minutes | opencoffee.gr

Open Coffee Athens XXI – Open Thread

April 8, 2009 8 Comments

Εδώ μπορείτε να καταθέσετε τα σχόλια και τις εντυπώσεις σας από το εικοστό πρώτο επεισόδιο του αθηναϊκού Open Coffee, το οποίο και ολοκληρώθηκε πριν από λίγο.

meetings, minutes

1st iPhone Developer Garage Athens, the aftermath

March 13, 2009 2 Comments

a guest post by Bill Rappos, co-founder of Great Apps

Its been a week from our Dev Garage and I finally got around to writing up a proper summation to what I believe turned out an awesome event. The turnout was huge for our estimations; at some point there were about 45 people inside K44. Even more impressive was the fact that most were on time, there to judge us while we were trying to resolve all the miscommunication errors…

Some coffees from the corner cafe(-neio) later, we were comfortably sited in a large circle, talking about the iPhone, iSteam, marketing, the Internet and everything related. Then came the introductions. Marketeers and Developers were divided about equally, with about 10 macs (1 air thin) gathered and distributed among the tables.

After a necessary break while setting up the projector, Kostas started giving out basic tips on Obj-C. How to fire up the developers’ environment and make your first Dev steps based on sample apps available by Apple. A Metronome App, for example, is a very good start for an app that incorporates animations with sounds. On that note, an awesome resource, that someone contributed, for making your first (and not only) iPhone app is the Stanford CS193P Module notes. To follow the notes you do need a Mac, an iPhone however is not required since you can do most of the work in the simulator provided.

Once most questions were out of the way, came the hour of idea sharing. Essentially, an attendee with an idea would speak up and those interested in doing an app around that, would form a team and start developing. A good concept, but most hesitated trusting 40 potential competitors.. Gradually the fear went away and some good ideas were thrown around. Distinct teams were formed in the corners of K44 and programming needs emerged. Kostas hovered from one table to another, offering his experience as other Obj-C programmers were almost obsolete when the event started. Hopefully some more picked it up after… :)

Although, time wasn’t enough to reach an end product, first steps were made in developing; I think the people that were truly interested when they arrived at Gkazi last week, now are somewhere with a mac building their test apps.

More importantly, people with an interest in the iPhone and the AppStore Market gathered in the same place for the first time and actually talked! They shared opinions and ideas. It was an amazing feeling for us, just being there among everything. Thank you all for coming, thank you Open Coffee for sponsoring and promoting.

larisa, minutes

Open Coffee Larisa I – follow up

March 9, 2009 2 Comments

guest post από τους Μανώλη Αβαγιάννη και Δημήτρη Ψαρόπουλο

Χθες πραγματοποιήθηκε το πρώτο Open Coffee στην Λάρισα! Η συμμετοχή για την Λάρισα ήταν αρκετά καλή και αυτή ακριβώς που περιμέναμε! Έντεκα άτομα, αλλά έντεκα άτομα από διαφορετικό χώρο ο καθένας και ιδιότητα! Το απόγευμα κύλησε σε ένα πολύ χαλαρό και παρεΐστικο, θα λέγαμε, καφεδάκι όπως θα πρέπει να είναι ένα Open Coffee!

Ο Δήμτσας Βασίλειος παρουσίασε το e-shop που έχει δημιουργήσει για την εταιρεία του, μια καλή και πρωτοποριακή κίνηση για της πόλη της Λάρισας! Έπειτα ακολούθησαν αρκετές ιδέες και σχόλια άπ’ όλους πάνω στην παρουσίαση.

Αργότερα, και μέχρι τις 21:30, έγινε χαλαρή συζήτηση γύρω από διάφορα θέματα και ιδέες και γενικά υπήρχε ένα κλίμα κοινότητας που άρεσε σε όλους.

Ελπίζουμε στην επόμενη συνάντηση μας να υπάρχει ακόμα μεγαλύτερη προσέλευση! Το συμπέρασμα είναι ένα: Το Open Coffee στην Λάρισα είναι πλέον γεγονός!

