RSSAthens Startup Weekend II
Put together on November 26, 2008 3:11 pm by Dimitris
1 Comment
Meanwhile, back in the real world, lunch had come and gone (healthier than I expected) and sometime after that, in the midst of looking for information about how to include blogs in our process, tinkering with the crawlers and developing the back end we decided it was time to pick a name. That way we could register the domain and have it ready before the next day’s deadline while also making the logos and design the website could start.
After spending perhaps too much time on it (although I’m the first to say how important such a process is) and after discarding some very attractive options because we were unable to find a satisfactory Albanian registrar (.al is excellent for adjectives) we were already into the afternoon and had to make a decision to keep moving: we went for howsocial.ru! And with that in place we were in business – web design could start. At the same the blog crawler started being developed and a business plan was set up based on a template which Alexandros G started to work on.
Towards the end of the day Vicky who had been pulling the main weight of web design worked us through some decisions on it – how many pages we’ll have, homepage real-estate and content, colouring and font etc. We also registered our brand with the main services out there to secure it. And we also started giving some more thought to monetisation plans. The main concept was to have a 3-tiered service:
1. Free: Any user can visit the site, enter their usernames in the platforms we support and we give him an impact factor – no authentication is required. That’s just a percentile number representing what fraction of the users he or she belongs to in terms of his impact – e.g. a very influential person could be in the top 5%.
2. Standard: We produce reports on a monthly or weekly basis that include impact indices of lists of people we choose broken down by topic or keyword. This is offered for a premium.
3. Extended: Clients can contact us to create customised reports on lists of people or topics.
Apart from the sporadic and mainly vanity checks of (1), packages (2) and (3) can be an essential tool for marketeers but also of startups and individual professionals. Such parties using howsocial.ru can easily identify the primary channels to get their message across without wasting time and losing in reliability trying to identify the appropriate ‘megaphones’. A key item in our approach is that the premium packages are rankable in cost depending on what section of the impact pyramid one is interested in: top 5% is more valuable than top 10% (or isn’t it?).
With that figured out and the crawlers left to do their thing we stopped for Saturday at about 22.00.
The following morning, having reached a semi-finalised design, we had to start fleshing it in with content. Yes, this means those little (or not so little as it turned out) texts that explain everything your site is about to visitors. They sometimes can make the difference between returning to it or forgetting all about it: who we are, what we offer in terms of packages and of course what exactly is it that our website and algorithm does. That last bit is significant to share with our users (at least to some extent) in order to prevent people from using howsocial.ru in every conceivable comparison between people online. It is meant to give an idea what we mean by the social impact index.
Unfortunately, we had to make do with only sporadic and remote support from one of the developers who could not make it due to a review he had to have in on Monday – back in the real non-SUW world, that is. Moreover, crawling had to start anew to accommodate the changes made since these programs started working – one of the problems in trying to work fast to fit everything in 2 days. With these developments in mind we decided to also do away with crawling blogs and instead focus on Twitter and FriendFeed (which anyway does have some blogging information) to provide at least a proof-of-concept for the combination our service does. So during most of the morning the algorithm we had came up with the previous day was integrated into the code and following that George K and Vicky worked together to connect the front-end with back-end.
I was not feeling very productive overall in the second day and seemingly all I could do was help people with some website bugs and jumping from minor problem solving to minor problem solving here and there. In the afternoon George T started creating the presentation that was due later that evening while at the same time people from the GIVE fund overlooked the teams to hear about what everyone was doing.
As we learned later from Andrew Hyde, the Athens Startup Weekend, apart from being the largest in Europe, was one of the few – if not the only one – where a prospect of an investment had been announced. The startup that delegates of the GIVE fund would be most impressed about would get a chance to have a more serious collaboration with them. Such discussions where therefore of mutual gain: these possible funders offered advice to the startups while intimately learning about how they work.
And just as we were filling in the last details of the business plan and George T was rehearsing the presentation the crowd that would listen to the talks started to file in and a bit past 8 in the evening the culmination of the weekend had arrived. Everyone would present what they had done and the funders would choose. In order of appearance (excluding howsocial.ru) they were:
pettycards – a business process that allows micropayments using mobiles and scratch cards. I’m not sure I grasped the idea but my business sense was tingling from the initial Friday pitch.
Digital Rights Protection – a site to collect all patents from various worldwide legal systems and allow search to look for infringements. That presentation seemed promising even though a bit complicated to implement and use. I bet that it would be greatly improved by aiming it to the lay people too – not just lawyers and patent firms.
rentawife.gr – using which you can outsource household chores to others. Political correctness aside it tackles a favorite project of mine matching a job with someone who wants to do it and in free-time starved culture like the Greek one it definitely has potential.
blognudge – a widget on your blog so people can that you write something (including a topic or adonation). A simple idea so useful that you kind of wonder how it hadn’t been done before. Plus, en excellent weekend project too.
mobcommerce.com – a website that allows e-commerce store owners to get a mobile store version automatically. It is based on existing e-store generators like shopify which already have 20Kstores online.
freecycling – a Facebook app to give stuff you don’t want to others instead of throwing them away.
mydoulapa – another FB app that organises your wardrobe or helps you donate some clothing items to charity while at the same time giving access to fashion houses to connect with their demographic.
beeshopper.net – a one-page website that presents an array of e-shops collected categorised per field with its main innovation being an easy to navigate single-page interface.
uArt – a deviantArt clone website which however allows artists to earn money from their work
betcafe – an online gambling house (?)
To be honest I wasn’t terribly excited by most of the talks – but maybe that’s just me. I thought the concept of rentawife.gr stands out and could offer some real relief to many people – although not terribly innovative. Mobcommerce.com is sound business-wise and I’m sure it has monetisation potential. And pettycards can solve a real pain – especially in Greece – by addressing to some extent how backward-looking telco’s are.
The relevance of the latter startup to the Greek reality as well as it’s solid foundation in familiar concepts make it no surprise that it was elected as the most promising one – many congratulations to everyone in their team! I sincerely hope they are successful in passing the funds evaluation and take off to make the mobile situation better in Greece – and why not abroad too!
And with that and lots of thanking going back and forth between the organisers and the participants, 2.5 days of very successful work and starting up came to an end.
tags: idea, report |
Digg | |  |
Del.icio.us | |  |
Ma.gnolia | |  |
Newsvine | |  |
Technorati |
Comments
One Response to “Athens Startup Weekend II”
Leave a Reply - in English Please
[...] can also see the viewpoints of others that attended the event, such as John Nousis’, Dimitris Athanasiadis, Alex Georgiou, George Tziralis . Please leave a comment if you were there, we’re still trying to [...]