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Leveraging potential – The Calacanis effect
You are passionate about {Cloud Computing / Web Design / Podcasting / Ruby on Rails / you name it}. And you want to organize a meet-up about it. But you don’t know how. Or you can’t find the right people. Probably, you’d also love to have in place some cool guys from Open Coffee Greece. Whichever is the case, we are here to help.
We will share with you our humble experience and our phonebook. We’ll find you the place, find you wifi and make it happen. Or we won’t, if you don’t need to actually. What we’ll definitely do is build up buzz on our blog or maybe make you a contributor so you can write your own posts. News groups are still hip too.
Still, you will be the organizer, you will decide on the format and guests and other details, it’s your thing; we’d be just happy to enable it and serve as your proud partners.
Jason pitched us the idea back on Tuesday. It’s Thursday and you have the framework ready. So, let’s announce the first meet-ups by … Friday? Yes, let’s make the Open Coffee ecosystem grow and bloom… fast ! The time is now. And great potential lies ahead
Open Coffee Athens XV, the call
Tuesday, October 7th, 6 o’clock in the afternoon, at Bios. 4 exceptional talks, a couple of hundreds people from the best and brightest of the greek start-up scene and a presence that worths, well, an event on its own. The 15th meeting of Open Coffee Athens is -I dare to say- a must event, you just can’t miss that! Here goes the details:
- Speakers
- Elias Politakis, founder, will demo (right in our mobiles) the innovative wireless services of MobileFX, aiming at both the enterprise and entertainment markets. What’s more, Elias will give his (sharp!) views on do’s and don’ts about start-upping in Greece.
- Michael Rizos, New Digital Media Manager of the one-month old MTV Greece will present, two days after the big event in Kallimarmaro stadium, his beliefs on new media and the music industry at large, as well as the ideas of implementing these in MTV Greece.
- Mr. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, among others an ex-consultant of Alpha Ventures and Managing Director of NBG Venture Capital, will contribute his personal expertise about raising money and entrepreneurship in general, giving an apolitical speech that we are clearly honored to host.
- Having Jason Calacanis as our guest is just amazing, to say the least. Jason needs no introduction and he will inspire us about the things he’s among the most qualified people around the globe to talk about: the passion for technology and entrepreneurship.
- Where: Bios, Peiraios 84, downtown Athens, in a rural, ex-industrial but trendy downtown area, the perfect host of the start-up culture (View Map). Join us in the bar for the pre-coffees and the after-beers and in the theatre for the speeches.
- When: Next Tuesday, October 7th. The full programme is:
- 18.00 – 19.00: Come along and meet around, enjoy your coffee or warm-up drinks, till the speeches start
- 19.00 – 20.00: Short (5-10′) speeches, followed by Q&A
- 20.00 – …: The main part, endless informal networking and socializing over drinks
- How: It’s simple, you just come over and get in. Participating in an Open Coffee meeting is by default free and open to anyone who would like to attend. You’d better leave your tie at home or at the office, but don’t forget to bring some business cards with you, you’ll probably need a lot of them. If you’d like, you can validate your presence by leaving a comment here or RSVP in the relevant facebook event. And, if you’d like to present in a future greek Open Coffee meeting, just send us an email at opencoffee.gr(duck)gmail.com.
- Why: Why attend? Well, each one of the hundreds of people who attended the previous meetings had their reasons, we bet that you’ll find your own ones. Till then, rest assured that you’re going to meet the nerds and marketers, bloggers and journalists, VCs and developers, entrepreneurs and PRs, who shape and shake the Greek start-up scene and become part of this vibrant community. Plus, you’ll also meet Jason Calacanis, could it be better than this? :-)
The meeting will be unique, spread the word and let’s all together rock on Tuesday night!
Confirmed, confessed and breaking: Jason Calacanis to attend Open Coffee Athens XV, Tue Oct 7
He is the founder & CEO of Mahalo. Co-organizer of TechCrunch 50. Entrepreneur in Action at Sequoia Capital. He has founded Silicon Alley Reporter, Rising Tide Studios and Weblogs Inc. He has served as General Manager of Netscape and Senior Vice President of AOL. Naturally, he also enjoys wide attention in his twitter account, mailing list, both new and old media.
In a few words, Jason Calacanis is nearly a synonym of a serial web entrepreneur, an icon for start-up addicts who, in his own words, has switched from nobody to media titan again and again. His name makes it also clear, he’s greek in origin and he’s doing things well.
At this point, let me just share the joy and excitement: We’re thrilled to announce that Jason will join us in the forthcoming Open Coffee Athens XV, to meet you all people and inspire us about the things he’s among the most qualified people around the globe to talk about: the passion for technology and entrepreneurship.
