Joomla initially for free to attract attention and hopefully later for a fee. Also, it’s in their plans to enable the creation of video platforms as well as even more interestingly a web service that will enable Joomla extensions to operate in other CMSs in order to go over the strict Joomla borders.

Following to his presentation at Open Coffee Athens XXV, Martin Linkov of Favit writes about the status of the Bulgarian start-up market, paving the ground to cooperation across our communities.

photo from flickr and user cobalt

Talent

Though the hard times and the constant problems with funding and outdated programs, Bulgarian universities and high schools are still able to lay the grounds for further development of very talented developers, designers, entrepreneurs. It is enough to mention Viktor Antonov - the chief designer of the Sierra Studios to get an idea of the work we can deliver. However, due to the economic situation and the business climate in Bulgaria most of the Bulgarian developers and designers tend to:

a) outsource their work to companies like HP, IBM, Gameloft, C3i, Cisco or those of the hosting industry like Aplus.net (the one I started my IT career from with more than 200 employees in its best days) , Hostway, etc.
b) freelance their skills mainly via GAF and EUfreelance.com, GetaCoder, etc.
c) which is and the best case - outsource their work and perform extraordinary on positions as low as technical support (customer care) and develop some small projects (sites) in their free time, while eventually gain enough clients and stick to b) but freelancing to the local market

Developers and Designers are considered as high paid positions, however due to the different standards between Bulgaria and Greece, their typical monthly wage is even less than the “Genia of the 700 euro”, starting from as low as 500 euro/mo and growing depending of the position and the company to 800 euro, 1000 and very slightly above the 1000 euro mark (in most of the cases).

Funds

NEVEQ - a fund founded in 2005 with 22 mln. euro for investments in tech companies. The fund gradually increased its capital to 32 and is moving close to the 40 now. Some of their projects include Lessno - “Less Money, No Hassle” - a search engine for cheap flights worldwide (initially invested 3 mln in 2007, second round of 1,5 mln in October 2008, 2 more mln in July 2009, now control 100% of the start up, due to problems with the management) and FinAnalytica, a company for estimating and prognosis of financial risk, with a 5 mln. investment in March 2008. The fund currently has 7 companies in its portfolio, including Semantic Search Company OntoText and an innovative Data Center Builder one. Future plans of the fund include investing 5 mln. for four new companies, 2 in Southeastern and 2 in Western Europe.

Other funds with interest to Bulgaria and the region are GED, Global Finance, Balkan Accession Fund, Bancroft, ARX (the new DBG), Mid Europa Partners, as well as the purely tech funds 3TS Cisco and Advent.

Community

The Start Up community in Bulgaria is pretty small and new. However, due to good university policy in that sphere, it gets a lot of support from the Sofia University and the Technical University in Sofia - including rooms to held conferences, speakers.

For the last 3 years the Start Up seminars have been held for about a day and this year we had the first Start Up IT seminar with speakers from the industry, lawyers, business angels, and a few wanna-be investors. The Nova Tech competition is also an important event for the community. The start up community is gathered around the Startup-bg.org website with its subsites of Init Lab - a coding event- and the newly founded Marketing Lab - a marketing experiment lab.

Cooperation

In Bulgaria the Ruby on Rails community is getting a lot of traction and organizing a lot of events for coders, why don’t we bring this to Salonica and make it an Autumn Code Camp for example? Or organize a truly Open Coffee with participants from Bulgaria, in Sofia, Salonica or anywhere in between? In October we will have the first Mozilla Dev Garage too, may it’s a good idea to might held one together. I’d love to participate in such a common gathering, and I’d like to work towards that, please share your feelings, ideas, or get directly in contact if would like to cooperate on such an event.

It is to our great pleasure to share with you and the world that the Netflix Prize is finally over, with Nicholas Ampazis and George Tsagas being the core members of the winning team.

The contest, featuring one of the biggest datasets ever published, opened new frontiers in the areas of Data Mining & Machine Learning and could easily be characterized as’ The Olympiad of Data Mining’. Netflix, the biggest online video rental service in the US, literally crowdsourced the optimization of its recommendation system, giving away -next to the data- a prize of $1M. (You may read more in the NYT or Wired, or you’d better wait for more updated articles to come).

To put this success in context, let me also mention that over the 2 years that the contest was running, more than 40,000 teams from over 160 countries participated. The final winner in a very tight race with consecutive submissions till the very last moment is The Ensemble team, the full member’s list is available here.

Nicholas Ampazis presented a few months ago in Open Coffee Athens XXII his own start-up, Feeds 2.0, and gave a fascinating speech on the Netflix Prize a couple of months ago in the greek Foss Conference, but rest assured that we’ll have him again to speak on this tremendous success in a Open Coffee event in the very near future. :)

update: Netflix will officially announce the winners in a couple of weeks, based on a separate test set to validate the robustness of submissions to overfitting.

update 2: It seems that, Bellkor’s submission was better in the test set, at least this is what a member of the team states at the netflix forum. And we really have no reason to argue against that, it looks like a proper time to congratulate the team. The official announcement is still pending.

