2. Summary of Innovations assisting the
growth of the Greek Internet
1995 – Established the first and most frequent news service (updates every half an hour) for the benefit of
the Greek diaspora via SKAI Radio (Charitable work, done for free, as I approached the radio station and
asked them to implement it so that my Greek friends in the UK and the USA can read the news)
1995 – First Real Media Streaming service in Greece (for Olympiakos.gr – I run at the time with friends)
1996 – First electronic newsletter and page personalisation from a Greek newspaper (naftemproriki.gr)
1996 – First ever Macromedia Director and Flash technology deployment in Greece.
1996 – The first Greek on-line record store in the best address of the internet (music.gr)
1996 – Contributor and equity holder in the first web-based virtual community on the web (the Canadian
suite 101)
1997 – Involved with the first windows based editorial-content management system in Greece, tightly
integrated with “the Internet” via IBM’s Lotus Notes (for Lambrakis Press).
1998 – The first article published in the Greek press about the convergence of TV and the Internet.
1998 – Proposer to Lambrakis Press for the creation of the Greek portal (In.gr)
3. Summary of Innovations assisting the
growth of the Greek Internet
1998 – Part of the team that created the first website of Greek National Television (ERT).
1999 – The first article published in the Greek press about the many-to-many nature of the Internet with RAND’s
James Dewar.
(break in 1999-2000 studying New Media at the City University London; on scholarship via “The friends of the
Music Society” presided by the late Christos Lambrakis.)
2000 – Introduction of the first automatic translation to/from Greek/English/French of web pages and/or
selected text with the use of Systran translation technology, so that more Greeks (who didn’t know foreign
languages can find useful the Internet).
2000- First on-demand music service in the Greek internet (with Everstream).
2001 – First push chatcustomer support in Greece (i.e. when a visitor could be proactively approached for
support (service dropped because people were getting scared))
2001 – Part of the Global team of Software engineers that coded the first .NET based forum application for
Microsoft (volunteer work in lieu of learning .NET and shaping its future development/features).
2003 – Introduction in Greece of the first forum in a Greek company where the “demanding customers” could
discuss openly and freely their opinions (was for the Olympiacos Athletic Club).
4. Summary of Innovations assisting the
growth of the Greek Internet
2004 – Introduction in Greece of the first Google Ads in order to help smaller publishers to make money from
their content. Trial was performed at www.Olympiacos.org where we helped Google debug its engine to
support Greek and UTF-encoded text.
2005 - First deployment of Microsoft CRM for a greek NGO (Olympiacos); that became a Microsoft EMEA
case study (see other presentation in my slideshare profile)
2007 - Established metadata with the encouragement and a loan from my former employer.
What “metadata” are, was unknown for most, though metadata became a household term in 2013.
Started with 5 people and did a turn-over of 300,000 on its first year - Grew to 18 people (and an 850,000
turnover on tis second year) and Reached nearly 30 people (and was looking forward to a multimillion turn
over) was “killed” by such an event.
Indicative innovation. Our CMS, metaCMS succeeded in replacing one of the most expensive CMS on the
market (Vignette) for Eleutheros Typos at a fraction of the cost, offering equal or better functionality.
Vignette; it usually costs 300,000 for the setup and the first year and 150,000 annual maintenance fee. We
replaced Vignette in one of Greece’s leading newspapers (Eleutheros Typos) at a cost of 30,000.
2009 - Undertook the website development of Greece’s busiest web-sites Zougla.gr that was suffering
reliability issues.
5. www.skai.gr 1996 fp
f(ounding) dev
team member
p(resently) I am
asked for my
opinion andor
run on platforms I
was member of
the dev team
23. Architecture
Treating news-stories as products for sale (with add-ons on various
platforms) and retail products as rich-media objects (to differentiate them
from competition)
Separating content from presentation
Web authorsweb developers can operate independently from designers.
The content can be transferred into different formats.
The content can be reused.
The complete redesign of the experience it is a matter of content managers
and designer – no developers involved.
25. Architecture
Architectural Design Fundamental Units
Templates
The template has available regions-positions for the placement of
specific controls with fixed or linked (with other control) dynamic
content
Business Objects (content)
Support for a series of content ontologies such as Articles, Files,
Events, Banners whereas the open and modular architecture of the
platform enables the creation of unlimited number of ontologies
based on the requirement of the clients. Object update (debugging)
can propagate to all clients.
26. Architecture
Controls
Lists, Full Article, Custom controls
Modules
Small autonomous applications that can be positioned in a page in the website.
Support of modules such as Weather, Stock-market, Geo-Mapping
Services
Search, Logging, Caching, Auditing, Versioning
28. Features
Error Logging
In the database, Flat files, andor Email alerts
Caching
Hierarchical, multi-layered categorizations of the ontologies
Dynamic change of Template
Dynamic change of Styles
Dynamic production of pages
29. Features
Dynamic page setup
Dynamic Resize and cropping of images with multiple versions for re-use of
the same photo in different contexts (frontcategory page, full-article)
Every ontology can be recorded as RSS Feed
Every ontology can accept user comments
Every ontology can be Rated
In every ontology (inclusive of categories) polls can be added
30. Features
Ability to create ontological collections
Media Gallery for multiple file formats.
Mechanism to categorise, add Metadata, and search archives.
Creation of re-usable controls for the Back-office.
Role based user rights management per resource.
System parametrization infrastructure.
37. Sample code…
The C# sample code provided from the stock market module of metaCMS
is indicative of the code writtensupervised.