The meeting, as expected, will take place in the evening of Tuesday, October 7th, save the date and tune back in here for the specific details later this week.
Breaking: Stream 08 in Athens Oct 2-4!
It was by pure coincidence that we found out about it only a bit ago. The second iteration of Stream is happening in Athens, Greece. Around 200 people from “the creative, media and technology industries around the world” will participate to this anti-conference where apparently the only requirement for being there is that you contribute. Be it by helping with the logistics, hosting a workshop, giving a talk, performing in one of the events or simply cooking your favourite dish for the rest of the attendees you could in principle land a spot. It’s just that and an invitation of course – it is by invitation only. With an impressive list of tech and new media ‘luminaries’ attending (including Jason Calacanis, Jeff Pulver and Tim O’Reilly) however, it’s worth having a go at being there.
TechCrunch goes Open Coffee: Qualia, the video
Clearly, a lot of time has passed since we co-hosted the greatest of our events so far with TechCrunch. But, it is also clear that it takes time for things to mature and coverage to conclude (even our esteemed guest has yet to publish his own minutes – rest assured that he will though). So, let me now proceed with the event’s coverage, providing you the video and presentation of Qualia or “I came, I saw, aino” by Iason Demiros.
Open Coffee Athens XIV – meeting notes
Last Tuesday the 14th OpenCoffee meeting took place at the usual place in Bios. There were 4 talks and in this post I’ll put down some of the things I noticed in them – mostly stuff that never made it to the slides. The presentations themselves and videos of the talks will follow in separate posts for the more visual types of people.
First talk was by Alexis Mpallas of Cytopia.org, a website that does online music distribution for psychedelic trance (psytrance) and progressive labels. They cover an impressive (for the genre) tally of 50 labels while their site features an online radio station and brings in about 1000 euros a month in sales. One thing to take away from Alexis’ talk is that the reason they can survive in a market otherwise dominated by big players like iTunes and Amazon is the fact they aim in the niche market of their particular genre and even their website design aims to fit in with their particular audience. Their best promotion is – probably as expected – from online marketing, mainly in forums – compared to physical world efforts like fliers and promos. Main sales come from countries like the US, UK, Brasil and so on – but not Greece.
The second talk was by V.Trip‘s Dimitris Tsigkos who parted with his life’s wisdom for someone who would like to startup in Greece. Even before the business plans start a life plan is necessary – and the various alternatives one has right after finishing school are limited. A significant amount of risk-taking is required – but that’s made even worse by the fact that in essence no high-risk VC’s operate in Greece. Those that are here realise their limitations and decide not to invest in our kind of startups (early stage and high-risk). That alone but also the presence of a magnitudes’ larger market abroad means that to find success you most probably need to look outside the local markets. He made it clear that if you manage to come up with a product (and not just services!) that demonstrates the necessary volume (and as such value) for a foreign VC, they will not hesitate to invest – even on a Greek-based startup.
V. Trip’s course in particular included initially some subcontracting in public portals and then some subsidised research work. Presently, they still base their income on services and grants and subsidies while they also sell products on a global scale such as e-front, open source e-learning package, video streaming apps, etc.
The third talk was by Andreas Konstantinou by VisionMobile a small team of mobile market analysts spread all over Europe and working from home. Although the company started for the sake of teamwork it has evolved in the sales of a wide range of products including consulting, reports, market-how maps and seminars among others. Andreas underlined that a good business environment as the one offered in the UK (where good startup infrastructure, transparency and market information is available) is a plus but what’s really important is to get together a good team that share the same values and can bring knowledge, passion and innovation in the startup. An interesting approach he stressed is the need to answer 3 questions before implementing your idea:
- What exactly is the problem you are solving?
- Who pays to solve this problem?
- Is there another way to solve this problem (that would make yours irrelevant)?
Finally, it was the turn of Anna Diamantopoulou, State Secretary of Development to take the stage. She also stressed how important it is for ideas and businesses to become competitive beyond the strict confines of Greece’s borders. Her main premise is that for that to happen three factors are required:
- an idea accompanied by an advantage
- a high level of technological infrastructure
- a helpful environment in terms of institutions
She gave a few examples from her book of how this happened both abroad and here. Perhaps the most descriptive was about how Sweden managed to turn a province known for its steel-making industry which was however decaying into the best location in the world to test cars against problems resulting from low temperatures. The cold (exploiting the idea of the low temperatures as an advantage) aided by top-notch scientific research on the matter and the relevant infrastructure managed to transform the province within 10 years with the help of everyone: the workers, the unions and the government.
Greece according to AD needs to work towards extending internet access, increasing public spending in research, improving the banking system to encourage investments and strengthening small enterprises, to increase the number of patents produced and to actually reward the best businesses to provide further incentives for growth.