Plexscape consists of two applications - the Plex.Earth and Plex.Mark! tools which enable mosaic creation and coordinates transformation for AutoCAD using the Google Earth platform. Basically this startup allows you to identify a plot of land on Google Earth given an AutoCAD file of the area, gather all the required images and create a mosaic. It’s a project aimed at engineers, research programs and environmental scientists with little competition (primarily by AutoCAD itself which also offers an extension with similar but buggy functionality). Plexscape is approximately three months old and is already looking for partners to develop and promote the product. Its main use lies in identifying whether changes in the physical space has been correctly reproduced on the blueprints given that Google images for Greece are relatively recent (2006-2008). The business model is based on a subscription fee and has already resulted in some customers.

skroutzstore - an offshoot of skroutz - offers the tools to quickly create an online store: there’s a 1′ signup and within 10′ you can be receiving product requests. Their niche market is about aiming for Greek e-shops and making the store creation simple and without many options to decide on (although it is customisable to some extent). Payments are handled via credit card and all bank and courier related processes are streamlined by the store to alleviate the user. All issues that such a stand-alone site has to face are compressed in one fee. As such site creation and hosting costs, certification, maintenance, updates to the platform (as well as some price reductions in skroutz.gr) are all offered to the user for a range of flat fees (in contrast to a percent of exchange which introduces maintenance overheads). They soon plan to introduce an API to allow users to export and most importantly import products massively using an Excel or CSV form - and even to connect the platform with an ERP (which sounds like an all-around neat idea).

Rate Solutions is an Estonian company with  a social network which is localised in every country it’s implemented on with wraia.gr being our local version. The concept involves having a centralised platform (ensuring all countries run the same social network basically) while the databases are local (to ensure responses’ speed) and the interface localised of course. Half the Estonian population uses the service in Estonia while half the site was sold in the largest telecom in Estonia. Rate Solutions are behind the top social networks in many European and Asian countries. In Greece they have achieved 325K average daily page views and 30K users. The main target group is ages between 16 and 27 and the mentality is more centred in user profiles rather than the social aspect and friends. Their revenue model is 30% advertising and 70% micropayments (in exchange for virtual gifts, a rating system, customised backgrounds etc) which are done via credit card and SMS which results in a revenue of 4$/user/year on average. The global empire is maintained by just 8 programmers, 2 designers, 5 expansion people and 20-30 country managers. παλιοίφίλοι.gr is also launching in Greece in August (and they are looking for partner).

feeds2.0 is one of the very early Web 2.0 startups - having started at 2006. It’s a Google Reader look-alike but before Google Reader came about (only bloglines was around then). Feeds2.0 has some cool features that actually work such as learning from user behaviour, auto-tagging of articles and grouping of articles by subject among others. Their business model is based on advertising including personalised ads, delivery of RSS in the entreprise and delivery of RSS to the mobile. Having started at 2004, development took place throughout 2005 and it was presented at Innovate!Europe (the European version of DEMO) at 2006. That resulted in lots of promotion and additionally their business plan was awarded at the 8th VC Forum in Athens. Despite the promotion, the good business model and the working idea, still Feeds2.0 managed to generate no income. The reasons are that apparently Greek VCs like to give awards but not capital; no VC contacted feeds2.0 after the 8th VC Forum. Also, European and US VCs give no money abroad - for example, Saul Klein asked them to relocate to the UK in order to move from running ‘a project’ to creating a business. Other reasons also were important such as that too many resources were spent on traveling for promotion and negotiating deals that never happened. Currently feeds2.0 is trying to take the technology and apply it to another platform: the blogosphere for sentiment analysis, in a corporate environment, in music suggestions in your mobile etc.

odesk is well-known as one of the top employment services for online collaboration for employers and employees. Its innovation lies in that it allows sending snapshots of the employees desktop to the employer at random intervals so that the work progress can be monitored. That allows for charging by the hour and guaranteeing that a worker gets paid - advantages not existing in the competition at least when the company appeared. odesk launched in 2003 and in 2008 grossed 30M (3M profit), while in 2009 it is looking to double it. Although initially it took them 4 months to develop a working prototype 5 months later they had just 2 customers and that was it. The break came when a simple Google AdWords campaign attracted many small enterprises as customers to odesk. Although that indicated a revenue stream, funding was still sorely needed. After many failed attempts, a VC showed their idea to a staffing entrepreneur - who liked it and the VC decided to invest. Currently, they have 200K registered users (and that so far has landed them to be 2nd in terms of market share.) who have formed an open and transparent marketplace so that free-market forces can take over with odesk limiting its mediation and instead becoming just the enabler of the platform. America, India, Russia and Ukraine are top for workforce while in Greece they have very few members as employees and no employers. Their business model is based on claiming 10% of wages between contractors and by basically avoiding any other interference with them.