Open Coffee — The Start up World

Panteion University — Ad & Pr Lab

All the start up teams from our lab had the honor to attend the Open Coffee event on April 5 at Benaki Museum in Athens.

Open Coffee is a start up pitching and networking event that aims to be a point of reference for Greek startups. The main idea is to bring together the Greek start up and entrepreneurship community through monthly meetings in a relaxed environment that encourages networking and interacting. Actually, it is an opportunity to interact with all the Greek startups by drinking a cup of coffee.

Bibe Coffee:

The first start up that was presented to us was Bibe Coffee, an application that was still on its early stages of development. It’s owners Vasilis Apostolopoulos and Panos Vrettos gave us a deep analysis regarding their start up. More specifically, it concerns a device that is inserted into the coffee machines in order to collect the data from them and upload them in a server where the owner can analyze it. It’s a tool to provide crucial information about the quantity and even the time of the coffee produced by the machine. It goes even further with advanced features such as warnings for necessary maintenance. Overall it’s a start up which its main puprose is to give an indication for profit to loss ratio.

GeekBot:

The second start up was presented by Nikos Papanotas. At the beginning, he made a preamble, sharing his experience with his previous projects that did not end up succesful. He gave us insights regarding overcoming the difficulties presented when we structure a startup and advised us to «solve our problems» in order for our start up to succeed. Geekbot is a start up developed around the platform ‘Slack’, a communication hub. To be more specific, it collects information about on going projects, keeps track of them, organize and presents them to users that are interested to them. Basically, it was designed to facilitate parteners that are working from different places around the world.

Epignosis:

The last start up was presented by Thanos Papaggelis. A small yet smart idea that was soon evolved in one of the most successful start ups and quickly spread abroad. Basically, it’s a software program designed to provide employees with efficient «tools», knowledge and train them accordingly in order to meet the expectations of their companies. The training takes places via e-learning providing various ways depending on the purpose of its customer. Epignosis, cooperates with multinational companies and has thousands of active users.

Networking

As soon as the presentations finished, followed by an exchange of ideas and proposals regarding future start ups between us and the owners. It was a unique opportunity for us, a great experience and we would definitely suggest it to everyone looking into start ups and entrepreneurship.

Our team: paris almagkout, eddy Michailidis, Dimitris Plastourgos, Lefki Liakakou, Vasilis Vasilopoulos

Our professor: Betty Tsakarestou