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)!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tags: athens, gew, greece, leweb, openfund, startegy, startupweekend, swAthens, truestory
Pingback: The Babelverse Story : The Vision - Babelverse
Pingback: The Babelverse Story : Validating - Babelverse
Pingback: Babelverse Takes 3rd Place in Prestigious LeWeb Startup Competition | AndesBeat