THE STORY OF SPEAKERZEN.ME
Inaugural Google's Launchpad fosters SE Europe Youth's Intellectual Capital Utilization. Financial-Academy's startup “SpeakerZen” wins the 1st prize. (Athens, October 10, 2013)
Google Launchpad Athens took place from October 7 to 10, 2013 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art.
Google Launchpad involved recently-founded companies of technology and developers from all over Greece, aiming to share ideas and technical skills, in order to form groups, create new products for the market and develop their businesses.
Athens is the second city, after Tel Aviv, that hosts Google executives and Google Launchpad with the purpose of presenting tools and strategies that will bring domestic and international success to a start-up.
More than eighty developers and business candidates participated in the event.
About us
The 1st PRIZE!
Led and mentored by Panagiotis Tzellos, the Athens-based Financial-Academy.gr team won the first place with the start-up “SpeakerZen”, an application facilitating direct input from mobile devices, helping speakers improve their skills by getting direct feedback from their audience.
“I strongly believe that Greece has brilliant and skilful young people. Therefore, with the right guidance and by challenging the way they think, we guide them towards selecting the most appropriate initiatives, we help them put their thoughts in order, and teach them how to avoid pitfalls and manage the superficiality of their youth! My priority is to enable them to create real value for themselves, their peers and ultimately the society.
Based on these thoughts, and with a strong sense of personal responsibility I decided to hire the first intern in my company in 2010. It was only later in October 2012 when I decided to take this a step forward and progressively start hiring and employing more interns and include them in real projects, my startups.
As part of my conference and seminar activities through Financial-Academy and European-Forums.eu, I started the ConferenceV.com project, a web app providing interaction and engagement between the audience and the speakers.
In April 2013, I set up a team with interns to work on a real project-startup, the VivaFunds.com startup. However, at the end of September of the same year, one of the interns informed me about the 1st Google Launchpad. The team was ready to participate in such a competition, and although this was not my priority, I accepted to participate and assist my interns with this experience. It was such a big time and a great honor for them to live those moments and get the best experience under the auspices of Google Inc.
The project I decided to participate with was ConferenceV.com, the first web app version I was already using in my conferences with six features at that time (Agenda, Questions, Polling/Graphs, Sponsors, Event and Speaker Evaluations). David Katz, the mentor of our team at the Google Launchpad, suggested to focus on the “Speakers Evaluation”. Thus, the name of the app that came up was SpeakerZen.”
