It all started on Friday 9/2, from around 40 ideas we had to go down to 15, so 60 seconds was all they had. Nervous but bold the participants took that time and one by one pitched their idea. There could be only fifteen so the process took its course and after an intense hour the participants self regulated the results and formed into teams.

The level of the ideas was surprisingly high and the commitment of the participants admirable. Most were eager to learn and adjust and took in the recommendations, proposals and critique from the mentors  (more about them) blended it with their experience and transformed it into something anew.

And why wouldn't they? Having the opportunity to have your idea analyzed, discussed and stretch tested before you even take the first step is something that anyone starting a company should envy.
Especially having your idea under the spotlight of Microsoft evangelists, world class web designers, startup consultants, proven entrepreneurs and coaches with might is an opportunity not to be missed.

During this weekend, we met some interesting young people with innovating ideas, we talked to them and we tried to help them by giving feedback and advice but mainly by offering a different point of view.
It's remarkable how many people were receptive to new perspectives and how they would calibrate their initial ideas based on the feedback they got from all the mentors.

Here are the projects as we saw them,in a particular order.

startupnetwork

A Network that intends to bridge the gap between early stage startups and seed fund investors.
A nice prospect even though it faces great established competition from day one.

Our tag line is that all that you need to build your startup is to just do it.
This project needs to differentiate from the competition that is well established and respected. We suggested a pivot to a LinkedIn game with simple game dynamics and powers emerging from the virtual talent you acquire.

Allcancode

their pitch :“ Let’s create the next generation of coding talents”.
This team had an interesting approach, they immediately understood that they had to build on top of competition (all can code, codecademy), they want to focus, as we understood it, on teaching the concepts and the mindset of programming rather than what is usually offered by other learn2code platforms.

The problem was that even though they had a prototype they chose not to present it in front of the judges and their 5 minute presentation didn't focus on the game dynamics of learning and how they would implement that.

We believe that focusing on a "parent -child" selling proposition with a well structured game dynamic would give their concept an edge. We loved the concept, but we strongly believe they should focus on a unique value proposition as well as a better marketing pitch.

#asw4 learn 2 code with your kidsyfrog.com/h68u0qlj

— Niobium Labs (@niobiumlabs) February 11, 2012

Kinect Life( 3d place)

“Kinect Life is Kinect for all”
Motion gestures is definitely going to be part of our lives in the near future and these guys aim at putting a hand on that!
Their proposition: adjust the level of the effort needed to interact with kinect according to various profiling methods.
Nice implementation and a demonstration of their project during their 5 minute pitch!
We unfortunately had little to no time to talk with this team. These guys were up to their necks coding the kinect SDK into building awesome stuff. However we kinda failed to fully grasp their business model and their revenue strategy during pitch time.

Orderro

our first thought when we heard their 60 second pitch was

#asw4 disrupt the way we order our coffee?Let's do it

— Niobium Labs (@niobiumlabs) February 10, 2012

  Their idea is to be able to pre-order food and drinks through the use of mobile phone and skip the queues. We feel in love with the idea. We even started thinking ourselves ordering frappe next to the beach during Greece’s hot summer. Hard go-to-market but huge potential to disrupt the entire retail industry.

Metoo

We have to admit that we didn't fully understood that. They worked in mysterious ways, flirting with psychology, psychometric personality results and the content the user is supposed to be seeing in his social media feed. They proposed that people should get their content timeline (facebook or other) based on their personality instead of who their social circle or declared interests(facebook likes) are. They concluded with a Facebook application that performs psychometric tests and matches content between different users based on their profile compatibility and similar personality traits.

“I had one of the best times of my life, it was extremely fun and all the people were super, everyone was helpfull. “ said one of the team members when asked about her startup weekend experience.

The automated content discovery industry is super hot, which in other words means a lot of competition form startups with millions in the bank. We cannot argue on whether or not the personality profiling is an interesting twist for better algorithms since we are not experts in the field. Anyhow, this idea needs to prove it’s business case.

Respondability

A crowd sourced decision making platform, where corporations will be able to choose a cause of corporate responsibility based on suggestions from users and NGOs. Great idea that solves a not so tractable problem. The issue with pitching these kind of idea is how do you quantify the gain for large corporations. We suggested that the team focuses on hyper local and real time pledges, in order to be the facilitator for minimum-budget, quick-response actions that would maximize earned media coverage and community engagement.

Eksipnoteros

The team’s idea was that Supermarkets should bid for your shopping list. Even though it sounds like an interesting idea, we believe that it would be difficult to be implemented, mainly due to practical reasons. Interesting concept that tries to gain from arbitrage between prices in different grocery stores. However, the logistics are huge and these guys will have a pile of problems to address.

