Epignosis was elected as the Greek based portal collaborator

The elearningeuropa.info portal is a European Commission initiative which forms part of the eLearning Programme, managed by the Directorate-General for Education and Culture; Geographical Impact of Programmes; Comenius –Grundtvig Unit.

elearningeuropa.info is the main medium established by the European Commission to promote the use of multimedia technologies and Internet at the service of education and training.

elearningeuropa.info has established a network of e-learning practitioners who will act as the portals "correspondents" in their country and region. Collaborators contribute by promoting and animating forum discussions, recommending eLearning experts to be contacted and interviewed, address actual eLearning topics to discuss and highlight, inform and send resources for portal’s directory and do article peer-reviews for eLearning Papers.

Epignosis (represented to this medium from Mr. Athanasios Papagelis) was elected as the Greek based portal collaborator. For a current list of collaborators check: http://www.elearningeuropa.info/main/index.php?page=fix&id=12

Under this role, Athanasios Papagelis represented Greece on the Workshop that was held on Brussels at 30 October 2008. The aim of this workshop was to bring together portal collaborators at a European level to discuss and exchange ideas about the current and future status of distant training.

For more info on the workshop and a personal view on what was discussed you may check our detailed forum post at: http://forum.efrontlearning.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=364

Next Generation Learning Services (NGLS)presents its innovative elearning services & tools at the 4th People Management Executive Seminar.

NGLS a member of the V.Trip Group of companies, is participating at the 4th People Management Executive Seminar that takes place on October 20, 2008 at the Athens Concert Hall, Vas. Sofias & Kokkali, Athens.

During this prestigious event NGLS will present its full range Human Capital Development Solutions.

NGLS brings together technology, educational methodologies and synergies through strategic partnerships in order to offer unique services in the fields of education and training making use of advanced methods of mixed education/training and technologies of information and communication .

NGLS's solutions are aiming to help companies to:

• Test the knowledge of (candidate) employees (gap-analysis)
• Organize training materials as training courses
• Build user-tailored training paths based on organization needs
• Minimize the organization's training costs
• Pin-point the best candidates for tasks
• Fulfill the inner-organization communication needs
• Preserve the company knowledge
• Certify the employee knowledge
  

Virtual Trip announces commercial distribution of its flagship product SOLO Gateway

Virtual Trip, leading company of the V. Trip Group, announced that its flagship product, Solo Gateway, is commercially available and distributed through a network of certified partners. The announcement was made in the Infosystem 2008 exhibition, where Virtual Trip also presented the Telecom version of Solo Gateway.

On behalf of Virtual Trip, Mr. Vangelis Mihalopoulos, Solo Product Manager, said: "We are proud to present the Telecom version of Solo Gateway. Its innovative design and compact size offers a complete broadband experience for consumer and business Telco users. The Solo Telecom Gateway materializes both the Fixed-Mobile and Telco-IT convergance to the direct benefit of the end-user".

Solo Gateway is a unified software solution offering not only a powerful computational infrastructure combined with IP PBX and fax server facilities, but also a flexible collaboration environment, a complete security framework and a reliable applications deployment platform.

Solo Gateway comes in three version: Small Business, Enterprise and Telecom. It is distributed through certified partners and bundled with broadband subscriptions.

Solo is Simple. Solo is Complete. Solo is All You Need.

NGLS presents its innovative e-learning services and tools at the IT Directors Forum.

NGLS a member of the V.Trip Group of companies, is going to participate to the IT Directors Forum, which is taking place on October 10, 2008 in Athens, Greece.

On behalf of NGLS, Mr. Papagelis Athanasios, Technical Manager, is going to present the views of the company on “Business Transformation & Human-Capital: Managing Change through Learning”.

NGLS brings together technology, educational methodologies and synergies through strategic partnerships in order to offer unique services in the fields of education and training making use of advanced methods of mixed education/training and technologies of information and communication .

The tool for the educational program implementation is e-Front, the platform for distanced asychronized education and training .

