Digital Journalism for Eastern Europe » Narine Daneghyan

Start-Ups in Armenia – a View from the Inside

Narine Daneghyan — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 14:00:42 +0000

Production Data
Shot in Yerevan, November 2015
Script, Production, Camera: Narine Daneghyan
Used Video Gear: Smartphone
Edited with: Premiere Elements 13

Summary

MemTalk is an Armenian mobile app which helps journalists take photos over live audio recording. The app actively compiles everything in real time once the record button is pressed.

The app will be released on the App Store in December 2015. MemTalk is a good example of the growing start-up ecosystem in Armenia. Founding a start-up is currently one of the most attractive career options among Armenian youth.

300 Start-Ups, 3 Million People

Although there are no official statistics, the number of start-ups in Armenia is greater than 300. For a country with two closed borders and a population of three million, this pinpoints IT as a leading industry.

The income of the IT sector accounts for $450 million a year, or 5% of the entire country’s GDP. Government, as well as private investors, encourage this development.

Funding Options Exist

A few technoparks, incubators and one venture fund currently operate in Armenia. Granatus Ventures has already made investments in eight Armenian start-ups. Another place where start-ups usually find support is the Microsoft Innovation Center with its ten-week acceleration program.

7 start-ups of the acceleration program, May 2015.

Start-up meetups are held in Yerevan once a month. The venue is usually provided by big IT companies, and more than 200 people attend. There, you can find people who need to find new team members as well as those who want to understand what’s going on.

Start-up meetup in Yerevan, September 2015

Background Information

A Start-Up is an entrepreneurial venture or a new business in the form of a company, a partnership or temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. These companies, generally newly created, are innovation in a process of development, validation and research for target markets. The term became popular internationally during the dot-com bubble when a great number of dot-com companies were founded. Due to this background, many consider start-ups to be only tech companies, but this is not always true: the essence of start-ups has more to do with high ambition, innovativeness, scalability, and growth.

Venture capital (VC) is money provided to seed early-stage, emerging growth companies. Venture capital funds invest in companies in exchange for equity. The companies usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as biotechnology and IT. The typical venture capital investment occurs after a seed funding round as the first round of institutional capital to fund growth in the interest of generating a return through an eventual exit event.

Interesting Links

Website of the Microsoft Innovation Center (in English)

Website of the Granatus Ventures fund (in English)

Website of Armenian start-up coverage at Itel.am (in English and Armenian)

Website of the MemTalk app (in English)

Five Things that Struck Me about Hamburg

Narine Daneghyan — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 10:02:01 +0000

The program involved a lot of hard work, but participants also had plenty of opportunity to explotre the city

You always need to have an umbrella with you. The weather here changes every 10 minutes, or at least that is what it feels like. Sometimes it can be really hot and later it may become too cold. So in August, for example, you can wear light clothes but should always combine them with a jacket or coat.
Despite being a tourist and shopping destination, Hamburg’s shopping life ends at 8 pm. It is difficult to find places to buy food, medicine and other stuff after hours. The parks close early too.
Speaking of parks — Hamburg is a very green city. You can find green areas everywhere and sometimes they are rather large. It took me an hour and an half to find the place for the water-and-light concerts inside Planten un Blomen (“Plants and Flowers”), an urban park that covers 47 hectares (I should have researched this on Wikipedia beforehand).
No matter how much food you buy from a supermarket, they will not give you a free bag to put all your shopping in.
Policemen here are very friendly. They are keen to help and show you exactly how to get somewhere, even if they just see you staring desperately at the city map in the underground station.

Webinars with Dan Gillmor and Denys Bihus

Narine Daneghyan — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 08:26:35 +0000

The first webinar speaker was Dan Gillmor, Director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Dan Gillmor

Gillmor and 14 program participants discussed the question “Should journalists be activists?”

His answer was a resounding YES!

“Journalists must be activists when it comes to protecting freedom and consumer rights”- he concluded.

A general discussion was followed by questions about social networks and ethical issues.

The second webinar was with Ukrainian investigative journalist Denys Bihus, who shared some of his recent investigations and answered questions about the problems and challenges faced by investigative reporters.

Both webinars provided interesting insights, notwithstanding the technical issues caused by Internet connection problems. The organizers are discussing the possibility of hosting webinars during the e-learning stage as well.