In what was probably the OpenCoffee session with the most startups or projects (to play along with recent complaints that the term ‘startup’ is used rather loosely) presenting, here’s what you missed if you didn’t make it to the event – nor tuned in its live coverage.
First of all, there were 3 presentations from the by most accounts successful Athens Startup Weekend. Blognudge to begin with is trying to solve the problem that some bloggers (hint, hint) fail to update on a regular basis and (nudge, nudge) even weeks intervene between their posts. What this service does is that it simply allows you to install a widget/button on your blog that visitors can push to urge you to write a post. Although this is the only feature offered at the moment, future versions will allegedly include the option of suggesting a topic, donating to the blogger or donating to a charity. A number of revenue streams have also been thought of for Blognudge including a monthly charge on bloggers using it, requesting a cut from (non-charity) donations and also exploiting the statistics and the data generated by the ‘nudgers’.

howsocial.ru is a service that aims to measure the combined social impact users of social media have on their online environment of followers and connections and rank them accordingly. Their goal is to include all important platforms starting with Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and the blogosphere – although at the moment the service operates using just Twitter as a proof of concept. The business model is based on the fact that knowledge of the most influential nodes in the social graph (i.e. how people are interconnected in the various platforms through following etc) is highly valuable to anyone who would be interested to get their message across. As such possible paying customers of this service are marketers, startups or even individuals willing to identify who to approach for their promotion goals. At the same time, analytics on particular topics/keywords will be provided under the lens of who propagates such information – and their importance. (Disclaimer: I am a member of the Athens Startup Weekend team that put together this project.)


