March 09, 01:03

5′ with Neofytos Kolokotronis

Innovation Specialist at Found.ation | KDE e.V. Board of Directors Member

FinQuest 5′ sessions welcomes Neofytos Kolokotronis.

Neofytos studied medicine and got a degree in psychology, before deciding to follow his passion for technology. He is a co-founder of open data and open government citizen initiatives and has been a long-time contributor to international communities and organizations developing open source products. Neofytos is also a member of the global board of directors of KDE, one of the largest software communities in the world.

As an Innovation Specialist at Found.ation, Neofytos is leading the company’s projects related to the startup and innovation ecosystem, including incubation and acceleration programs, and of course initiatives like FinQuest. He is also the liaison to EIT Digital, responsible for the organization’s activities related to supporting deep tech startups in the SE Europe region (Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Cyprus).


I wouldn’t pick one, as every era has its own game-changing innovations that help push technology and society forward and have a wider impact on our daily lives. With science and technology moving at much faster pace nowadays, it looks like every decade has a landmark breakthrough. I can though mention the ones that greatly affected people around my age, and those would be the internet and the smartphone.


There are various technologies already available that are expected to affect our lives, the tricky part is predicting the prevailing ones and the massiveness of the impact they will end up having. Significantly faster and more reliable internet connections (whether its via 5G, fiber, or satellite), made widely available everywhere, would definitely act as a base for additional services to develop based on advanced technologies (e.g. IoT, AR/VR, Data Analysis) and will contribute to new business models evolving. I am particularly interested on the next generation of internet-based Web3 technologies that are being developed, around the concept of decentralization.