By definition, disruptive innovation can bring evolutionary (or even revolutionary) changes, improvements and sustainable expansion to an existing market. Or sometimes it just creates a new market that displaces and eventually replaces what came before. (Radio, TV and the internet are examples of the former. Horse-drawn carriages & mass-produced cars are example of the latter.)

Call us wide-eyed, but with Babelverse we’ve endeavoured to figure out a holistic recipe that’s the best of both worlds. On the one hand is the interpreting profession, for whom we bring innovative tools made possible by today’s technologies, and access to a larger global market made possible by working remotely. On the other hand, seeing our increasingly globally connected world, we leverage the power of multi-linguals, to create an entirely new market of informal on-the-spot interpretation affordable to travellers and glomads of all kinds.

As the book “Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World” illustrates in countless poignant ways, language barriers are present in every aspect of our lives, and we started the Babelverse project simply because we needed it ourself (and realised we’re not alone!) Like Siegfried Ramler, the chief of interpreting at the Nuremberg trials (for which simultaneous interpretation was invented) says, “necessity is the mother of invention”.

In the “lean startup” way, we have experimented a lot, learning how to make it work through trial and error, until arriving where we are today (and the journey isn’t over). You may have heard contradictory things, which were sometimes outdated or simply misunderstood. It’s easy to mix up or not grasp the differences between our various offerings, because of the diverse range of people who power Babelverse (from enthusiastic multi-linguals to professional conference interpreters) and situations it can be used for (from helping a tourist with directions to interpreting international summits).

We’ve always been very transparent (see for example our page containing a lot of information on Being a Babelverse Interpreter which we encourage you to read), but we realise people in the profession still have many questions, maybe because our past communications (at conferences or in the press) have been mostly geared at tech audiences.

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”  – Nelson Mandela

So let’s clear up a few myths and make some statements about where we stand:

• We recognise that interpretation is a difficult skill, and that being multilingual isn’t nearly enough. It requires training, hard work, experience and arguably even a certain predisposition. Our tiered system and future plans (notably related to training) account for that.
• Babelverse makes a clear distinction between enthusiastic multi-linguals and qualified professional linguists, they are made available to users for distinct use cases and situations (informal vs. business, helpful vs. critical), and at different rates. As you may know, that is not the case for most companies in the remote interpretation space.
• We want interpreters on our platform to receive a fair income and to be in control of their own schedule. They can choose what days & time-slots they are available, interpreting notifications are then sent during these times, interpreters then accept requests they choose.
• On day 1 – literally – of the Babelverse Project, we decided that the split would be would be 70-30 (interpreters receiving 70% of what the client pays for interpretation), and have stuck to it, putting much thought and effort into our rates and variable costs to make this work.
• That said, as you’d probably expect, our rates are lower than those paid by large organisations such as the UN or EU. Our business model has always been to find the sweet spot between being affordable to as many people as possible, while also being a fair source of income. That is why Babelverse sets the rates.
• Our pricing system calculates a base rate for each possible language pair, based on an average cost of living in the countries where they are most spoken (using consolidated data from several international sources). We then adjust the base rate according to the tier of service (enthusiast, professional…), use case (consecutive, simultaneous…), and skill-set (specialist topics). These rates will soon be published publicly, and in the meantime the applicable rate is always indicated in a job notification.
• Babelverse is based on using off-the-shelf devices, internet connections and phone lines. Of course the transmission quality of sound & video is not as high as with specialised hardware and dedicated satellite links (and obviously physical presence). But that keeps costs low, which allows us to offer affordable prices to many users who would otherwise be excluded, and to pay interpreters the share we do. Also, with the speed of technological progress (eg. Moore’s law), we are confident that this will only keep improving very quickly, and are constantly testing & developing new tools and techniques to that end.
• There are some situations where more serious and costly solutions (such as on-site interpreters) are beneficial or even required – the potential market is big enough to accommodate both.
• We’ve mostly focused on creating new niches, providing our service to clients and users who would otherwise not have access to interpretation, due to a lack of awareness, or the complexity and high costs traditionally associated.