Παρακάτω ακολουθούν videos από στιγμιότυπα της βραδυάς καθώς και η παρουσίαση, ενώ φωτογραφίες μπορείτε να βρείτε εδώ.

Ευχαριστούμε όλους όσους παρευρέθηκαν και στήριξαν αυτή την προσπάθεια!

english, minutes

OpenCoffee Athens XIX – the minutes

February 8, 2009 3 Comments

Last Tuesday the 19th iteration of OpenCoffee took place in yet another venue – we believe we are converging to our natural habitat though. Lots of networking between familiar and new faces and in between our select speakers.

megaventory.com is an online service which handles inventory. It’s “a web tool where anyone being a business or an individual can manage and control the availability of an entity being a product or a service and make this information available to others” – gotta love the concise mission statement. The idea is a side project of the previous company the founder, Kostis Mamassis, was a member of: there, they wanted to keep track and minimise their stock in order to cut costs. Megaventory is basically a platform that can handle multiple users and storage points set to capitalise on the notion that inventory keeping is supposedly the next big thing in web and the fact that an inventory can take many shapes and appear in many markets – from your fridge stock to the availability of hotel services.

In the initial stages input in megaventory.com was done using the mothership company’s customers and was manual (if it did happen at all) and the initial feedback very negative. But they pressed on – they being a freelance vb.net/sql server developer plus the founder for all the rest. And so far they have 50 paid visits (coming from AdWords) plus 50 non-paid per day. All their ‘customers’ are in their free version with premium and unlimited paid versions available in which the number of items, users and inventory points increases.

They aim for the approx. 8M customers in the USA, EU and CAN market where the hard-to-believe competition is a single other startup. That does not include of course large packages and companies offering offline elaborate solutions (we’re talking simplified versions of ERP and CRM here basically). megaventory.com aims for the small customers and companies – e.g. one-man companies and startups will find it useful as they can’t afford technically and cost-wise current ERP solutions.

Ioannis Methodios, the VP of KEMEL (Greek Volunteer Managers) started off his speech with a short bio covering his early days as a consultant. ΚΕΜΕL is an organisation with former CEOs of major Greek companies as members who are interested in giving back some of their wisdom and experience to the entrepreneurial community. In particular, they are offering free business, marketing, legal, banking consulting as possible aids for any startup- so if any OpenCoffee people are hesitant about taking the step they now have one more way of coping and asking for help. KEMEL is considering offering their time in the shape of support via telephone, email or even workshops. It’s a 100% free effort and will quite possibly provide a means to access the network of professionals in KEMEL’s disposal. So, if anyone is interested for more information either stay tuned for more information, contact us to bring you in touch or – why not? – contact them straight away.

Sun, our sponsors for the night came on next with their important announcement: Sun Startup Essentials is launching in Greece! This means Sun is offering a wide range of services and products free or at a very reduced price for small companies – read startups in our case. It’s really fortunate – and we’re really interested to see what will come out of the move – for the large players in the market to do their bit to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship. So what does Sun offer? The list is long: Sun hardware and software (for Solaris, Linux, Windows), free tools, community support, free help with technical support – a full portfolio of services, software and platforms. The offered servers are starting at 750$ and there’s 70% off at storage, while hosting goes at 40$/month. The only requirements to be eligible is to have a company (a verified online presence and a legal entity) that has been around for less than 6 years and has a maximum of 150 employees – that probably covers most of the OpenCoffee community. Sun claims it’s a 5-minute process to sign up and 2-5 working days for them to clear the application formalities – you will then be one of the 6000 ventures that have already joined the scheme worldwide. Sun closed off by also announcing the opensource conference they organise for the 11th March.

Speaking of events we were happy to have Konstantina Zoehrer with us who announced the much-awaited second iteration of Mediacamp: it’s coming up 14-15 march!

Also, one of the most important figures in the internet, Tim Berners-Lee will be coming to Greece for the 3-day academic Webscience conference at Foundation of the Hellenic World (FHW) which will cover various internet-related subjects adopting the usual method of presentations, papers and posters. OpenCoffee people can take the option of registering for the Tim Berners-Lee talk at 25 euros.

