The Openfund is happy to announce the opening of the call for proposals for its third round of operations. Entrepreneurs may apply starting today by filling the form here. You are also encouraged to take a close look at our process, FAQ and best practices before proceeding with your application.

The call will remain open till June 30, 2010. Early applications get the extra advantage of timely feedback, enabling an improved resubmission before the deadline.

The selection process is set to begin on July 1st. As always, during that time extensive reviews will be provided and shared with the applying entrepreneurs. This will be followed with writing business plans, with the assistance of the Openfund, going through an interview and finally presenting to the Openfund investors. The final selection is expected to take place during the first week of September and beyond that the startups will be admitted in the programme.

We are loooking forward to working with the greatest and most aspiring of entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into reality, together. The journey starts here.

We are happy to report the final results of the long yet fruitful selection process for the companies participating in our second round of operations. We will refer to the later from now on as 'the Openfund Round II' (or 'Openfund II').

We really set the bar high. In full alignment to our investors interests and our commitment to excellence, we ended up with a selection indicative of the projects we are looking for and a team being absolutely worth it. Within this context, we are announcing today the selection of Stockpodium, one more company joining the Openfund.

Stockpodium is a strong team of four from Sofia, Bulgaria, pursuing opportunities at the intersection of visual image search and stock photography.

We're really excited to work closely with the team and make great things happen in the following months. At the same time, we'll keep working at the same fast pace with all 4 companies of the Openfund I, taking their efforts to the next level. Finally, the call for proposals of the Openfund III will open in the following days, stay tuned for full details.

We’re thrilled to invite you to the Openfund Demo Day, an event where all of our start-ups will finally reveal their products to the world. After months of hard work during our development phase, the first round’s companies are ready to graduate and share the fruits of their purpose and passion; we’re pretty sure that you’ll get excited with the results.

The event will take place in Athens on Wednesday April 28 and it will naturally be co-hosted with Open Coffee Greece, the vigorous local entrepreneurial community which also defined the DNA of the Openfund itself. The place to be is Benaki Museum at 138 Piraeus street, with presentations starting at 19.00 in the grand auditorium and plenty of coffee and drinks being served before and after in the cozy bar.

The founders of Fashinating, YouScan, Listiki & Sportmeets will all be there to pitch and share their experiences so far, while we’d like to invite each one of you to join us among entrepreneurs, investors, advisors and all those people who keep the entrepreneurial spirit going. So, save the date or book your flight and be there, tickets are free and access is open to everyone, you may just RSVP here.

At the same time, we at the Openfund consider this event as a tangible proof of our work up to date and we literally cannot wait to share great entrepreneurial stories in the making, or maybe get you to prepare your own one. By supporting great people to put their ideas to work, we see our vision taking shape and the pieces of the puzzle being put one after another into place.

In this context, Demo Day fully stands up to its name and you are all invited to join us and experience the next big things around the corner by yourself, see you there!

We are happy to report the successful conclusion of our second round of applications on February 28. Similarly to the first round, we received a broad set of submissions, associated to software, the web and mobile, among other relevant areas. We are very pleased with the quality of the teams and potential of the ideas collected, while we are eagerly looking forward to work closer with the teams, starting from the reviewing phase.

The graphs below provide insights on the submissions collected, starting from the cumulative distribution of submissions per day, which in this round proved to be more gradual.

Applicants came from 20 countries around the globe, including ones as far as Brazil & Australia. Naturally, 15 countries were European ones, while 55% of all applicants originated from Greece. The map below provides a closer look to the European submissions.

Of equal interest is the self assessment of the applicants’ skills, according to the scale provided within the application template. Expectably, applicants consider themselves more technically than business experienced, while the distribution of self-assesed skills looks much better than that of official degrees.

Our part of the challenge has just started. In compliance to our schedule, the essential process of first stage reviewing is now under way, as the Executive Board is collaborating with our advisors to assess every application received. Applicants should be informed by next Monday March 15 on their success proceeding to the next round or not, while receiving extensive reviews on their initial applications.

To those applied, let us stretch that the real benchmark begins now. In the 1.5 months to follow we will be asking for things from these teams and will be measuring their turnaround time, their insights, their ability to filter noise and so on; this is how we get to know you better and eventually shape our decisions on working further with you.

Should you be willing to apply and you didn’t, please get prepared to do so in our next call for applications, which is expected to open in about two months; that’s really soon. In the meanwhile, we intend to leverage our experience thus far and return significant value to all participants and the ecosystem at large, while finally selecting the greatest of teams to work with during the second round of the Openfund.

You have a great business idea. You know that investors should be pitching you, not the other way around. Yet presenting it the right way is very tough. After sorting through dozens of seed funding applications on Openfund’s first round, we have put together below some words of advice on what we think makes a strong pitch. Openfund’s Round II is accepting applications now, so if you read this and feel inspired, submit your application this week here – deadline is February 28th!

Ten days before the submission deadline, we provide hereby the full schedule of selection operations for the second round of the Openfund:

- Sunday February 28: Submission deadline
This is the hard deadline for submitting your application here. You may get some quick tips, or check our FAQ for more information.

- Monday March 15: Notification
Applicants get notified on if they proceed to the next round of interviews or not. Successful applicants are provided with a business plan template to fill, while full reviews are shared with both successful and unsuccessful applicants.

- Monday March 29: Submission deadline for business plans
Extensive feedback will be provided during this couple of weeks for your questions to be answered and your business plan to be further improved, before getting reviewed by our full Executive Board.