The _css, _js and _gfx directories provided by one of the Sklavenitis sites are
indicative of the quality of the front-end code – part of it was part the
given questionnaire (e.g. sprites, see wood_spirte.jpg).
38. Data Visualisation
The task at hand: Quantify the impact of the assets of one of Greece’s
wealthiest individuals – personal property estimated to over $5 billion, map
all the relations of his holdings in “one page”!
The solution: Collect data using WSS (the freeware SharePoint) through an
InfoPath form. The XML feeds an SQL server (thus avoiding duplicate
entries)
Following data cleansing a flat array was given fed into a Flash application
(the demo you will see contains all the visual data in 66kb)
Year of development: 2005
I volunteered to create, for free, the first web site of SKAI in order to provide timely, news information about Greece to the members of the Greek Diaspora across the world.- SKAI used the NewsMaker program and my application was extracting the news that were read in the news bulleting of SKAI radio (every thirty minutes), parsed them to HTML and uploaded them (via a dialer\ftp) to a web server. This simple service was, until 1999, the most frequently updated Greek-news site on the Internet and was receiving thousands of unique visitors per day across the Globe. Its success and the acknowledgment I received from many people led to my decision to concentrate on the Internet Industry in the Media sector.
Currently, this web site is the #1 Greek site by any major TV\Radio station (despite the fact that the TV Station is #4 in the ratings)
My first prof. web site. Although I left Naftemporiki in 1998 to join Lambrakis Press, I never ceased my involvement with its development. I have family ties with the newspaper – I am the best man of the Director of the Digital Publication\IT manager, thus the input is continuous, although but never professional e.g. I never sought to sell a product or service to Naftemporiki. Naftemporiki is by fat the #1 web site of any financial newspaper in Greece and the place where I first get to know the Reuters data feeds.
In.gr, the #1 Greek Newsportal, is a result of a recommendation by myself and Naftemporiki’s Financial Times Editor at the time, Sotos Chryssaphopoulos.
The first external contractor and member of the initial team of three that architected the web site and web services for Greece's National Broadcaster
- Devised the strategy
- Proposed the technology (Microsoft Site Server, Commerce Server and overall ASP development on SQL Server)
Designed and developed the initial version of www.ert.gr; hired and trained the initial web designer who remains the designer at ERT (and has designed this version)
Here is the initial version of flash.gr that was later renamed as nooz.gr. The current design of the site is based on our design of 2008 (as presented here). Build on MetaCMS.
The web site of the Kokkalis Foundation. 2010 version, one of the last works that I personally did the layout of a site. Build on MetaCMS
Started with www.olympiakos.gr in 1996 – together with two friends in London and Detroit – that in 1998 was donated to our Club. Fate brought me to be again responsible for it since 2002. This version although designed by Wedia is, by and large, build on our previous design and services.
Although this site is on the borderline of an aged website (for a commercial ISP) in 2007 was one of the most novel Greek ISP sites.
This “tacky” web site called “jungle” happens to be the #1 Greek blog with over 3.000.000 absolute unique visitors per month (Greek internet clients about 6.000.000). It was an adaptation of the original version based that we homogenized its “aesthetics” and make full use of CSS in order to make it minimize load times… Particular care was taken in the CSS for gradual load and avoid failures when the ad servers or other modules fail etc. <Table> was used only in the menu as they wanted the flexibility to add new categories without the risk of ruining the layout of the page. Zougla is the first news-site to use the eshop infrastructure of MetaCMS.
Self-proclaimed Crete’s #1 Newsportal run using metaCMS. The version here was the original 2010 version. The current version is obviously spoiled by the lack of aesthetics in the ads presented etc.
Progreece was a e-commerce joint venture between metadata, Lambrakis Press-www.in.gr and Agrotouristiki offering traditional organic Greek produce. The portal also included recipes, suggested travel destinations, recommendations for restaurants and agrotourism. It fell victim of the Financial Crisis in Greece as these high quality products came at a premium price too.
Sklaventis is the largest greek owned Supermarket chain in Greece with sales exceeding $1.5 billion. We created their e-shop but it was never aired due to lack of supporting infrastructure (logistics etc) and subsequently due to the Greek Financial Crisis. Here is our initial take and subsequent versions based on customer feedback….
Slowly we tried to move them to a white background...
Sklavenitis in known (apart from the orange-red logo) for the use of wood in his supermarkets. Thus we were “forced” to add some “wood” to the site…
This is the latest draft version; the use of Green it was not our suggestion… (it was removed from the final version that I am unable share)
This is the last site I designed even its graphics, as part of my obligation at City University to present ourselves (with the exception of my Master Thesis). I explained the choice of the { brackets } during our meeting. Although it is over 14 years old, I still find its aesthetics much more relevant than its content.
As said during the meeting metaCMS was the culmination of my experience in designing publishing systems, since my time at Naftemporiki and Lambrakis Press.
At that time it was using state of the art Microsoft technology, we were utilizing best practices and design patterns… in the code sample for the modules on Reuters\Stock-market feeds I provided there are lines with lambdas etc.
This is the first page a journalists sees as he logs in in metaCMS v1 (the last articles and photos that he inserted\edited)
Use of Telerik’s controls (on the left for drag and drop change of priority (left picture) and creation of menus (centre); on the right the action box.
The initial multimedia gallery and the list of templates…
Components and Pages…
Here is the set up of a page. One can drag and drop available controls from the right hand side into the defined sections in the templates chosen for the pages. Most of the parameters of the controls can be changed as shown… so even the content editor could alter\create a page without the need of a web author\developer.