The story of emarket.gr (formerly fleamarket.gr) is an interesting one as it goes back to 2000 when it was founded and it’s about the best localised e-bay option Greece has. It’s showing a rapid growth as Greeks after all start to feel more confident with online purchases – it reached an impressive 130K+ members and an impressive equal amount of unique visits. They employ 11 staff and handle 5-7K transactions a month resulting from 3.5M pageviews/month and an average time spent on the site of 15minutes. Their business model is currently based on the free submissions it receives and on the 2% commission it receives from sales of 100 euros/month gross. In addition to this revenue stream they have affiliations with eshop.gr, banks and other entities while of course they also display ad banners. Given that everything was free up to 2006 and some revenue streams are still only now coming online, emarket.gr’s course is indicative of the uphill struggle Greek startups had to give to succeed – perhaps it’s easier nowadays though. It’s also important to note that the website was developed on own funds during the first 5 rough years when the internet penetration was small and the potential customers few – while at the same time 2 offers for acquisition were turned down. Their goals for 2009 is to expand their market, visitors and members while continuing to offer excellent customer service (2 1/2 full-time people are currently on it). Prospects to cooperate with ebay or expand in other nearby markets are probably slim due to their current small-ish size.

Contrary to emarket.gr, iSteam is the iPhone app that reached 1M people in one week in the App Store and has become the first app in 40 countries at some point. When they turned their free app to a paid one, Kostas Eleftheriou, Vasilis Samolis and Vasilis Rappos (24, 22 and 22 respectively) grossed 60K sales – not bad for something that had only started in October 2008. As the App Store is already overwhelmed by good things and basically games – developed even by large companies, it’s hard to get awareness for an app, so they wanted something viral. iSteam was the result of two weeks of brainstorming and 150 rejected ideas: they had to minimise the required workhours and maximise the viral effect – and of course to get by the Apple screening. It had to be simple, require one hand to be used and to be possible to play with non-continuously. Once conceived it took them 7 days to make and as soon as it was out the competition was quickly an issue so they they decided to go free to fight it. 600K downloads later they went paid for 1$ – and went to no 27 in the world-wide list of paid apps. That meant 50K revenue in less than a month for 3 people – not bad for a project that requires no infrastructure (Apple handles it), no previous experience with that technology and “just” lots of work after submitting the app to keep the it popular and mentioned in the various points of interest online. The iSteam team plan to start developing other ideas and iPhone apps by keeping it small and simple – we wish them all the best although something tells me that as the market matures it’ll be much harder to gain visibility among the many apps that will be submitted.

That’s all for now – see you all next month…

conferences, τεχνολογία, internet, επιχειρείν, meetings, minutes, publicity

DLD conference 2009

January 29, 2009 1 Comment

Είχα την τύχη να παρεβρεθώ στο DLD (Digital Life Design) conference που έγινε 25-27 Ιανουαρίου στο Μόναχο. Το DLD είναι μία από τις μεγαλύτερες συναντήσεις ανθρώπων από το web και όχι μόνο και οργανώνεται από τον Γερμανό εκδότη Hubert Burda και τον Yossi Vardi. Συνάντησα αρκετές γνωστές προσωπικότητες του web 2.0 όπως τους Chad Hurley (YouTube), Samir Arora (Glam Media), Mitchell Baker (Mozilla Foundation), Peter Hirshberg (Technorati.com), Andrew Paulson (co-founder, SUP / Livejournal), Lukasz Gadowski (Spreadshirt.com), Max Levchin (Slide.com), Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software), Marissa Mayer (Google.com), Xavier Court (Vente-privee.com), Julia Allison (nonsociety.com), Loic Le Meur (seesmic.com), Joi Ito (Creative Commons) και το γνωστό σε όλους ιδρυτή του Facebook Mark Zuckerberg ο οποίος ήρθε εκτός προγράμματος ως έκπληξη του συνεδρίου.

