OK, so let’s hear the big news on the football event that Sportmeets will be holding on 29th April in Athens!

What’s happening?

As we are presenting Sportmeets at the Openfund Demo Day on Wednesday 28 April, we thought that the best way to show what Sportmeets does is to let it do what it is best at: organize a game of football! This will be the first-ever public meet held on Sportmeets and a pretty cool place to be on a Thursday night! Everybody’s invited!

What will it look like?

Football, great people and fun. We have a nice 5-a-side football pitch booked for Thursday evening and there will be 5 games of 20 minutes each, with short breaks in between. We’d like to see and meet quite a few of you there, so hopefully this will give everyone a chance to join us at the event at least for a while.

Where and when?

We will be playing on the Coco-Mat Field, close to the Kifissia train station. Here’s the location: 165 Tatoiou Str. Kifissia – http://bit.ly/d0Cvc8

A big thanks to Coco-Mat for having us there! Also, we’ll be happy to pick people up at the train station if needed, just let us know in your RSVP!

We will be meeting after 6pm and start the first game at 6.30pm. The games should finish around 8.30pm.

How to sign up?

The easiest way is to follow this link that will take you to the homepage of the OpenCoffee football crowd, where you can join the group and sign up for the football game at the time you prefer. If you are not on Sportmeets yet you’ll have to create an account first.

Do you feel like playing more than one game? Excellent! Just sign up to for several games then! And, once you’re at it, we’d really appreciate your thoughts and feedback on how you like the Sportmeets application!

Anything else?

Of course! We have a nice prize that travelled in a bottle all the way from Scotland to give out to the ‘MVP’ of the event. (Note that it’s not the ‘minimum viable product’ this time.) Whoever scores the most goals will be named the most valuable player and grab the prize!

So Miro and I, together with the Openfund guys, are looking forward to meeting you all on Thursday for a different kind of social event this time! Please, don’t forget to tell your friends and bring them along, too! You can also follow us on Twitter to make sure you don’t miss out on any updates or annoucements!

So we are off to Athens again! Last time we enjoyed it a lot. The November weather was great, the hotel proved less exciting than its location near the Omonia square would suggest, and the Openfund gave us the green light to kick-start the Sportmeets project. What is ahead of us this time then?

OK, the first major change is that we’ll be staying in a safer area, so Miro might actually take his camera with him this time. Hope we can get some nice pics for the blog, too.

The second big thing is that we will be presenting Sportmeets at the Openfund Demo day, which will take place on 28th April. You can find out more about the event on Openfund’s own blog. We are looking forward to meeting up again with all the guys from the Openfund, as well as the other funded startups – Fashinating, YouScan and Listiki.

Of course, Sportmeets is about sports in the first place, so we are taking our football boots along, too! Following the Demo Day, on Thursday (29th April) Sportmeets will host its first ever public sporting event: a proper game of football! (originally we thought of ice-hockey, but British Airways won’t let us take the hockey sticks in the cabin luggage for some reason…)

This is an open event and everybody is invited – or more precisely – everybody will be invited – via Sportmeets! So if you feel like you could do with a relaxing, healthy kickabout on Thursday evening, just watch this space for my next post about the exact place and time, and how to RSVP. We are looking forward to seeing you there!

Well, here we come, Athens, so get your souvlaki and ouzo ready! Yeah, and we hope there will be no volcanos causing trouble this time…

We are looking for a smart and experienced PHP developer to contribute greatly to the build and future growth of our innovative web application. Talent and personality are important to us, so we are looking for someone who gets excited about building great and useful consumer web applications. The ideal person takes initiative at devising solutions as (s)he will have a major impact on the product’s overall back end architecture.

What we offer:

• Work on an interesting project that solves a real world problem
• As one of the first employees you will have a major impact on the product’s direction
• Work with a team of driven founders and advisors from various areas of expertise
• Everyone on the team works (mostly) from home, and sets their own schedule, so there is a great flexibility – (we prefer someone local to Prague, Czech Republic to meet up 2 days/week to collaborate, but for the right person we can work around this)
• We are looking for someone for a long term cooperation

Requirements:

• Can-do attitude and amazing work ethic, responsibility, enthusiasm and technical awesome-ness
• Good English communication skills and sweet internet connection are a must
• Practical experience in software development – ideally a consumer (web) product
• Willingness to learn new technologies
• PHP 5 & OOP — with experience in CakePHP and MVC, Smarty templates, MySQL, Ajax handling, XHTML, Javascript libraries (Prototype)
• Competence with the LAMP stack and Linux shell
• Code optimization, debugging (xdebug) and profiling experience is a great way to show your technical skills
• Points for showing interest/collaboration on Open Source projects
• Points for knowledge of Facebook & Twitter APIs
• Points for sys admin skills

Although we are building a web app for sport enthusiasts, you are not required to be a sporter :) So, to apply for this position, please describe your past experience and tell us why you would be a suitable person in more details at miro@sportmeets.com. We’ll be excited to speak to you while we appreciate applications specific to this position rather than generic CV emails.

Saturday 21 Nov was a great day for Miro, Peter and Sportmeets. This was surprisingly not only because of the so-not-Glaswegian warm and sunny weather that welcomed them in the Athens (actually, other things, too, had welcomed us the night before on our way from Omonia Square to the hotel). The real big thing was the successful presentation of the Sportmeets concept in front of the OpenFund executive committee and a bunch of online-biz-savvy investors and their tricky questions. This concluded the 2-month-long effort (sprint, dash, scramble) following the application and the outcome sure is worth it! Sportmeets will receive seed investment and will cooperate closely with a number of advisors to get y’all crowding in a big way soon!

Now a bit about the other projects that have made it as well. And yes – they were interesting!

YouScan is a social media monitoring and reputation management service aimed at Ukrainian and Russian market. Very useful, the Russians like to gossip :)

Listiki is an innovative service for organizing and prioritizing online real time data – creating lists. Everybody likes lists, right?

Fashinating is a platform for providing insights around fashion trends and generating data for the fashion industry. Good ol’ window shopping made rain-friendly and couch-compatible.