Category: Nicosia

Ranking The Startup Ecosystems of 1,000 Cities and 100 Countries

CrunchBase links to the StartupBlink’s “Ranking The Startup Ecosystems of 1,000 Cities and 100 Countries“.

The top 3 countries are USA, UK, and Canada. Cyprus takes 68th places out of a 100, climbing 6 places from the 74th place it was at in 2017.

The top 3 cities are San Francisco, New York, and London. Three Cyprus cities made it into the ranking:

  • Nicosia takes place 239, dropping 23 places from 216 in 2017.
  • Paphos takes place 531, climbing 329 places from 860 in 2017.
  • Limassol takes place 613, climbing 234 places from 847 in 2017.

I can find ways to justify Nicosia being so much higher than Paphos and Limassol. But Limassol being below Paphos looks strange to me.

Cyprus National Internet Portal for Open Data

It is via this Cyprus Mail article that I’ve learned that not only Cyprus has an official Open Data portal, but that it’s also the best in Europe:

Cyprus is one of the top five European Union countries in the field of Open Data for 2018, while the new National Open Data Portal data.gov.cy scored highest among 31 open data portals in Europe, a special honour and recognition for the Open University of Cyprus (OUC) that developed and implemented the National Open Data Portal in collaboration with the public administration and personnel department of the finance ministry.

So far I’ve only had a quick look around, and I have to say that it’s quite impressive!  Even though most of it is in Greek, Google Chrome translation handles it nicely.  Here are a couple of interesting bits to get you started:

And there is so much more … Well done, Open University of Cyprus!

The Global Airport Database


Global Airport Database – Arash Partow

The Global Airport Database is a collection of data about all (???) airports in the world, big and small.  It covers a total of 9,300 airports worldwide.

That’s pretty interesting.  For example, how many airports do you think there are in Cyprus?  Obviously, there is the Larnaca International Airport and Paphos International Airport.  Then, there is one in Nicosia, which is not functioning since the island was divided.  And there is one in Acrotiri on the British military base.  Four, right?   Well, the Global Airport Database has a total of 7 (!!!) entries for the country of Cyprus:

LCCC:N/A:N/A:NICOSIA ACC/FIC:CYPRUS:000:000:000:U:000:000:000:U:00000:0.000:0.000
LCLK:LCA:LARNACA:LARNACA:CYPRUS:034:052:030:N:033:037:029:E:00003:34.875:33.625
LCNC:N/A:N/A:NICOSIA:CYPRUS:000:000:000:U:000:000:000:U:00000:0.000:0.000
LCPH:PFO:PAPHOS INTERNATIONAL:PAPHOS:CYPRUS:034:043:004:N:032:029:008:E:00013:34.718:32.486
LCRA:AKT:AKROTIRI:AKROTIRI:CYPRUS:034:035:025:N:032:059:016:E:00024:34.590:32.988
LCRO:N/A:N/A:EPISKOPI:CYPRUS:000:000:000:U:000:000:000:U:00000:0.000:0.000
LCRR:N/A:N/A:NICOSIA:CYPRUS:000:000:000:U:000:000:000:U:00000:0.000:0.000

Larnaca and Paphos are there. The Akrotiri one is there too. Then we have 3 records for Nicosia. And one more for Episkopi. Hmm …




hack {cyprus} summit 2017


Last week I’ve attended the first ever hack {cyprus } summit.  hack {cyprus} is well known among techies in Cyprus for organizing other events, mostly hackatons.  They are good at that.  And this time it was something new.

The event itself was excellent!  It had all the usual things you’d expect from such a gathering – a bunch of bearded guys in dark t-shirts and jeans (each one secretly wishing that there were more women in tech), gadgets, coffee, snacks, and so on and so on.  And there were talks and workshops with lots of chatter in between.

Being a big fan and a frequent attendee of technical conferences all over Europe, I knew there was no chance I’d miss this one in Cyprus.  Even if I have to drive from Limassol to Nicosia.  In fact, I decided I’ll get even more value of it – practice my public speaking and presentation skills at the expense of the crowd.  So when the call for talks was announced, I submitted a couple of talks and one was picked.

There was a little hickup where I didn’t know the time slot of the talk (how long it would be), so I submitted two talks – one for 30 minutes or so, and one for 60 minutes.  The 60 minute one got chosen, and then I learned that the time I have is 20 minutes for the talk and 10 minutes for the Q&A.  Oopsy.   But, never the less, challenge accepted.  It took a lot of cutting and trimming but I think I sort of managed to get the essence of it into about 20 slides.  My talk wasn’t the first one of the day, so I observed other speakers.  I think most of them went slightly over 20 minutes and cut into the Q&A time, but on the other hand, there weren’t enough questions for most of the talks to fill all that time.  So in the end, it all worked out pretty well.  If I remember correctly, I managed to squeeze my talk into about 25 minutes altogether.   I’d love to see the video of that – there’s plenty of mistakes to learn from there, but for now, there are only the slides.

I would like to say huge thank you to everybody involved – organizers, sponsors, speakers, and attendees.  It was a blast and I hope to attend many more.