It can be used as:

• Communication and briefing tool
• Tool for education and training
• Tool for assessment, output control and as a “machine” that creates trainees improvement proposals
• A report data base

In three sectors:

1. continuing employee’s education
2. preliminary control of knowledge of candidates
3. certification of knowledge skills of the employees
   

Virtual Trip Silver Sponsor at the GD 2008 Symposium

Virtual Trip Ltd, the leading member of the V.Trip Group, is a Silver Sponsor at the GD 2008 Symposium, which will be held during 21-27 September 2008 at Heraklion, Crete (Greece).

The range of topics that are within the scope of the International Symposium on Graph Drawing includes:

• Visualization of networks, Web maps, software engineering diagrams, database schemas, chemical structures and molecules
• Graph algorithms
• Geometric graph theory
• Geometric computing
• Software systems for graph visualization
• Topology and planarity
• Graph theory and optimization on graphs
• Interfaces for interacting with graphs
• Applications that need graph drawing solutions including Biomedical Informatics, Data Mining, Networking, and Security

Virtual Trip is a network-centric software development company founded in September 2000 by a team of Computer Engineers and "Critical Publics". Its activities are extended in high technology software products, technological works in the private and public sector, as well as, industrial researches in collaboration with leading European inquiring institutions

Virtual Trip is the vendor of the SOLO Gateway platform and also provides services for network-centric information systems, voice portals, enterprise security, systems and network consulting and integrated systems design.

eFront ‘s new reselling agreements in India, Egypt and Denmark

Epignosis, spin-off company of the V.Trip Group has achieved new reselling agreements for eFront, an easy to use, visually attractive, SCORM compatible, eLearning and Human Capital Development system.

Our new partners are:

• DEEKSHA SYSTEMS PVT LTD, the only IT Company in India which focuses only and purely on education sector. DEEKSHA SYSTEMS PVT LTD was founded 4 years ago and is backed by the Technology Innovation Center of UNIKEN INC (the parent company based out of Tampa, USA) where the technology components are developed – it has some of the leading figures on its Advisory Board who have more than 30 years of experience in technology industry.

• CHANNEL COMMUNICATIONS, a Middle East based company established in Egypt Since 1987, offering turnkey IT solutions. Its purpose is to provide high quality end-to-end solutions and offer organizations of all sizes a trusted source for all their current and future communication requirements. CC has alliances and strategic partnerships with major software and hardware manufacturers. Utilizing the diversified recourses and know how, CC provides turnkey solutions in automation, Learning management systems, and multimedia broadcasting.

• OPTIMON, a Danish company who has collected a battery of open source digital service tools for the demanding organization. Optimon provides services as: e-learning development planning, courseware flash, scorm and video productions and various knowledge logistics solutions for mainly the Scandinavian Healthcare sector and other e-learning consumers.

eFront at "Innovation & Entrepreneurship Week" of Patras' Science Park

Patras' Science Park organizes a five-day Forum under the general title: «Innovation & Entrepreneurship Week» from 30th June to 4th July 2008. The Forum is organized around several thematic sessions oriented towards innovation, entrepreneurship, carrying innovative ideas and actions.

On behalf of Epignosis, spin-off company of the V.Trip Group, Mr. John Gialelis will present “Methodika” tomorrow,Tuesday 1st of July 2008 between 10:10 – 10:30 am.

The purpose of the Methodika project is the modelling of a distributed operational system in the form of entities, relations and activities. The project developed a standardised methodology which can convert IT enterprises to a virtual and distributed form combining a number of software tools that facilitate this transition. One of these tools is based on the eFront platform: an easy to use, visually attractive, SCORM compatible, eLearning and Human Capital Development system, which is suitable for both company and educational usage.

More specifically, Mr. Gialelis will present the case of eFront WiKi which integrates the following tools: Project Content Management System (CMS), Project Content Management Administration System, Project Management System, Timesheet Planner.

Mobile Marketing Conference

MVNS, spin-off company of the V. Trip Group, participated at the 2nd Mobile Marketing Conference, which took place on Thursday, June 26, 2008 at Hotel Pentelikon (Kifissia, Greece).

During the Conference, on behalf of the V.Trip Group of companies, Mr. Manos Moschous, Technical Director, talked about the latest trends of mobile marketing in a panel coordinated by Dr. Gregory Giovanof, Professor & Head of research group in wireless broadband networks, Athens Information Technology.

