Event Report - Startup Weekend Athens

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Blog by Lydia Morazzani:

130 people, 20 mentors, 15 teams, 54 hours – Startup Magic Happening @MIC Greece

Athens, Greece 4thStartup Weekend Athens, February 10-12, 2012.

©photo by Aurelija Sukeviciute

Friday, February 10, 2012

3:00 pm- Mass Transport strikes create questions as to how attendees will get to the venue. Through Facebook and twitter people connect to carpool and share routes.

5:00pm – on the dot a line forms at the Registration desk

6.30pm- Event begins- SW how –to-rules, talks from organizers and sponsors. This year we co-organized with CoLabWorkspace a co-working space the idea for which sprung from the 2nd SWA.

An inspirational presentation from Babelverse.com about the year following the 3rd  SWA ,the implementation of their idea, and  the experience of participating and winning the 3rd place at the Paris LeWeb’11 Startup Competition… and yes they actually came to participate…again.

7.00pm- Pitches begin- long line forms, the auditorium is buzzing with ideas. Will they convince and manage to recruit a team? At the end of the pitches the walls are full of ideas and attendees are asked to vote with post-its on their favorite ideas…

Friday ends….

15 teams take shape…

The weekend begins!

Saturday & Sunday, 11-12 February 2012

Saturday and Sunday the teams work on their projects with the help of technical, business, legal and VC mentors.

The Ideas

The 15 ideas that formed are the following:

  1. Startupnetwrk : Startupnetwrk intends to bridge the gap between early stage startups and seed fund investors.
  2. Allcancode “Let’s create the next generation of coding talents” Allcancode addresses the need of programming/coding illiteracy and the scarcity of talented developers and inspired educators.
  3. Eskipnoteros : “ You Shop, we bid, you get” Supermarkets bid for your shopping list.
  4. Lovechirps: Recorder of messages for Valentine day.
  5. Kinect Life “Kinect Life is Kinect for all” Kinect is mainly for energetic people. Kinect Life brings a mood profiling and engagement application with which you can use Kinect to play legacy arcade games.
  6. Metoo : Facebook application that performs psychometric tests and matches content between different users based on their profile compatibility and similar personality traits. 
  7. Respondability A website which enables corporations to co-create causes on-line and target them to choose an audience. It gives them the ability to respond to the actual need at the right time and hugely increase their social impact and positive reputation
  8. Yummy Mummy: “Food made with love everywhere” YummyMummy tries to solve the problem of not being able to have homemade food where and when you want it. The idea is to be able to press a button and search for homemade food made by people who cook in their home around your location.
  9. ORDERRO: Ordering and pre-ordering through the use of mobile phone for food and drink venues ( bars, restaurants)
  10. Shopalyzer: Creation of your own e-shop in Facebook and start selling to your fans in less than 5 minutes!
  11. Offerme.gr : A unique answer to the self-planning traveler matching specific vacation requests to businesses so that they can make custom offers directly.
  12. SWAPMAPP : An innovative and disruptive way of making swaps. Instead of 1-1 swaps we create circles of multiple swaps between an unlimited number of people. And this is only the beginning.
  13. USEUM: Useum is a 2-way bridge between art lovers and artists.  It a web platform where art enthusiasts can discover emerging artists based on their artistic preferences. Vice versa new artists can showcase their art.
  14. Fashion Fairy : Automatic wardrobe management, key item suggestions through fashion brand synergies, celebrity stylists for recommendation of outfit selection 
  15. Rentarento: Connect with people around you to rent things you own but aren’t using or borrow things that you need reliably and easily.

The Winners

Sunday night… by far the most difficult time of any Startup Weekend. Time to decide the winners.

  1. USEUM – takes first place with its idea to bridge new artists with the art lovers
  2. YummyMommy- with the idea to re-distribute homemade food
  3. KinectLife – with the idea ( and live demo) of using Kinect to play legacy arcade games with a mood option.

©photo by Aurelija Sukeviciute