Shopalyzer

The idea is to create your own e-shop in facebook and start selling to your fans, without redirecting them to another website. In this way, companies can get advantage of their facebook page in order to attract potential buyers.

The simplicity of this idea is its strong point. It has a straight forward go-to-market plan and the team is versatile and competent. We believe this can be a hit if they enhance their game concepts in order to incentivize small retail sellers as we advised.

Offerme

Instead of looking for offers and hotel ratings on the web, offerme suggest that clients should be able to make vacation requests and businesses can make custom offers directly. When a deal is reached, the company gets a commission.

#asw4 let the vacation offers find me! With @wardroberecycle yfrog.com/nv56bjrij

— Niobium Labs (@niobiumlabs) February 11, 2012

Offerme is a reverse actioning site that focused on the long tail of Greek tourism professionals. Great potential that builds on top of the strategical advantage, operating in a county that the travel industry is 20% of GDP. We advised them to go with an island hopping iPhone app, in order to have a high value marketing gimmick.

SWAPMAPP

Based on the old saying:
We have a lot of stuff why not trade them?

Instead of 1 to 1 trades, the team had the idea of creating circles of multiple swaps between an unlimited number of people. They plan on focusing initially on books and games swapping.

We did not had the chance to talk with the team during the entire weekend, but they delivered the most consistent presentation in our understanding. The idea is simple and builds on the proven concept of economy of exchangeable goods, as AirBnB indicates.

Rentareto

We only saw their 5 minute pitch on Sunday. Where were you guys hiding?
a platform that enables location based sharing/renting of various stuff

Fashion Fairy

Fashion Fairy is your personal stylist. You upload photos of your clothes and Fashion Fairy suggest the best possible outfit combinations. In addition, it recommends clothes that you should add to your wardrobe.

Interesting idea from a very experienced and competent team, but with an open question on scaling, especially on the cloth recommendation service.

Yummy Mummy (Niobium Labs mobile innovation award)

The idea is to create an app that will help you find homemade food anytime, by connecting users and people who cook at home.

This is the most disruptive idea of the competition, therefore we have chosen these guys for the Mobile Innovation Award. We will comment in subsequent post on the concept of our verdict.

USEUM (First Place)

The winning team created a 2-way bridge between art lovers and artists. This web platform will help art enthusiasts discover emerging artists based on their artistic preferences. Vice versa, new artists can showcase their art to a broad audience.
Useum is the typical example of a solid idea with a prototype and traction that proves the business case that was sky-rocked from a clever marketing concept. The AR art preview app that the team build over the weekend was the marketing sparkle that transformed this idea from a boring community of weird art enthusiasts into a mainstream content sharing app with a glimpse of awesomeness. We will follow their progress in Berlin.

Lovechirps

This team had a romantic mood. Their idea was to combine technology and romance, by enabling you sending recorder messages to your lover for Valentine’s Day.

What these guys pulled off in less than a weekends time is extraordinary. A fully functional service with awesome design and execution. Great product development from an awarded and proven team.

You can find more about the teams here

and something about the order: It's our suggestion if you want to enter the startup world, a suggestion based on the names and of the startups

1. build your network and find people you can work with! create your personalStartupnetwrk
2. Learn to code or find somenone that allready knows (we suggest you start learning anyhow)
3. Kinect Life = move... take action
4. Stop laying around coffe houses all day, orderro that coffee
5. metoo? yes you can do it too
6. You have be be responsible for your actions and have the abiliy to adapt. something like Respondability
7. You may be smart, but you are not the smartest eksipnoteros

1. some times simple is all you need, stay lean shopalyzer
2. Instead of trying to look for resources/people talk about your idea and let other people find you Offerme
3. keep only the necessary. Trade away anything that you don't need swapmapp
4. use what is allready out there rentareto
5. Do it in style Fashion fairy
6. Do that and you might win Useum & Yummy Mummy
7. Even if you don't succeed and end up failing, fail fast and fail by design at the end of the day, love is all you need Lovechirps

On the other hand, as we all know, the protest in Athens against austerity measures lead to serious riots. Among the 'victims' of Sunday's incidents, was our office in the center of Athens.

The bright side - a startup weekend experience

Niobium Labs took part as a sponsor in the Athens Startup Weekend, where teams of inspired people put together their skills and ideas to form the basis of a business in 54 hours.
As hundreds of others have in the 10 parallel held start up weekend events, (hosted in places as far and exotic as Anchorage Alaska, Mumbai India and Valencia Spain) 120 developers, graphic designers and business people in Athens worked hard during three days in order to form and present a proposal.