Εκτός από τις web προσωπικότητες στο συνέδρειο μίλησαν και αρκετοί CEO μεγάλων εταιριών που με εξαίρεση τον Brad Anderson από το Best Buy δεν είχαν ιδιαίτερο ενδιαφέρον. Η πιο διασκεδαστική στιγμή του συνεδρίου ήταν το party που έγινε τη δεύτερη μέρα καθώς ήρθαν διάφορα γερμανικά celebrities τα οποία δυστυχώς δεν γνώριζα:):) μιας και το party ήταν ένα mix του DLD μαζί με ανθρώπους από περιοδικά που εκδίδει ο Hubert Burda.

Για περισσότερα σχετικά με το συνέδριο μπορείτε να διαβάσετε το σχετικό post στο blog μου και προτείνω να επισκευτείτε και το http://www.dld-conference.com καθώς οι ομιλίες βρίσκονται εκεί σε βίντεο και είναι πολύ ενδιαφέρουσες!

english, minutes, start-up, VC

Open Coffee Athens XVIII – the minutes

January 13, 2009 24 Comments

Although somewhat outdated here’s a brief run-down of the startups that presented in Open Coffee Athens XVIII. Be sure to check out doxaras‘ view too and the conversation that follows.

Presencespace was presented by Giannis Georgiads and is a startup providing an online, ‘nearline’ (that’s almost online) and offline customer support platform to businesses. Their service is open source and open standards and features among other things secure encrypted chat, multiple chats per operator, canned responses and geolocation capabilities. Pretty standard but important stuff. Integration with a website at the moment takes place manually or with certain plugins – but from what I could gather the process is straightforward. So far its main customers are mainly e-shops, hotels and tech support sites usually with 1-3 people working the application. Current licenses go for 5 euros per operator per month and presencespace already has about 50 clients – which amounts to a nice monthly income but not much more – for now. Needless to say, all customers are from abroad.

lostinmarket is an idea that grew gradually and eventually became a company for Dimitris Kourouvakalis and Fotis Zantzas. It’s a comparison of four types of products from the Greek market: banking, mobile, broadband and automobile. They aim to save their broad audience time, money and provide reliable information. Their customers are basically all the possible consumers that want to research the market before they buy. That’s an advantage in terms of the sheer numbers they can reach but also a disadvantage since it is hard to categorise customers into target groups. Still, they aim to make the experience personal (personalised like Amazon perhaps?) and create a platform for user-generated content (the comments and ranking Web 2.0 startups tend to offer).

The next stages of expansion of lostinmarket.gr will include insurance and travel-related projects – probably a good idea to avoid putting all the proverbial eggs in one basket. And although a comparison marketplace for insurance products will be both helpful and original, the market of travel is quite saturated (albeit by mediocre attempts generally speaking). And as for the fun bit of where the money will come from… it’s a 3-tier process. The idea is that the firms offering the products will pay lostinmarket.gr in order to have access a. to the traffic of people ready to buy (which I suppose has a premium compared to regular traffic) b. data mining results from the browsing habits of lostinmarket.gr visitors (probably the most important asset if used well) and c. the ubiquitous ads. It’s also interesting to note that the information on their website is updated both manually and automatically every week – which as was accurately pointed out in the Q&A that process may not scale when the products compared increase. Not so accurate however was the argument that ‘if companies will be paying a website to display their information won’t that make that website not independent and as such unreliable?’ Fortunately for lostinmarket.gr that has been answered – by none other than Google. Without reliability and transparency they will lose all customers rapidly and go out of business – and the internet market/culture identifies such ‘cheating’ startups very fast. On the other hand, the audience rewards honesty – so that won’t be a problem for lostinmarket.gr. Getting to a critical mass (both of products to compare, visitors and business they strike deals with) in the Greek market might be more of an issue though.

