Meet GES delegate: Ani Berberyan
Twitter: aniberberyan28
Organization name: MemTalk
Organization website: www.memtalkapp.com
Brief description of organization: MemTalk is a mobile app that helps students save classroom presentations in the form of voice & photos creating a slideshow synced with voice in real time. It is a new generation of note-taking tool to combine voice and pictures for trade show and exhibition visitors. Now instead of heavy and shaky videos you will get a high quality compact slideshow perfectly synchronized with your thoughts and comments. You just press the record button and start talking, then press the photo button at any time you want. Simple. You can add as many photos to your narration as you wish. Your lightweight talking album will be created on the spot.
What inspired you to start this organization? The idea of MemTalk was born in Jerusalem. Being fascinated with Holly Sepulcher church and its history, our founder Garik took dozens of pictures and recorded the guided tour with his mobile phone. When trying to share his impressions with friends and family, he faced the problem of combining guide’s narration with photos to create a story of the tour. Back in Armenia, he shared his problem with 3 co-founders who strongly believe that people need to create and tell stories in an easy, fast and cost-effective way. There should be better alternative to heavy videos. We are reinventing digital storytelling by focusing first on people and helping them create easy, compact talking albums that can be uploaded to media in no time.
What is the next big step you hope to help your organization reach? We’ve done several iterations of testing to validate our product/ market fit. MemTalk has a new design with deeply thought-out UX that will delight our users. Now we are concentrating all our efforts on marketing our product to students and event & conference participants from developed countries to help them document classes and create notes on the spot. Our next big step is to receive investment for broader roll up of product and marketing. When we’ve already built reputation and awareness, we will move to our main idea, which is offering White Label version of MemTalk with full back end system for Education and Event Management Industry.
What has been your biggest obstacle as an entrepreneur? The biggest obstacle as an entrepreneur was deep inside me: realizing that I needed a mindset shift from product centric to human centric, because at the center of any innovation and great accomplishment are people and teams. Understanding people’s deep needs and motivations, approaching problems from the right angle and effectively communicating your thoughts are skills that any entrepreneur needs to master.
What advice would you give to any emerging entrepreneurs? I would like to quote one of my favorite heroes, Bruce Lee, who wisely said:
“Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.”