The aim: Convince the jury that their ideas can be realized and become the basis of a successful business.
The prizes:

1. A trip to Berlin in March to pitch at HackFwd at the Pitch in Berlin V2 event
2. Free mobile design & development services with a pinch of  consultancy by the Niobium Labs team.

Check out the 15 teams that participated .

The fifteen teams worked hard for 54 hours and prepared 5-minute presentations that took place on Sunday evening.

Niobium Labs awarded the mobile innovation award.

The award was free consulting development and design services for the creation of a mobile application. The winning team was Yummy Mommy, who had the idea to create an app that will help you find homemade food anytime, by connecting users and people who cook at home. We will be working hand in hand with that team over the next month to create a mobile application that will bring their vision to life.

The dark side - a country in flames, our offices one of the victims

While we were at the startup weekend event, Athens was going through hard times. Thousands of people were protesting outside the Greek Parliament against the vote for the new austerity measures. During the night, many buildings in the center of Athens were set on fire. Unfortunately, our offices suffered serious damages as a result of a fire on the ground floor of our building. On Monday morning, we came up against an unpleasant scene. Many buildings and shops in the main streets of Athens were destroyed by the fires, and people were trying to evaluate the damages.

Our office was covered with ash and the smell was unbearable and it looks like it will take some weeks before can get back into the office. Thankfully fellow Startups offered to help and we were immediately relocated to Colab Athens to carry on with our work, delivering quality services to our customers.

During this weekend we realised that it can take a few hours for new ideas to be born as long as people work together and take advantage of their creativity. However, it also takes just a few hours to destroy everything and create chaos.

These are two sides of Greece. We choose to look on the bright side.

Check photos of the event on Aurelija S. flickr and photos of the disaster on our Facebook page

Responsive Web Design was initially conceived  by Ethan Marcotte and was presented in his  famous article ”Responsive Web Design”. Resposive web design is now considered as a top trend by web designers and is evangelized by all major webdesign sites as  a paradigm.

The core idea of the Responsive Web Design approach is to have a website  developed and designed  in a manner that helps the layout to adjust to the user’s computer screen resolution.
From mobile browsers to netbooks and tablets, users are visiting  websites from an increasing array of devices and browsers. Each one of these devices has a different screen size and image resolution, leading to a distinct user experience.

Through the responsive approach to web design we learn how to think and design a website in order its layout to deliver a quality experience to our users no matter how large (or small) their display. Responsive web designing has a completely different designing approach than traditional web designing, and developers must know about its pros and cons.

During the seminar we talked about successful examples of Responsive Web Design such as FT App [http://apps.ft.com/] and Boston Globe [http://www.bostonglobe.com/].

Even though responsive web design is mainly a mentality and a specific approach to web design, there are several resources available that could help beginners and experts alike familiarize themselves with the tools of the trade. During the seminar @doxaras walked us through  some of the most useful tools.

Responsive web design | fotisfxTALKS from Fotis Samaridis on Vimeo.

Check out @doxaras  slides from the presentation

Below you can find some really well structured resources on responsive web design

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/09/the-ultimate-responsive-web-design-roundup/
http://www.netmagazine.com/features/21-top-tools-responsive-web-design
http://www.coreysmith.ws/blog/mobile-site-or-responsive-design
http://www.netmagazine.com/features/seven-lessons-learned-responsive-web-design

On the following jsfiddle links, you can find some real life scenarios and you can freely experiment using them as a learning tool.

http://jsfiddle.net/doxaras/fjrWn/2/
http://jsfiddle.net/doxaras/LeB47/
http://jsfiddle.net/doxaras/CKPnJ/
http://jsfiddle.net/doxaras/nCGUu/
http://jsfiddle.net/doxaras/RMMaJ/
http://jsfiddle.net/doxaras/WTaKw/
http://jsfiddle.net/doxaras/T66wQ/

if that doesn’t cut it you could get the book written by the man himself Ethan Marcotte http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design

In an attempt to answer that question on Friday, January 20 NiobiumLabs team partnered up with the students of the National Technological University of Athens in a creative and challenging workshop. Our aim was to build Siri from scratch in an afternoon.

During the workshop, the students had the opportunity to see and participate in the application development.

The tools

In order to create the application we used  http://www.politepix.com/openears

OpenEars an open-source iOS library for implementing round-trip English language speech recognition and text-to-speech on the iPhone. Unlike Siri, which handles the requests server side, OpenEars is capable of local recognition on the iPhone of vocabularies with hundreds of words depending on the environment and other factors, and performs very well with command-and-control language models.