Aristos Doxiadis from Notos Associates was a much expected talk that started by outlining the VC situation in Greece – which is mostly what abroad is called private equity (and translates in virtually no seed financing). Before 1999 only a few tech investments were made from Commercial Capital where AD was working (and I guess that’s understable given the dark ages Greece was at tech-wise then). In Notos Associates (2000-2009), around 500 projects have been reviewed and only 15 were invested in – out of which only 1 a startup – which serves only to confirm what we already know. The reasons why ‘VCs’ in Greece don’t invest in early stage is that there needs to be a lot of decent companies to choose from so that at least one will succeed to pay off the rest who fail. And apparently the VC mentality is that Greek startups are inadequate both in numbers and quality. Furthermore, Greek projects are usually focused on the Greek market and as such unlikely to go huge – and have considerable earnings – as the domestic market is rather small. According to AD most Greek startups copy foreign models and the teams are just not good enough to provide a minimum of confidence to the investor. And of course, having an exit strategy is very hard in Greece as there are a few if any options for an investment that has underperformed to be sold to another funding body or to somehow return its money.

Another subject AD touched upon was the common mistakes startuppers make. Anyone who’s watched the community abroad and watched his Google Reader unread items soar to the hundreds, will have stumbled upon similar blog posts and won’t be surprised by the wisdom AD shared. So just to repeat, a great idea is unimportant the execution is what matters, it’s not about the founder’s brilliance, it’s about the team’s completeness and chemistry and finally it’s not about the wonderful, potentially hot-selling product but the actual users or customers the company has. Pretty obvious stuff (although remembering them when starting up is another matter of course). By the way, that’s another advantage web startups have – apart from the relatively low threshold of entry: information is so abundant that you don’t necessarily need a mentor – although personal contact with one is obviously not the same as reading a blog.

AD also pointed out that in order to have a decent chance before knocking at a VC’s door you basically need to already have immediate profits, a good hold on users (whether its 100.000 or one good license) and a comparative advantage – otherwise, just bootstrap it. This perhaps illustrates what some other people on our side of the funding fence have said: if a startup has reached these milestones then no VC money is needed. Personally, I’d say that no seed money is needed once there. To get there though you do need seed capital (a few tens of thousands) and once there you need expansion capital (a few hundred thousand euros) – spread over a period of years of course. And we should not forget AD’s offer to start a workshop – a great chance for startups to rack his and other experienced professionals’ brains. Sign up here!

Following A. Doxiadis’ talk Tasos Flambouras VP of the Darkfall MMORPG spoke about another much expected arrival – if we are to judge by the huge inflow of traffic from the game’s forum. So, this is for you too people. Darkfall is where all heads are turned towards especially now that big names like Warhammer Online and Age of Conan have launched:a 30-programmers’ project 6 years in the making born from a collaboration with a Norwegian company with Germany based servers that even managed to invert some of the brain drain and return Greek professionals back home in order to create a game that started from the premise of fulfilling users’ needs, working backwards and offering what existing games didn’t. So far about 300,000 people have been beta-testing it and 10.000 simultaneous users can play over each one of the hundreds of servers.

Darkfall has secured collaboration for publishing in Europe with audiovisual.gr (I’m very curious to see how well that company will do their job on the scale that’s anticipated). The price to play will be along the usual lines (10-11 euros/month) and Darkfall will be available in 22/01 both in Europe and the US. It’s important to mention that they’re not going head to head against giants like World of Warcraft – instead their niche seems to be players that appreciate non-linearity and freedom of actions (for example that could mean WoW users that want to be able to do their thing and are constrained by that game’s mechanics). Darkfall was very lucky to not only be able to find sponsors when they were beginning but also to be able to pick and choose who would fund them. Due to its size (and age) comparisons with current Greek startups are difficult but nonetheless a company we hope becomes a showcase for what Greek talent can achieve.

Speaking of which, Fanis Rigas of kariera.gr was our last speaker to describe how a small site which began in 1997 with 0 funds was 10 years later bought from careerbuilder.com for an undisclosed sum – but we can imagine many digits in it. kariera.gr was funded by an incubator-like body named iven in 2003 which was subsequently shut down due to lack of deal flow (!) and following that kariera.gr was bought by careerbuilder in 2007. Before the 2003 funding all their revenue came from a single customer. There are 48 people working in it in Greece and a few people abroad while they make a good 4 million euros in turnover.