And more specifically about remote simultaneous interpreting:

• We recognise the huge mental focus and energy required, and as such the value in having a “booth mate”, and always schedule at least two interpreters per language. The virtual booth environment we’re developing helps them collaborate remotely, such as note taking, monitoring that the active interpreter is being heard, and switching seamlessly with each other at any time. When two booth mates have gotten along well and collaborated effectively, they can indicate that connection, which will be taken account for next jobs.
• We also have a “chef d’equipe”, at least for large events, helping the interpreters with coordination, tech support and feedback. When it’s being interpreted into several languages, notes can also be shared among all.
• We usually schedule each interpreter for full half-day slots, and pay for the total time they are on the job, including when they’re supporting their booth mate but aren’t “on air”. If the event goes over schedule, we also pay for that overtime too.
• We know that preparation is key to providing a quality service, and do our best to educate event organisers to schedule and set up their conference to provide the best environment. Our minimum requirements include all speakers using individual microphones, and shown on a live video feed, and we strive to obtain speakers’ information, presentation slides and any prepared speeches in advance.
• We require interpreters to use headsets & microphones for quality sound, provide them with clear technical requirements and usage guides, and frequently conduct 1-on-1 technical tests as well.

All in all, Babelverse is a movement to harness the power of language and human communication to bring the world closer together. It can create a new lifestyle that makes work in cubicles (or booths!) a thing of the past, a lifestyle where geography, or the place where you happened to be born, are no longer a barrier, with which you can have fun helping people, while making a good living for yourself.

We’ve been putting – and will continue to put – a lot of effort into developing a sustainable business model and the best tools for interpreters, working alongside many interpreters to do so. We are always happy to speak with people who want to be involved in Babelverse’s development, simply by offering feedback or in a more involved capacity.

Opening up the discussion and those announcements!

To that end, we’ll be participating in an on-line public discussion on the topic in the coming weeks (date TBA, follow our Twitter / Facebook page to stay informed) with a few respected members of the interpreting profession and industry, such as Prof. Barry Olsen (founder of InterpretAmerica), Martin Esposito, Prof. Esther M. Navarro-Hall (owner of 1Culture). The venue will be a Google Hangout that anyone will be able to watch, both live or later on. The date and time will be announced at a later date, so if you’d like to participate or simply be notified, as well as if you have any questions or feedback you’d like discussed, please fill out this form. UPDATE: (6 Oct 2013) This has been postponed until a later date when everyone is available.

We’ll  be participating in a panel on “The Coming Wave: Technologies That May Disrupt Interpretation” at the InterpretAmerica Summit this June 14-15th, and look forward to have more fruitful discussions with the industry, and hopefully meet some of you there in person!

Thanks for reading. Time for a cup of tea.

UPDATE (6 Oct 2013): The panel and presentation took place, we announced the first working draft of our rates and released an updated FAQ for Professional Interpreters (Black Belts), we also publicly published the slides we presented:

Babelverse Presentation at InterpretAmerica Summit, June 2013 from Babelverse

We have some news to announce, but we first wanted to tell you a bit about how we got to this point. If you’ve read some of our previous blog posts, or followed us on Facebook or Twitter, you probably know some pieces of the story, so we’ll try to keep it short.

Backstory

It all really began for Babelverse with a Startup Weekend event in Athens, Greece at the end of 2010. After living in Paris for a while and working on a few startups, Mayel de Borniol had decided he wanted to travel and live abroad. Josef Dunne, working for a digital agency in London, felt the same. We both ended up in Greece, and came up with the idea of Babelverse shortly after meeting there, mainly driven by our own troubles with the language –  it was all Greek to us!

An early opportunity to test out the concept came during the March 2011 tsunami in Japan. We called for volunteers to offer free interpretation to assist foreign rescue teams and reporters on the ground who didn’t speak any Japanese.

