Greek start-up “Parking Defenders” was selected to take part in the Microsoft BizSpark European Summit, London, June 2012.

The future is app to us

Amidst continuing economic gloom, a new generation of young Greek tech entrepreneurs is nevertheless making in-roads into global markets, and hoping to change the country’s notoriously state-sector reliant culture.

Published on 15 June 2012 at 16:41
Greek start-up “Parking Defenders” was selected to take part in the Microsoft BizSpark European Summit, London, June 2012.

Greek geek central is a light, bright, very white space off Athens' main shopping street, furnished with cheap desks and chairs from Ikea and an expensive – and well used – coffee machine. They don't do despondent here. At coLab you can get a desk, free broadband and as much coffee as you can drink for €10 a day or €140 a month Or you can rent a small office for not much more.

Some of the dozen small startups that do are world leaders in their field. BugSense, for instance, though barely a year old, is used by more than 4,500 mobile developers around the world to track and analyse crash reports from their apps. It recently turned down a £1m takeover bid. Others have already outgrown coLab, as this space is called.

TaxiBeat, a mobile app that allows taxi drivers to advertise where they are and passengers to hail them, is doubling its business every two months and has expanded into Latin America and Scandinavia.

These are Greek ideas, launched by young Greek entrepreneurs; most of them with a PhD or master's in what is poetically termed the internet-mobile-software triangle.

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"It is quite a new phenomenon," says Andreas Constantinou of VisionMobile, which analyses the mobile telecoms industry. "Greece has always had bright minds, but for generations a public sector job was the only goal. Decent pay, job for life, early retirement. That's no longer the case. And new technology – apps – mean people can concretise their ideas."

Industry

What happened to the factories?

Greece “lost its factories”, while “services buoyed by the development of tourism and the deregulation of finance and telecommunications” continued to grow, reportsLe Monde.

In one decade, the tertiary sector of the economy expanded by 83%. However, “services are supposed to accompany industry not to replace it", points out Michalis Vasileiadis, an economist at the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research (IOBE). "The fact that Greece was forced to borrow to compensate for its structurally loss-making balance of trade resulted in an increasingly uncomfortable situation."

What was the cause of the decline? wonders the daily, which focuses on two explanations —

Europe has one story, while the Greeks have another. Both versions have some degree of truth. When it joined the European Union and thereafter the Eurozone, the country was obliged to open its borders, and to comply with quotas for agriculture and textiles... As an agricultural country without much of a tradition for innovation, Greece was simply not ready to cope with the upheavals occasioned by this change.

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