OPEN COFFEE 24/5
On Friday 24/5 at 18:30 we found ourselves at the Benaki Museum, in order to attend the last “Open Coffee” for this year. We had the opportunity to listen to three great lecturers, who shared with us their journey from the birth of their business’ idea to the fulfillment of their project and then to their success. For us, who attended the lecture, it was for sure one remarkable experience. We received many interesting and useful information and we, also, had the opportunity to have some networking with the rest of the attendants, which is a great way for someone who wants to get in the start up business, to meet people and expand his social circle.
The first lecturer was Chris Spatharakis, co-founder and CEO at the start up company “Ferryhopper”. Ferryhopper is the most practical online platform for booking ferry tickets. The company’s goal is to make the ticket booking a much more easy and fun process through different functions.
Ferryhopper’s big difference compared to the other companies is that it gives you the opportunity to look though different routes and to book your tickets to islands that aren’t linked directly, giving you many more solutions and results in a simple and useful interface. Moreover, they recently begun the “island hopping service” which allows the user to book multiple trips at once. In other words, one can book his whole journey in just a few clicks. At first, Chris Spatharakis claimed that since they decided to address to a field that is quite restricted, they managed to create a platform that is as much as possible pleasant and appealing to the users. As he said himself, Ferryhopper’s team does not consist of members who are “experts” on the sector that each one is responsible for. They believe that it is better to “become” an expert team that being a team of individual experts. They started their business in an unusual way, by promoting it through forums and they definitely weren’t aware of the unexpected success that it would have. Recently they did some really important partnerships with EasyGroup and EasyFerry. As for the future, Ferryhopper’s team aims to make their business a benchmark in the Greek market field but also to brunch out to the European market. One more important characteristic of the team is that they always try to find the “twist” in their business. They want to make Ferryhopper intriguing by presenting it from a different angle. It is, well, a company that continues to grow and which constantly announces new job vacancies, willing to welcome new members and expand its team.
The next speaker was Fotis Talatzis, the co-owner, of Novoville, a start-up which was created in order to help local governments to modernize their communication with their citizens. Paying a fine, finding all the necessary documents someone needs for an application or any activity that has to do with your municipal is as easy as it gets. Novoville manages to save money from governments and also helps them have a better communication with citizen and get a clear image about the quality of the services they offer. Novoville is the government’s contact with citizens it informs them about the problems that come up to citizens, about their worries and other things that have to do with the living in a city.
Novoville has three main citizen-centric interactions. The first one is e-Frontdesk that allows citizens to report issues they encounter on a daily basis quickly and easily, and receive automated notifications about how their issue is being resolved. Citizen requests can be assigned directly to the appropriate government employee, allowing for intelligent resource management, saving precious time from calling centers.It also provides the users with a FAQ agent who responds to their questions about certifications, applications etc. Novoville makes the process of collecting, curating and sharing information with citizens simple,their webchat-based FAQ agent provides suggested answers to citizen enquiries dynamically, using Artificial Intelligence. If answers for specific topics have not been provided, citizen enquiries can then be redirected to the call center. With the Novoville FAQ Agent, local governments can significantly reduce the volume of phone enquiries and save resources, while improving customer service. Another interaction that Novoville provides is consult and communicate.It allows local governments to reach a wide number of citizens quickly to get their perspectives on crucial public affairs, from environmental policies to transportation planning. Consultations can be set up and accessed through social media or a web page. With real-time visibility over trends on their dashboard, government officials can make informed decisions and provide citizens with the services they need. The Novoville Messaging tool makes it easy to reach citizens across multiple channels, including SMS, push notifications, emails and social media. The third interaction is Receive and Process payments. The Novoville Payment System helps local governments facilitate, process and manage online monetary transactions.Users can pay for bills and services through the Novoville app, such as parking fines, Council tax, public transportation fares and event tickets, anytime, anywhere.Payments can be set up to accept credit or debit cards, direct debit, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal.
When it comes to big data the government is out of the competition, the amount of their data is huge and Novoville gives an easy solution to both governments and citizens, saving time and money. It makes our lives easier and provides citizens and governments with solutions using real-time dashboards. In two years Novoville has earned about 1,6 million funding and is used by 50 different municipalities in 4 different European countries, England, Switzerland, Belgium and Greece.
The most important Fotis says is THE TEAM, their biggest accomplishment is having by their side hard-working people.
And for this year last, but not least, the idea of was Radiojar was presented. Mr. Stathis Koutsogeorgos who is the founder and Chief Executive Officer(CEO) of Radiojar, creator of the popular software for Internet radio, was there to share for the very first time the eight-year evolution of the company until today.As he said it was not easy at first to remain focused on the radio sector, because the radio has great potential and each costumer prefer something else, and also this way of thinking for them was a little bit old fashioned. So they decided to appeal to the people who knew exactly what they were doing, knew that they had a challenge in what they were doing and tell them how they had the solution to those challenges. He was also referred to technical parts which made his own company diverge from the others and how they started looking for big investors after making the costumers trust them. During his speech, Mr. Stathis Koutsogeorgos refered to the take-over of their company by the iHeartMedia-the leading information and entertainment company that counts more than 250 million listeners in the US-, which started as a cooperation at first and gave the audience a piece of advise, to be their self in order to succeed. As he said you have to be patient and focused in order to create something by your own, as he did, and be successful. They knew that it was better to set small targets in order to reach the big ones and that’s what they did with their own company.