Soon after, the two of us spent 6 months in Chile as part of the 1st round of the government’s pioneering incubator Startup Chile (offers foreign entrepreneurs 40,000 USD equity-free, a 1 year visa, office space and relocation support, with the aim to attract potentially world class startups to their country). So in June 2011 we packed our bags, said see-you-later to Greece, and headed down to Chile on this unknown entrepreneurial adventure to make Babelverse a reality.

In December, we headed to Paris for an opportunity to present Babelverse in front of thousands of people for the first time. The audience of the LeWeb conference was very excited about the project, and the judges honoured us with an award.

In January we offered to live translate US president Obama’s 2012 State of the Nation address into up to 6,796 languages (i.e. all of them). We were living in Buenos Aires at the time, we pulled a 24h all-nighter with the help of many friends and volunteer interpreters around the world, to make this last-minute idea happen (thanks!)

Then returning to Europe, and taking bootstrapping to the extreme, our team of three (now joined by our designer Zachary Zorbas) lived and worked in a 15 square metre garden shed in London, continuing to develop the platform in time for launch.

For the official launch in April 2012 at The Next Web, on top of participating in their startup competition (and receiving 2 more awards, one from the jury and the People’s Choice!), we partnered with the organisers to interpret the conference talks into Spanish and Portuguese for remote viewers in Latin America.

It is worth noting, that right from day one, people have paid to use Babelverse, and we’ve paid our interpreters. Differing from what is common in Silicon Valley, Babelverse is not one of those apps in search of a market or business model. A recent gig was providing interpretation into Francais Quebecois (French) for the International Startup Festival in Montreal.

In May 2012 we headed to New York for TechCrunch Disrupt, where Babelverse had obtained a booth to demo in the US for the first time. It was a nice surprise that this less multilingual public was just as excited as everyone else, and voted Babelverse for “Audience Choice”, which lead to a presentation on stage, where a jury then selected us to present once again among the top 6 finalists.

This all lead to many conversations with investors and other interesting people who wanted to follow up, most of them based in Silicon Valley, so we decided to extend our stay in the US and headed to San Francisco. This quickly proved to be a good move, as within 2 weeks of being there, we’d obtained some initial funding.

Funding

Indeed, we are proud to announce 500 Startups as our lead investor (the round also includes other angels). We feel that they are a great match because they share Babelverse’s international focus, and have a strong and very helpful network of representatives and portfolio startups around the world.

Though now in the US, Babelverse wasn’t forgotten in Europe! We were selected as one of 12 top start-ups in Europe as part of the European Union’s TechAllStars programme, and more recently selected as a top high-potential startup in the Startup Games, an Olympic-affiliated event organized by the UK government.

The point being, Babelverse cannot be described as “European”, “Greek”, “Chilean”, “South American”, or “US based”, etc. Babelverse is a global (if not universal!) project. We already work with collaborators and interpreters in more than 100 countries, with our interpreters covering 642 language pairs as of the day this post was published. Even when our customers are US-based (for example), they often resort to Babelverse when they want to expand their international presence.

Partnership with TechCrunch for Disrupt SF 2012

In fact, we’re also announcing a partnership with TechCrunch to translate Disrupt SF (a conference about technology-driven disruptions happening in many industries, which combines top thought-leader discussions with new product and company launches). This will make Techcrunch Disrupt San Francisco available in 12 languages so that the public around the world can view and follow the proceedings live in their own language.

The languages available will be the following:

• English
• Español (Spanish)
• Français (French)
• Português (Portuguese)
• Deutsch (German)
• Italiano (Italian)
• 普通话 (Mandarin Chinese)
• Русский язык (Russian)
• मानक हिन्दी (Hindi)
• 日本語 (Japanese)
• 한국말 (Korean)
• Türkçe (Turkish)
• Arabic

Join us!

Next steps for us include rounding-up up our awesome team (apply here!), launching a mobile app for personal on-the-spot interpretation, and raising a larger round of funding to make all this – and much more – possible…

Side note: If you’ve read all the above, you may have noticed that we move around a lot! And if you’ve been following our adventures on social networks, you probably saw our photos all over the islands of Greece this summer. While it sure is great fun, we at the same time never stop tirelessly working to take Babelverse to the next level. In today’s world of near-ubiquitous WiFi and 3G we count ourselves very lucky to be able to work from anywhere, and we choose to do so from the most awesome places. Life and work don’t have to be enemies, and we are very happy to enable our team, and the thousands of Babelverse interpreters to have the same lifestyle.