Within the trade show, MVNS presented «mVision Ad» and «mVision Social Networking» platforms, that introduce innovative value-added services for the mobile market. As the personalized mobile advertising possibility turns to be the basic characteristic of the mobile business models, MVNS developed the «mVision Ad» platform, fulfilling the need for managing this source of revenue. «mVision Ad» offers overall management of Mobile Advertising Campaigns based on multimedia material for different communicational channels, such as WAP, SMS / MMS, 3G Video Call, Web and Social Networks.

Moreover, MVNS presented its new Facebook Application, «EXODOS», which offers great perspectives for corporate advertising in an easy, targeted and effective way.

NAFTEMPORIKI newspaper about Virtual Trip

One of the top economic newspapers in Greece, NAFTEMPORIKI , wrote about the Greek companies which participated in the Growth Company Investor Show 2008. Among them NAFTEMPORIKI is referring to Virtual Trip, too.

The article is talking about the nine Greek companies, which are planning to enter the Plus market in London and took part in the big roadshow «Growth Europe Event 2008». The show was held in the Barbican Centre of the British capital and attracted more than 100 small businesses - exhibitors, with 1,400 registered potential investors.

Among these companies, there are some which have already been «on the road» for Plus Market, while two or three more are expected to sign with a corporate advisor within the next days.

Virtual Trip Ltd., a company of the Knowledge-based Economy has cooperated with OTE, providing the Conn-X View platform, and also with large companies, such as Scali, Idylic, Siltanet.

The article is available in Greek here.

TechWorld and Open Source Living about eFront

eFront, Epignosis' e-learning and human capital development system, was presented at Open Source Living , as “an easy to use, visually attractive, SCORM compatible, eLearning and Human Capital Development system. It is suitable for both company and educational usage.” Open Source Living is “a community-driven dynamic archive of Open Source software spanning all major platforms”. Read more here.

Moreover, eFront was suggested as one of the best 10 open-source e-learning projects at Techworld. One of the top technological sites commented on eFront:

"As corporate and government organizations embrace the Web for delivering more education and training programs, a wealth of free and open source e-learning applications will help lower the barrier to entry.

eFront claims to be an easy to use e-learning and "human capital development" system, making it suitable for both company and educational usage.

The flagship product of Epignosis, an e-learning company based in Greece, eFront enables "community learning" and supports the principles of "collective knowledge". Organizations using eFront include the Greek Ministry of Public Order, and the Polish Ministry of Interior.

Version 3.5 is in beta and claims improved stability and speed, extended courses management, a new Ajax-based file manager and functionality, and core functions have been rewritten to take advantage of the object oriented features of PHP 5. Also new is a PayPal payment module and the ability to install eFront without any Web server or "Document root setup hassle".



You can download here the open-source eFront v3.5.0beta3.

The sky is the limit!

Planning to enter the PLUS Market, Virtual Trip Holdings S.A. participated at the Growth Company Investor Show 2008 (London, UK).


Our partners discussed with investors about Virtual Trip's impressive growth rate that has achieved in the first 7-year period of organic growth: 4,252.33% in turnover and 3,306% in net profits. For this reason, investors mostly focused on Virtual Trip's enormous growth potentials.

Virtual Trip keeps expanding. The sky is the limit!

Virtual Trip Holdings SA exhibitor at the Growth Company Investor Show, the must-attend event of 2008 for anyone who invests in quoted companies

Virtual Trip Holdings SA participates at the Growth Company Investor Show 2008, which takes place on Wednesday, 11th of June 2008 at the Barbican Exhibition Halls (London, UK), during 10-17:30 pm.

The company plans to enter PLUS Market, in order to keep the impressive growth rate that was achieved in the seven years of organic growth: 4,252.33 % in turnover and 3,306% in net profits.

Virtual Trip Holdings SA owns a group of six technology companies offering IT products & services to the international market. Key products are the "SOLO" small office & home gateway, the "eFront" e-Learning & human capital development platform and the "mVision", mobile services & social networking platform, while customer-list includes a number of Greek and european blue-chip companies such as OTE, WIND, ARMENTEL PLAISIO COMPUTERS, INTRACOM, INFO-QUEST, FORTHnet and LYKOS GROUP. Virtual Trip Group companies have signed reselling agreements with partners in Australia, Denmark Egypt and India.

