The last day of the year is a good chance to review what you did and what you didn’t, helping you shape out tangible plans for the year to come. I’ll try to do so in the lines to follow, based on the sparse 35 posts I happened to post in this blog during 2008.
So, what did I do?
- finally launched -together with Efthimios- AskMarkets and AskMarkets Services, but we’re clearly in the very beginning
- had a very poor year academic-wise, with a few minor research contributions (some others are to come up soon though), while focusing mainly on my PhD
- watched Open Coffee Greece and the local start-up community bloom, with 21+ events (including one with TechCrunch), 87+ speeches (among them Jason Calacanis) and hundreds of participants, I was happy enough to get to know tons of people, too
- teached A Course by Blog on data mining, next to a couple of lectures on prediction markets (all of them in greek, apologies), then set up
DataMine.itMineKnowledge as a start-up with my fellow students - launched with Efthimios and Dimitris a little web service which got some serious coverage, WebSource.it that is
- set up the promising HowSocial.ru with a fantastic team within a weekend
- turned almost into a ‘parsley’ by gaining (or not) some media attention (ok, I’m joking, but to me media coverage is far from an achievement)
So, I can roughly describe 2008 as ‘a year of launches’. And that makes the target for 2009 clear. Turn launches into successes, premises into actions, potential into results. PhD included.
PS: Can’t wait, will be fun!