You’ll find more details about the Babelverse story on our blog and there is much, much more that is yet untold… buy us a beer and we may share some stories

Subject: Don’t use human translators

Message: Hi, Cool app! Have a suggestion.

Analysis:
– Mobile internet is costly in roaming.
– English is #1 language globally. So, 80% of interactions could include English.

Suggestion:
– Create an application that will record English speach, convert to text, translate to Local language and say via text-to-speech.

Not great quality. But see on the market and cost sides.
– Big market
– Low costs (no variable costs!)
– Scalability!!!

Monetisation: sell whole application ($1-10).

This is exactly what Babelverse is not about. We’re building a global community of people that can mutually help each other communicate regardless of language, and certainly not an automated smartphone app set up to make a quick buck.

Babelverse relies on people to preserve the quality, context, cultural relevance, tone and emotion of the spoken word. Much better than any algorithm! Machine translation is just not reliable for real conversations.

Some of the companies that have taken the automated approach are apparently realising that it doesn’t really work, take this tweet by the creators of a machine-powered voice translation app (currently #1 in the US App Store – their user reviews are an interesting read btw).

We mentioned them during our presentation on-stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last week:

iTranslate Voice is even mentioned in the TC Disrupt presentation of @babelverse http://t.co/o6XXAGmz (at about 12:30)

— iTranslate (@iTranslateApp) May 22, 2012

Here’s their response:

BTW @babelverse you're right. MT does not solve the problem…

— iTranslate (@iTranslateApp) May 22, 2012

Also, while English (or rather, Globish) is being used by many people around the world to communicate across borders, we think this is not the ideal solution. Communication becomes poorer when two people are speaking in languages other than their native tongue, they are forced to use only a subset of available vocabulary, etc. We also believe that the diversity of languages contains much richness, it shapes how people think, act and interact in different cultures. Humanity has a lot to gain in preserving this, and much to lose if we move towards just speaking one language. There are many scientific and philosophical papers about this, but we’ll start by recommending this great science-fiction book: Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.

People vs. Robots. Whose side are you?

First of all we want to thank our interpreters who volunteered to help people understand Obama’s Speech, as well as everyone who gave Babelverse a try. Thank you also to all those who spread the word, as that is essential for this type of community-based service. Here are few tweets that got the ball rolling out there about the service.

https://twitter.com/techcrunch/status/161971262233657346
https://twitter.com/tropo/status/161893647883829249
https://twitter.com/startupchile/status/161811753435537408
https://twitter.com/startupweekend/status/161887305471234049

Screenshot of service

Ambitious?

Yes, our goals are very ambitious, some would even say crazy. But we stand by them. Of course we didn’t get interpreters online in 6,976 languages on day one, but that is our vision and we are doing our utmost to make it happen.

After the 24 hour marathon to set everything up for the event (we only thought of doing this literally the day before!), we greatly enjoyed listening in live, switching constantly between different languages to hear our awesome interpreters and make sure it was all working well (which it mostly was!) If you were trying it out and encountered any glitches or have any other feedback, we are eager to hear it, contact us!

Short clip showing the service in action

Time to get some sleep

We then caught a few hours of sleep before digging into the stats:

• More than 1000 people from over 80 countries tuned in to our service on the 24th.
• Interpreters from around the world volunteered to provide the translation in a wide variety of languages, such as Spanish, Hindi, French, Mandarin Chinese, Greek, Bahasa Indonesian,  Portuguese, etc.
• About 30% of the users were providing interpretation, while the rest were listening.
• We had an average of 2 interpreters per language. Listeners could provide feedback by rating them, and could switch between them.

We think our concept was really proven last night, and will of course continue to improve and grow Babelverse, watch this space!

