Startup Weekend

Posted by Andrew Hyde

Athens (Greece) Startup Weekend was held at the Microsoft Innovation Center.

Microsoft Greece kicked off the event with the announcement of BizSpark, which gives free software to anyone in startups.  This includes window, server licenses and even cloud hosting.  Really an impressive package.   Lydia and Patrick were amazing organizers, and really do a great job of connecting Microsoft with the local community.

We had 8 projects come out of the weekend:

A fantastic team by @gtzi @kcorax, @dimitristi, @netwire, @ageor and @thimios and turned a rough idea (“friendfeed counter anyone?”) conceived about an hour before the event into a solid service and valuable offering, which you may better visualize as “PeopleRank”.

Online service available to bloggers and readers of blogs that enables readers to remind the blogger to produce content. Incentives include Charitable donations and “Cash In Pocket”

BlogNudge is being built by bloggers for bloggers. On the team is Jim Myhrberg, Nick Georgakis, Patrick Malone, Alexander Pagidas and Stavros Messinis.

MyDoupa by Kasidakis John, Matsa Samantha, Rekalidis Konstantinos is a site that combines social networking services and an exciting way to organize your wardrobe and keep up with the latest fashion trends.

BeeShopper by Steve Varsanis and Stratos Tzanavaris is worldwide virtual mall. Through its innovative and user friendly interface it offers easy access to a huge directory of quality online stores. By entering the BeeShopper community users can rate and comment on their purchases to help make online shopping safer.

MobCommerce is a service that allows ecommerce store owners to easily create a mobile-friendly version of their store for free.  It was built by Stefanos Vasdekis, John Nousis and Dimitris Theodorakis, and is one of the slickest Startup Weekend projects I have seen.

uArt by Aziza Al Ghafri, Diamantis Falidas, Nick Kokosis, and Nick Saoulis is a application for sharing digital art through an online community.  It is a chance for new artists to show their work with the option to sell.

One day every Cafe will become a BETcafe.com.  Great domain name and the first gambling site from a SW project.

PettyCards took home the ‘prize’ of talking with the G.I.V.E. grant.  Their team was Anagnostou Nikos, Argiriou Alexandros, Kapetanakis Spriros, Moustakas Dimitris, Papadimitriou Dimitris, and Zamanis Panagiotis.  Pettycards is a Internet paying system that includes a card distribution network and a website that allows end customers to use these cards to buy services or goods from cooperative web sites. It is intended for use mainly by young people that do not have access to credit cards or for people that do not feel safe giving their credit cards information for small payments.

All around a great weekend with a community coming together.

Dimitris has a great post as well.