So what were Rigas’ lessons from this experience? Firstly, failure is considered an evil thing in Greece and something that you should avoid by all means. This is literally hardwired in our mentality – but also in our laws which allegedly do not allow us to start again if we go bankrupt. Secondly, for a startup to succeed it needs to have a clear mission statement that can identify it among its competition and guide it along the way. It’s also very important to be very clear about how you will make money (what are you selling, to whom and why they will buy it). I guess that’s a no-brainer – what’s really hard to achieve is to honestly convince yourself (the funders will be easy then) with real data and case studies that the revenue model you have in mind actually works. Once there, get together the best team you can and create the accompanying culture to keep them in your company. And of course, since the road is long and you don’t know when success will drop by (or what it will look like) you need to commit to the end if you believe in your idea.

A couple more interesting tidbits were that FR actually hopes that more players appear in the jobs market – so that it can actually broaden up and generate more revenue for everyone but also what a huge lesson it was to see how things are done right by careerbuilder who acquired them. Being able to realise and also to admit these is I guess one of the characteristics you don’t see that often – and which may make the difference between success and failure.

(all images kind courtesy of johnkarak)

Update: a few of the participants follow…

Salvator Levis, partner 7L Capital Partners, www.7lcp.com, “Great event. Congratulations.”
Nikos Patsiogiannis
Constantine Dokolas, http://cdokolas.blogspot.com/, twitter: cdokolas
John Karakatsanis, founder of xblog.gr, http://www.xblog.gr, twitter:johnkarak, “Το Open Coffee χρειάζεται μεγαλύτερο χώρο :-)”
Grigoris Skoularikis, admin of RunningNews.gr, http://www.runningnews.gr/
Chrtistos Papadimitriou, www.meenix.eu business development, http://www.sogo.gr, twitter:sogoster, “ligo megalitero meros please”
Dr.-Ing. George Vardangalos, http://gvard.wordpress.com,,”Kali prospatheia,alla o xwros mikros.Ksexaste trapeziki xrimatodotisi gia start-ups.Ouk an laveis para tou mh exontos…”
Charalampos Konstantinidis, Foracamp.gr Webmaster”, http://foracamp.gr,charalampos
George Anagnostopoulos, General Manager of Amaze SA, http://www.amaze.gr/
Yiannis Doxaras, CTO OSIS Ltd., http://fluxqubit.wordpress.com, twitter:doxaras, “longer Q&A sessions next time”
Jon Vlachoyiannis, co-founder of KarmaEffect.org”, www.karmaeffect.org, twitter:jonromero, “όσο πάει γίνεται και καλύτερο! Well done!”
Katerina Karagianni, Co-founder of Days4u.gr”,www.days4u.gr, twitter:Days4
George Symeonidis, http://www.linkwise.gr, http://twitter.com/linkwise
George Sotiropoulos, Head of Affiliate and co-founder of Linkwise, www.linkwise.gr, twitter:linkwise
Alex Christodoulou, founder of izzyrace.com, www.izzyrace.com
Theologos Kelesoglou, Technology Consultant
Christos Stathis, http://www.chstath.com, twitter:chstath
Yannis P. Triantafyllou, marketing & business development consultant”, toatomo.blogspot.com & toatomoconsulting.blogspot.com
Antigoni Lymperopoulou, www.taneo.gr
Haris Aslanidis, www.opadoi.gr,Redman,”Wraia htan k x8es! Axize h broxa! Eyxaristw gia thn boi8eia sas!”
Lefteris Heretakis, Heretakis & Associates, http://blog.heretakis.com/, twitter: heretakis
Paris Apostolopoulos, javapapo.blogspot.com,javapapo, “: )”
Haris Spinthakis, www.jadehellas.eu, twitter:haridimos,”OC’s back! Η χθεσινή ήταν επιστροφή στις καλές συναντήσεις.”
Haris Zampoyras,www.moda.gr,Commercial Manager
Charalampos Oikonomidis owner of c2bii, http://www.c2bii.com
Στράτος Προβατόπουλος
despoina dimitriadou dr.,
Spyros Papaspyropoulos, co-founfer of x2interactive.gr and webdesignblog.gr”, www.webdesignblog.gr, twitter:spyros,”Keep up the good work. We will try and be there (Athens) every time”

« Previous 1 … 6 7 8 9 10 Next »