Press coverage

This project got a lot of coverage around the world and we woke up to many new users of different languages joining, such as Chinese (in its various forms: Cantonese, Mandarin, Wu, etc). All very encouraging.

See tweets collection at http://storify.com/babelverse/babelverse-to-translate-state-of-the-union

The very heavy trophy we have carried all around the globe!

Full experience here

http://storify.com/cleiva/babelverse-experience-at-leweb-2011/

It’s a programme created by the Chilean government, to attract early stage, high-potential entrepreneurs to bootstrap their startups in Chile, using it as a platform to go global. The goal being to transform the country to be more entrepreneurial and risk-taking and finally become the definitive innovation hub of Latin America. In exchange for our presence there and involvement with local universities, conferences and more, they provided a 1 year visa and relocation help, office space and financial support.

Team @babelverse has now moved to Santiago as a participant in @StartupChile – expect to see a lot more from us in coming weeks & months!

— Babelverse (@babelverse) July 9, 2011

It was a unique opportunity, so early July, we packed what we could in a couple of bags and flew from Athens, Greece to Santiago de Chile!

There’s so much to tell about our awesome time there, that we’ll have to save it for another post. In the meantime, below are a few photos and tweets…

Along the way, we received press coverage and increased our members from all over the continent, for example here on WebPrendedor or here on FayerWayer, and even ended up being named #2 start-up in Latin America in the PulsoStartup ranking!

Great discussion yesterday with Prof @Wadhwa and now with former Intel CEO Craig Barrett. You'd think I am in Silicon Valley, but its Chile!

— Mayel de Borniol (@mayel2b) August 18, 2011

Was interesting to hear Craig Barrett mention how Moore's law become a self-fulfilling prophecy at Intel. Used it as guideline for research.

— Mayel de Borniol (@mayel2b) August 19, 2011

DePe talk on entrepreneurship (@ Campus San Joaquín – Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile w/ 2 others) http://t.co/Rp8NCIms

— Mayel de Borniol (@mayel2b) October 3, 2011

These unprepared talks are becoming a habit! RT @babelverse Just gave a unexpected 5mn presentation at #startechconf – very good reception

— Mayel de Borniol (@mayel2b) November 4, 2011

Internet Exploder comes back to haunt me sometimes, at least now its confined to a tab on a Mac's browser! pic.twitter.com/UsLk27rC

— Mayel de Borniol (@mayel2b) December 6, 2011

Do you know any code hackers/ninjas/monkeys/squirrels (or you're one yourself) in Chile? come to our 48h hackathon! http://t.co/7vshcneG

— Mayel de Borniol (@mayel2b) November 8, 2011

Babelverse team will be sharing some of our many crazy stories at this 1st event by RealStarters http://t.co/PoMHkgwY

— Babelverse (@babelverse) November 21, 2011

Doing another 24 hour marathon to get a cool service into the hands of as many people as possible. Exciting http://t.co/mVj2Dpxl

— Mayel de Borniol (@mayel2b) January 24, 2012

When disaster hit in Japan, like everyone following the news, we wanted to do whatever was possible to help. We realised that Babelverse could be a big help to foreign aid teams, by allowing them to better communicate on the field.

So, during an all night coding marathon in an Central Athens flat, Josef & Mayel set up a dedicated and completely free service, meant to break down language barriers between aid teams, NGOs, media and locals.

Spent all night setting up interpretation service to #HelpJapan : http://babelverse.com I love what I do

— Mayel de Borniol (@mayel2b) March 15, 2011

With it, anyone fluent in English and Japanese could very easily make themselves available, so that anyone in Japan needing interpretation could call a single local number or Skype account (or even use their web browser) to automatically be connected with one of the available volunteer interpreters.

In Japan & need live interpretation? OR speak ENG/JPN & can volunteer time to interpret? #HelpJapan Goto http://t.co/X6EjstT via @babelverse

— Babelverse (@babelverse) March 15, 2011

The response was amazing! In it’s first 48 hours of operation, more than 100 bilingual (Japanese<>English) speakers volunteered their time (4 hours each on average, totalling more than 16 days of online time!)

