The Babelverse Story : Starting

Continuing on from our previous post “The Vision“… here’s the next part of our story as we build for LeWeb:

Start-up Weekend Athens – 19th-21st Nov 2010

Speaking of entrepreneurial events and good timing, after the Startegy event, Startup Weekend was happening in Athens! They are well known 54-hour weekend events that are organised in dozens of cities world-wide during which groups of developers, business folk, start-up enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more pitch ideas for new start-up companies, form teams around those ideas and work to develop a working prototype, demo, and/or presentation by Sunday evening.

On a roll from our hit at Startegy, we just HAD to participate. (BTW we highly recommend you take part in these kinds of events!

So, on Friday night we pitched again what we now called “Project Babelverse” and spent the week-end putting together mock-ups, testing different open-source tools and cloud services, developing rough prototypes, setting up a landing page, preparing a presentation, meeting lots of great people and thoroughly enjoying ourselves, it was a long and quite fun-filled weekend (#truestory)! ;)

We'll be presenting our project on stage in a few minutes at#swAthens Sign up here to become an alpha tester : http://babelverse.com
2010/11/21 21:19:31 via Seesmic

On the Sunday night we presented a more refined vision of our project (though it was probably balanced out by our burnout!), and the jury awarded us second place.

We got second place @StartupWeekend ! Thanks everybody for your wishes! Remember to sign up: http://babelverse.com#startupbattle#swAthens
2010/11/22 00:20:29 via Twitter for iPhone

Upon exiting the building, a member of The Open Fund (a Greek based early-stage investment fund) who was there came and told us that they were interested, and would fast track us through their process!

Soon after that, we were featured on the cover of the monthly free-press newspaper Metropolis, and also in the national newspaper Ta Nea.

Global Start-Up Battle

The Startup Weekend in Athens was happening at the same time as many others around the world, all part of Global Entrepreneurship Week 2010, so there was an bonus competition: Finalists from each city were invited to submit a video for the Global Startup Battle. Of course we went for it and quickly created and submitted a video.

Hands down @babelverse is the best startup in the#starupbattle wildcard! Go watch the videos and see for yourself. http://bit.ly/g5nr5N
2010/12/01 21:50:58 via web

We finished in our favourite place, second behind Mimix, another project doing interpretation, but for sign language. This was starting to become a pattern!!

Anyway, Babelverse was a great idea that people got very excited about and we would of course continue pursuing it.

Congrats! Another 1 that's breaking language barriers ;) RT @StartupBattle @MIMIX is#StartupBattle Ultimate Champion! http://bit.ly/eWrVs9
2010/12/08 23:43:00 via web

Continue reading on, here is part 3 of our story this time we talk about the validation of Babelverse and how we turned down investment in favour of bootstrapping… read here.

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