A chilly October evening and the first of the autumn rains was bouncing off the roads and pavements but from deep in the darkest corners of the town hall came light, small but bright. Inside the hall all the seats are taken and many more stand around the walls; this is the tip of the iceberg that is the resistance.
Tonight there is a seminar about the new legal commercial
entity, the IKE, a talk given by a young lawyer,Nayia Antoniou, then another about the merits
and process of establishing a startup in America by two lawyers from San Francisco,
Christina Tsakona and Andrew Dimitriades. All this
followed attentively by a crowd (more about crowds later) of young and not-so
young optimistics, entrepreneurs and professionals. These are the real patriots, the draughtsmen of tomorrow.
App developers, mobartia presented a brace of new products
that allow the public to suggest and rate everything from eateries to wines to
public offices. The latter made my ears prick up, the chance to rate public
servants’ service to the public. They can demonstrate about pay cuts but for
many considering the concept of doing their job might get them more public
support. Then another app, called imoney
that helps get your expenses in order. I swear that some people are putting too
much trust in our little palm-sized friends but it is a wave and some much smarter
than me are riding it like a boss.
A friend and colleague Dimitris Tzouris took the lectern to
pass on the good news about
2-L8, a
fantastically weird group, look like the sensational Alex Harvey band sound like whose new double CD was financed by crowd-funding.
They received 119% of what they required! (As I write this I have them playing
on youtube. I am a big dEUS fan and I'm digging them big time)
Now more about crowds,
the final speaker was Irineos Filipidis talking about his company GROOPIO, they are the first crowd-funding
platform in Greece. I talk about resistance but there is no resistance without
something to resist, crowd-funding cuts out some of the dependence on banks and
government, the same who orchestrated this whole calamity. Making a new dawn,
not a golden dawn is going to require hard and smart work and relying more on
common resources and less on hand-outs. I would like to see crowd-funding
become an investment tool that allowed people who have some liquidity to get
some decent return while funding some worthy projects. Irineos tells me that
there are some legal barriers to this but you know about wills and ways eh?
Well that’s all for the moment, but the message is clear; get out and do what you can and do it well.
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