EconomicsTop

Forbes: Armenia-based company creating a presentation platform that could kill Powerpoint

“Entrepreneurship can come from all places. And just as Skype launched Estonia into the forefront of technological start-up innovation, a new company based primarily in Armenia hopes to bring the Caucasus start-up scene into the global spot-light,” Freddie Dawson writes in an article published by Forbes.

If it succeeds in doing so, it could spell an end to Powerpoint: nobody’s favorite presentation tool. The company – Voiceboard – is creating a presentation platform that incorporates different voice recognition platforms and Microsoft’s Kinect – the technology used for body motion control of Xbox games – to give presenters the ability to control presentations through vocal commands and gestures.

Currently Voiceboard is expanding its Armenian office and just starting to offer a demo product to customers. It signed up its first customer in March and hopes to have the first edition out in June. Initially the product will only have voice control features with gestures to be added in at a later date.

The company has grown significantly in a short period of time in order to get to this point. It has grown from four under-employed engineers brainstorming in a living-room to a company with offices in Bulgaria and Armenia, as well as a separate entity in the USA.

“We were sitting in my living room with a whiteboard thinking about getting into IT consultancy and brainstorming,” says Nigel Sharp, co-founder of Lionsharp, the company behind Voiceboard. “We thought: ‘It’s so annoying to have to get up from sofa and write something and then the board would get filled up and we’d have to take a picture of it, wipe it clean and start again. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just control everything from here digitally?’”

Development started and the start-up secured a series of opportunities. First it won a competition, organized in conjunction with Microsoft’s Armenian Innovation Center – to go work in a business accelerator in Bulgaria called Eleven. The company then got a chance to demonstrate its presentation tools at TEDx – a popular series of lectures on science and technology. The start-up also had some success at the Microsoft Imagine Cup – an international innovation competition for technology.

“TEDx is a fantastic platform to get the word out.  We did our first ever presentation there and were getting phone calls from investors from a week after that,” he says. “A month later and we had concrete offers on the table.”

Sharp attributes some of the success the country had to the start-up scene in Armenia. “I found that young Armenians are ready to do a bit more to choose their opportunities,” says Sharp. “My co-founders are 20-21 and they’re throwing away a job that has a salary to come found a start-up.”

Although Sharp worries about the potential geo-political situation of Armenia, he remains confident in both his economy and the wider opportunities available in Armenia.

“But there is huge potential.  Collaborative entrepreneurship should be happening here,” he adds. “Guys with good ideas and management skills should be bringing those into Armenia. There are plenty of good ideas but they need backing, organization, which is not always a strong point.”

If Voiceboard can revolutionize business presentations in much the same way Skype changed international online communication, it would put Armenia on the map and could start a flood of investors searching for the next big technological solution. 

Show More
Back to top button