Posts about the Stone Soup residents

Introducing Our New Intern: Anya Eurwongpravit

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Hi! My name is Anya Eurwongpravit, and I’m the new Stone Soup intern. I have travelled to Athens with AIESEC, a non-profit youth-lead organisation that gives students the opportunity to travel across the globe, in order to develop leadership skills and gain cross-cultural experiences. My focus at Stone Soup will be primarily on Social Media Management, and increasing the company’s online presence. A little about me – I am from originally from Hong Kong, but my parents are from Honduras and Thailand. I go to the University of British Colombia in Vancouver, and am currently majoring in Psychology. This past year, I worked with a volunteer university group to increase awareness and decrease the stigma surrounding mental health on campus, and I hope to bring those collaboration and team work skills to this job. As a Social Media intern, I can use online platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, to promote events and engage the larger community as to what Stone Soup is, and does. I am very willing to attend to the needs of any of the staff, big or small, and am very excited to be here to learn.

Wishing Odd Bleat good luck!

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After being in the Stone Soup office for over a year, we unfortunately bid adieu to Odd Bleat, but we are happy that they are moving to their own, bigger space.

Since they first arrived at Stone Soup, Odd Bleat has expanded both as a group, with 3 people in the team now, and professionally, as they have begun to take on larger-scale collaborations. Their increasing notoriety has lead them to produce bigger and more intricate productions, and has broadened their scope, in terms of the types of animations they now create, and the different companies they have worked with.

Odd Bleat has continued to win various awards for their work, including Gold Prize for all Digital Applications and First Prize in the Animation category, both in the 2018 EBGE Awards in Greece.

A particularly interesting project Odd Bleat has since worked on, was at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre (SNFCC), a cultural complex that celebrates Greek tradition. The “Countdown to Christmas”, was a massive Christmas campaign, for which Odd Bleat created 30 animations, every day of November before the SNFCC turned on their Christmas lights.

This project allowed Odd Bleat to continue their work with the the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and they are now working with them on the foundation’s upcoming DIALOGUES events – a monthly series in which different topics, such as food and football, will be explored and discussed, in order to engage the community in conversation, and increase discourse around these themes. You can check out more information about this here. 

Odd Bleat’s hope for the future as they continue to expand, is that their focus remains on the creative content of their projects. As the animation industry is relatively limited in Athens, they look to grow the scale of their company in the international sphere, while still maintaining their smaller core group, and home-base, here in Athens.

Check out Odd Bleat’s website and Facebook page to see more of their work!

  

Lets welcome the Aquanetix team

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We sat down with Diogo Thomaz, one of the co- founders of Aquanetix and he told us about the UK based company which he created a few years back together with Stella Adamidou.

Aquanetix has built an application for aquaculture businesses which is based on cloud technologies. Everybody in aquaculture, from fish farmers to farm employees, can easily install it on their smart phone, tablet or computer and have an intuitive tool to collect their daily data on site, in real time. The data gathered, are analyzed with specialized algorithms, and are transformed into useful information which can help businesses minimize loses, particularly on feed. It allows, for example, to evaluate biomass in the production units, compare actual growth and feeding with models and continuously evaluate performance of each batch of fish or shrimp.

The Aquanetix team was created on early 2012. The original idea was to create a simple application that would empower the user to immediately understand how well fish feeds are used. Two years later, in the summer of 2014 they came for the first time to Stone Soup and met with Klaas Speller and Giannis Drosidis.  Klaas helped them in the system architecture while Giannis undertook the mobile application.

On January 2015 the app was released and they currently have clients all around the world from Africa to Europe and from America to New Zealand that grow more than 20 species in all type of farm operations.

Find more info about the company and download their app on their website. If you wanna talk to them in person, drop by Stone Soup where they currently reside.

Meet the Aquanetix team:

Diogo Thomaz  is an academic researcher. He worked worked in Selonda, one of the biggest fish producer in Greece  for several  years at the R&D department and as a specialist in hatcheries until the moment that he decided to cooperate with Stella to make together their own company for optimizing production costs.

Stella Adamidou holds a PhD from the Institute of Aquaculture at the University of Stirling in Scotland. At first, she worked as a manager in an trial farm for a joint project between Biomar and Dias SA  for 2 years and then as an independent consultant for aquaculture and fish feed companies.

Dimitris Avraam has held a number of Senior Management Positions in the Retail sector for the last 30 years. He has extensive International experience and has held the position of Retail Operations Director at Dixons Retail South East Europe and more recently as Retail Director in Media Saturn. He is now the CEO of Aquanetix.

Stek.io: a SaaS that makes Open Source Software accessible to non-tech users.

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Stek.io is a Dutch-Greek startup company, which works regularly out of Stone Soup. They are building a software platform that provides a set of tools in order to install and manage Open Source Software.  Users of Stek.io, have the control of their data in a secure surrounding.

Stek.io uses three tools: Ghost, Discourse and Hackpad. Ghost is a blogging platform that helps you record your news. Discourse is a forum that enables the creation of new communities. And Hackpad is a tool to capture, organize and share knowledge in order to collaborate with other people and work together. These tools are only the start. There will be more tools coming very soon as the main purpose of this project is to become an one-stop open source shop.

              

With Stek.io, you pay for ease of use, privacy, and security.The usage of the website is very easy. You only need to create an account, providing your email and a password, and you have access to each tool. Then you click on the tool that you want and you can either start a free trial or buy it from 15 euros per month.

The 3 creators of Stek.io have diverse and very interesting backgrounds.  They are Erwin Blom (VPRO, Fast Moving Targets), Mark Pors and Dimi Balaouras (both former in WatchMouse).

Here is a little bit info about them:

Erwin Blom is a journalist, media specialist and entrepreneur and he loves open source because of the fact that he was responsible for making content management system MMBase open source in 2000, at the public broadcasting organisation VPRO in Netherland.

Dimi Balaouras is versatile and passionate full-stack Software Architect. He continues to have a strong interest and be active in all aspects of Software Development. But the most important thing for him is that he enjoys working with Dev Teams.

Mark Pors is a tech veteran with a lot of experience in technology, project and people management and online business such as marketing, product design and more. He is Co-founder and CTO of WatchMouse (acquired by CA Technologies in 2011).