BABELVERSE: Boarding the startup train

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

Speaking of entrepreneurial events and good timing, following on from the Startegy event, Startup Weekend was happening in Athens! It’s a well known series of 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 3 weeks earlier, we just HAD to participate. If a Startup Weekend is happening near you then we highly recommend you take part, they are open to anyone who would like to get stuck in!

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) for those that remember it! 😉

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

— Babelverse (@babelverse) November 21, 2010

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

— Babelverse (@babelverse) November 21, 2010

As we headed out the door, a member of a Greek early-stage investment fund (The Open 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

— Dennis Palmer (@CoderDennis) December 1, 2010

We came out second behind Mimix, another interesting project doing sign language interpretation (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

— Babelverse (@babelverse) December 8, 2010