Thank you!

We want to take the opportunity to thank our VoIP provider Tropo for sponsoring the cost of the local Japanese phone number as well as the NGO Translators Without Borders and all the others who spread the word.

.@Babelverse is real-time Japanese translation for crisis workers http://cot.ag/ejFaVw

— Tropo (@Tropo) March 18, 2011

On-line platform for volunteer translators willing and capable of helping Japan: http://babelverse.com/

— TranslatorsWB (@TranslatorsWB) March 27, 2011

A screenshot of the service page

All members of Babelverse are available to volunteer during any crisis situation. This is integral to being part of the Babelverse community.

TEDxAcademy Women – 8th Dec 2010

Niki Siropoulou organiser of TEDxAcademy offered us the opportunity to try out Babelverse in a real-world situation (thanks Niki!) We interpreted the live video feed between Athens and the main TED event in Washington featuring Hillary Clinton, as well as a selection of other talks between Greek and English.

When we announced this on Twitter, we had people out there also wanting to volunteer to interpret the talks in other language pairs, the response was amazing, people were really answering the call!

We have 2 wonderful volunteers that will translate #TEDxAcademy session 2 from Greek > English.. a first 4 @babelverse http://bit.ly/eSUnsD

— Babelverse (@babelverse) December 8, 2010

Then – a stroke of luck – one of the speakers was running late, Niki immediately offered us the stage to present Babelverse, we had no presentation prepared and were in the middle of a trial run, but of course we took the opportunity to talk about Babelverse.

We presented/demoed Babelverse on stage of #TEDxAcademy Was totally last minute, so hope u understood, otherwise: http://bit.ly/hmHt7I

— Babelverse (@babelverse) December 8, 2010

Open Fund

During this time, we were doing a lot of planning, mock-ups and business-plan writing, spending many late nights running on Freddo Cappucinos, in preparation to present our project to the Open Fund board, soon after which they offered to invest. We also talked with several other early-stage investors in Europe during that time, with a few of them showing a keen interest.

Startegy 2 – 29th Jan 2011

We were then invited by Startegy organiser Vicki Kovolou to come back and share our experience and progress since the 1st Startegy event, to encourage and inspire others starting out on their ventures.

Had the opportunity to present at #Startegy and talk about our progress with @Babelverse since coming up with the idea at previous event

— Babelverse (@babelverse) January 29, 2011

@mayel2b and @josef talking about @babelverse and their previous #startegy expirience http://plixi.com/p/73255191

— Alice Corovessi (@alicecorovessi) January 29, 2011

Our FIRST TV interview on Greek national TV

The subtitles say Bubble and not Babel?!?!?!?!

Turning down funding and our decision to bootstrap

Taking outside money should not be taken lightly. Our project was very early-stage and we felt that we had spent a lot of time focusing on this. We talked in depth with the Greek fund, yet had not progressed our project as swiftly as we would have liked. Our attention had been taken away from it, we wanted to develop Babelverse further and then think about funding if and when we absolutely needed it.

So we decided to turn down the funding amicably and bootstrap. So… bootstrap we did. Fortunately for us, very soon after this something was about to come up which would change Babelverse for the better! (more on that in later posts.)

In the meantime we recieved some  media coverage, by the leading Greek tech blog away.gr “Γνωρίστε το Babelverse, το Translation μόλις έγινε 2.0“ (ENG: “Meet Babelverse, Translation 2.0 has arrived”)

Coverage on leading Greek tech news site @away_gr:
"Meet Babelverse, Translation 2.0" http://bit.ly/fFnsN0
Thank you @kalavros

— Babelverse (@babelverse) February 21, 2011

We worked on building a comprehensive database of spoken languages

The list of (currently 6,916) languages we will support is now available at http://babelverse.com/#/linguistics/ Feedback much appreciated!

— Babelverse (@babelverse) February 4, 2011

We also had did a test run of Babelverse during an OpenCoffee event in Athens.

Test went very well after finding the right cables/adapters to plug into the sound system and a volunteer interpreter, thanks Aggelos!