- Friday April 9 & Saturday April 10: Openfund Interview day(s) II
During the interview day, 20' interviews of all teams successful so far take place with our full Executive Board. Physical presence of remote teams is not required.

- Sunday April 11: Notification
Successful applicants are invited to present at the Openfund Launch Day II.

- Wednesday April 28: Openfund Demo Day I
This will be an open to everyone event, during which our first round's start-ups will showcase to the public their progress and products created during the incubation period. More details on the event will follow soon.

- Friday April 30: Openfund Launch Day II, presentations
Applications which made it thus far will pitch in front of our investors and advisors, so as to finally select up to 5 teams for our second round of operations.

- Monday May 3: The 4-month incubation begins

We're looking forward to leverage our expertise and experience thus far to return significant added value to all of you applying, and work together with the best teams out there to turn great ideas into fantastic products and successful companies.

We are happy to report that Openfund, the seed fund focusing on software, web & mobile services in Southeastern Europe, is sweetening its terms to entrepreneurs and providing them with an even more compelling offer.

The percentage that Entrepreneurs give to Openfund will drop from 20% to 15%.  What they get in return is seed funding (between 25K and 35K Euros) as well as access to the expertise and business networks of an exceptional group of advisors.

We were very pleased with the number and quality of applications on the first round and with this move we are hoping to build even more momentum and attract an even larger number of high quality applications in Round 2 and beyond.

We are also adjusting the allocation of Openfund’s 15% share between investors and the Executive board, in favor of investors. 10% is allocated to investors, and 5% to the Executive Board. This makes the terms more favorable to our investors, recognizing the importance of their contributions.

We believe that these changes, effective from the currently open round, will ensure that Openfund offers a highly compelling value proposition to leading edge entrepreneurs and investors, and will result in the gathering of an even larger number of quality applications.

Applications for the second round are open till February 28, you may apply here.

If you see this post it means that BlogEngine.NET 1.6.0 is running and the hard part of creating your own blog is done. There is only a few things left to do.

Write Permissions

To be able to log in to the blog and writing posts, you need to enable write permissions on the App_Data folder. If you’re blog is hosted at a hosting provider, you can either log into your account’s admin page or call the support. You need write permissions on the App_Data folder because all posts, comments, and blog attachments are saved as XML files and placed in the App_Data folder. 

If you wish to use a database to to store your blog data, we still encourage you to enable this write access for an images you may wish to store for your blog posts.  If you are interested in using Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, VistaDB, or other databases, please see the BlogEngine wiki to get started.

Security

When you've got write permissions to the App_Data folder, you need to change the username and password. Find the sign-in link located either at the bottom or top of the page depending on your current theme and click it. Now enter "admin" in both the username and password fields and click the button. You will now see an admin menu appear. It has a link to the "Users" admin page. From there you can change the username and password.  Passwords are hashed by default so if you lose your password, please see the BlogEngine wiki for information on recovery.

Configuration and Profile

Now that you have your blog secured, take a look through the settings and give your new blog a title.  BlogEngine.NET 1.4 is set up to take full advantage of of many semantic formats and technologies such as FOAF, SIOC and APML. It means that the content stored in your BlogEngine.NET installation will be fully portable and auto-discoverable.  Be sure to fill in your author profile to take better advantage of this.

Themes and Widgets

One last thing to consider is customizing the look of your blog.  We have a few themes available right out of the box including two fully setup to use our new widget framework.  The widget framework allows drop and drag placement on your side bar as well as editing and configuration right in the widget while you are logged in.  Be sure to check out our home page for more theme choices and downloadable widgets to add to your blog.

On the web

You can find BlogEngine.NET on the official website. Here you'll find tutorials, documentation, tips and tricks and much more. The ongoing development of BlogEngine.NET can be followed at CodePlex where the daily builds will be published for anyone to download.

Good luck and happy writing.

The BlogEngine.NET team

Being in Athens and wanting to learn first hand about the Openfund, next to meeting us in person? Join us Saturday afternoon at Money Show Athens 09 for a 2h session including Q&A, featuring executive members, advisors and founders of selected companies. Here are the details:

Date: Saturday, December 19, 16.00-18.00
Place: Hilton Athens, Room Terpsihori B
Speakers:

• George Tziralis, Executive Director, Openfund - The Vision and the Vehicle
• George Kasselakis, Executive Director, Openfund - The Process and the Progress
• Apostolos Apostolakis, Member of the Executive Board, co-founder & General Director, e-shop.gr - Replicating Success
• George Saliaris-Fasseas, Advisor, Country Manager, Greece, Google - Multiplying Potential
• Alexis Ballas, co-founder, Fashinating - The Inside Story

Looking forward to meeting you all there!

We are pleased to launch our second round of operations, with the reopening of our call for proposals. You may apply directly here, or check the process and FAQ for more info.

The call will remain open till the end February 28, 2010. However, you are strongly encouraged to submit your proposal much earlier, as we will be providing detailed feedback for you to improve and resubmit before the deadline.

The selection process will start on March 1st and will include extensive reviews, composition of a simple and to-the-point business plan, an interview and presentation, in between loops of feedback. Finally, the incubation of the companies that are selected to participate will start on May 1, 2010.

We're looking forward to meshing our experience and your unlimited passion to come up with the best teams out there and help turn your great ideas into fantastic products and exceptional companies. It all starts with your proposal.