Combining that with the Wolfram Alpha API we have managed to emulate Siri user experience, emphasizing on the artificial intelligence part of information retrieval process. On the educational side, we showcased the basic steps needed to build an iOS project and some common practices in structuring your app, such as:

• Including third party libraries to your project
• using retina & non retina sliced images to create custom UI elements
• using custom fonts
• retrieving data from disc
• building your views both programmatically and by using Xcode's Interface Builder
• memory management
• making asynchronous HTTP calls
• XML parsing
• using UITableViews with varying cell size and dynamic content retrieved asynchronously from the web.

Drawbacks

Although Open Ears is fast and reliable, it unfortunately suffers the problems all client side NLP software packages have, which is limited vocabulary references.

The code

https://github.com/NiobiumLabs/Siri-Wolfram

get the results and tell us what you think, keep in mind that this project was primarily created for educational purposes.

The learning experience

as Antonis Kalipetis on of the participating students pointed out:

"The workshop was quite a nice idea, in universities you learn a lot, but you don't get to know how the industry works and possible problems you might face there.
In the workshop, someone could see the whole process for making an application, in a few and easy steps. Catching the idea, starting development and choosing the best external libraries to use, integrating your designer's icons and deploying it. Mobile is a really nice field for development and workshops like that open the doors for doing something on your own, which is really awesome!
Let's hope for more workshops like this one, or other mobile platforms!"

Do not miss it! Today at 16:00 at Multimedia Auditorium, NTUA central campus.

If you want to build something awesome with us just join us.  Check our jobs section cause we are in a massive round of new hires!

Το ζητούμενο αποτέλεσμα για μια τέτοια εφαρμογή ήταν ο συνδυασμός ευχρηστίας και καλαισθησίας, έτσι ώστε ο χρήστης να έχει τη δυνατότητα της ενημέρωσης για τα πολιτιστικά δρώμενα μέσα από ένα φιλικό μενού, το οποίο προσφέρει ένα εύρος επιλογών.

Στον άξονα αυτό κινούνται όλες οι επερχόμενες αναβαθμίσεις της εφαρμογής και το βραβείο αυτό μας δεσμεύει γι’ ακόμη μεγαλύτερη ποιότητα στις προσεχείς εκδόσεις. Αντιγράφουμε από το δελτίο τύπου:

Η iPhone εφαρμογή του ελculture.gr, είναι ένας σύγχρονος καθημερινός πολιτιστικός οδηγός που χωράει στο τηλέφωνο σας κι επιπλέον έχει πολλές χρηστικές δυνατότητες. Μέσα από τα προσεγμένα μενού, ο χρήστης μπορεί να ενημερωθεί για την ατζέντα της ημέρας, ενώ μ’ ένα εντυπωσιακό μενού προβάλλονται όλες οι πρεμιέρες και οι νέες εκδηλώσεις της τρέχουσας εβδομάδας. Υπάρχει επίσης, η δυνατότητα για την καταχώρηση μιας εκδήλωσης ως αγαπημένης, έτσι ώστε να είναι άμεσα προσπελάσιμη από το σχετικό μενού, ενώ υπάρχει και ειδική ενότητα με τις εκδηλώσεις, που τελειώνουν στο προσεχές διάστημα για όσους είναι της τελευταίας στιγμής. Κάθε εκδήλωση παρουσιάζεται μ’ έναν συνοπτικό και συνάμα ουσιαστικό τρόπο, με αποτέλεσμα ο χρήστης να έχει στην οθόνη του συγκεντρωμένη όλη την σημαντική πληροφορία, την οποία μπορεί να τη μοιραστεί με τα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης με τα οποία συνδέεται η εφαρμογή αλλά και να χρησιμοποιήσει τη δυνατότητα πλοήγησης και προβολής στο χάρτη.

Art Director και Designer της εφαρμογής είναι ο Νάσος Κ. που με την εμπειρία του στο mobile UX μας βοήθησε να παράξουμε αυτό το εξαιρετικό αποτέλεσμα.

Niobium Labs affective analysis suite - which automatically detects and classifies emotions most likely to be present in visual inputs - has recently officially exited stealth mode. Best part? We'll be presenting it to the tech savvy and innovative crowd of TEDxThess this coming Saturday morning, April the 2nd.

Manolis Perakakis and Yiannis Doxaras will be showcasing Niobium Labs' brain-computer interfaces (EEG EPOC) on the TEDxThess second stage with live mind device training on lucky volunteers. So save the date, come say hi and experience a very promising technology of tomorrow, today.

Check out a description of the technology here:

Get a feeling of what we will be showing this Saturday in the video below.

EPOC EEG Navigation

via Nielsen and MobileMarketingWatch