— Babelverse (@babelverse) March 11, 2011

External validation

In May, Japan’s giant telecom company NTT DoCoMo announced that it was working on the prototype of a simultaneous speech translation app, but powered by speech recognition, machine translation and text-to-speech. Babelverse was no longer the only real-time voice translation app (except ours is powered by people!).

NTT DoCoMo testing (2nd after @babelverse simultaneous speech translation app, but machine-powered http://t.co/y7P6hrJ via @engadget

— Babelverse (@babelverse) May 31, 2011

In January, Google had also launched the experimental “conversation mode” feature on Google Translate for Android, for automated voice translation between Spanish and English.

Google announced in May that it would shut down the Google Translate API, due to its massive popularity. They will reportedly be relaunching it with a paid model, demonstrating at the same time the great demand for translation, and it’s business potential.

Google is shutting down the translation API … Wait … WHAT? http://t.co/UmMfig0

— Chris Blow (@unthinkingly) May 29, 2011

During that time, we also attended the 1st European translators & interpreters conference in Rome, organised by ProZ, and had the chance to talk with many seasoned people in the industry. It was encouraging to hear what they thought of the challenges facing them (like low-quality automated translation) and their feedback and excitement about Babelverse…

@danielazambrini @henrydotterer and all @ProZcom conf, thanks for great event & interesting discussions, looking forward to more! #przrom11

— Babelverse (@babelverse) May 22, 2011

Start-up Weekend Athens – 19th-21st Nov 2010

Speaking of entrepreneurial events and good timing, following on from the Startegy event, Startup Weekend was happening in Athens! It’s a well known series of 54-hour weekend events that are organised in dozens of cities world-wide during which groups of developers, business folk, start-up enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more pitch ideas for new start-up companies, form teams around those ideas and work to develop a working prototype, demo, and/or presentation by Sunday evening.

On a roll from our hit at Startegy 3 weeks earlier, we just HAD to participate. If a Startup Weekend is happening near you then we highly recommend you take part, they are open to anyone who would like to get stuck in!

So, on Friday night we pitched again, what we now called “Project Babelverse” and spent the week-end putting together mock-ups, testing different open-source tools and cloud services, developing rough prototypes, setting up a landing page, preparing a presentation, meeting lots of great people and thoroughly enjoying ourselves, it was a long and quite fun-filled weekend (#truestory) for those that remember it!

We'll be presenting our project on stage in a few minutes at #swAthens Sign up here to become an alpha tester : http://babelverse.com

— Babelverse (@babelverse) November 21, 2010

On the Sunday night we presented a more refined vision of our project (though it was probably balanced out by our burnout!), and the jury awarded us second place.

We got second place @StartupWeekend ! Thanks everybody for your wishes! Remember to sign up: http://babelverse.com #startupbattle #swAthens

— Babelverse (@babelverse) November 21, 2010

As we headed out the door, a member of a Greek early-stage investment fund (The Open Fund) who was there came and told us that they were interested, and would fast track us through their process!

Soon after that, we were featured on the cover of the monthly free-press newspaper Metropolis, and also in the national newspaper Ta Nea.

Global Start-Up Battle

The Startup Weekend in Athens was happening at the same time as many others around the world, all part of Global Entrepreneurship Week 2010, so there was an bonus competition: Finalists from each city were invited to submit a video for the Global Startup Battle. Of course we went for it and quickly created and submitted a video.

Hands down @babelverse is the best startup in the #starupbattle wildcard! Go watch the videos and see for yourself. http://bit.ly/g5nr5N

— Dennis Palmer (@CoderDennis) December 1, 2010

We came out second behind Mimix, another interesting project doing sign language interpretation (this was starting to become a pattern!)

Anyway, Babelverse was a great idea that people got very excited about and we would of course continue pursuing it.

Congrats! Another 1 that's breaking language barriers RT @StartupBattle @MIMIX is #StartupBattle Ultimate Champion! http://bit.ly/eWrVs9

— Babelverse (@babelverse) December 8, 2010