Athens International 2008 ...

MVNS and Virtual Trip , spin-off companies of the V. Trip Group, participated at ATHENS INTERNATIONAL 2008, which was held on May 15-18 at the International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos (Greece).

The exhibition was dedicated to Defence-Security-Technology in SE Europe and the Middle East.

V.Trip Group launched innovative value-added services in the telecommunications and security market implemented by the platforms: mVision and SOLO Gateway. mVision Surveillance, fully integrated with SOLO Home Gateway, offers a number of value-added features such as video recording, sms / phone notification, 3G Video-Call access, integration with alarm systems and event logging. The mVision Surveillance platform is already the technological underpinnings of the Conn-X View service of OTE and My Show of WIND.

Virtual Trip, also introduced the Integrated Systems Group, which offers integrated systems designing services. Virtual Trip ‘s ISG has high expertise and experience in the field of System S / W, Digital Design, Modeling & Simulation, Validation & Verification, Prototyping and Testing.

Our latest cover story: Dimitris Tsigos : “Virtual Trip is Materiazing Innovation”….

Mr. Dimitris Tsigos, Founder & CEO of the V.Trip Group, was interviewed by NETWEEK magazine (business magazine for the technology strategist).

Take a glance at the greek version of Virtual Trip's cover story here. Don’ t miss Mr. Tsigos talking about his vision and objectives for the company, and explaining how Virtual Trip evolved from the first successful start-up company of student entrepreneurship into a Group of IT companies with a turnover which exceeds 5.000.000 €.

Mr. Tsigos focused on V.Trip Group's products and services underlining that SOLO Gateway platform (small business and residential gateway) is the flagship product of the Group, while mVision (streaming video& mobile social networking platform) is the key solution for mobile surveillance and has already cooperated with OTE, providing underpinnings for the Conn-x View service. Other products of the Group referred are: eFront (e-Learning and human capital development platform), Insurance Manager (Integrated information system for insurance agencies & brokers), Diagramma (Integrated information system for education & training organizations), OpenVote (Secure Internet Voting System).

He also analyzed the needs of the Greek IT market, as he has been elected member of the board of the Hellenic Association of ICT Professionals and has been nominated the Special Prize of the University of Crete for Continues Entrepreneurial Development.

Finally, he announced Virtual Trip’s new opening in the Spanish market and revealed the secret of Virtual Trip’s success!

Next Stop : Dubai...

Following the successful participation in CeBIT Hannover 2008, V.Trip Group is focusing on the Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa regions. An expedition was organised to visit Dubai, a centre of trade and technology activities in the Middle East.

On board were our international business development team, Vangelis Zegkinoglou and Thanos Alafogiannis, and the key-persons for each flagship product of the VTrip Group: Manos Moschous of MVNS, with the "mVision" Mobile Streaming Platform; Sakis Papagelis of Epignosis, with the "eFront" eLearning and Human Capital Development Platform; Vangelis Mihalopoulos of Virtual Trip, with the "SOLO Gateway" Server Platform.

Dubai is the hub of the Middle East. Besides being a commercial and retail heaven, it is also an important business centre, attracting hi-tech international enterprises. Dubai is the fastest growing Business Location in the GCC countries, and certainly in the United Arab Emirates. Dubai has world class communications, high speed Internet Access, a superb GSM Mobile Phone Network, International Hotels, Foreign Ownership, excellent Conference and exhibition facilities.

The expedition involved a series of presentations to some of the largest established corporations of hi-tech industries. Some of the meetings involved: Eti-Salat Academy, an important eLearning solution provider; Du Mobile, the newly-established alternative mobile operator; Cellucom, a technology retailer; UAE Mobiles, mobile content providers; Axiom Plus, mobile handsets retailer.

Overall, the expedition was a good hit, leading to secondary discussions and, hopefully, possible cooperations with Dubai-based firms. We are currently planning our next visit to the most beautiful of the Emirates, to advance our contacts to the next level and negotiate on our local representation in Dubai, which will enable us to provide high-quality services in the Emirates and surrounding countries. Dubai was only the beginning.

SOLO Gateway's latest publications ....

VIRTUAL TRIP presents the SOLO Gateway platform, which fulfills the need for flexible, easy to use, safe and complete ICT solution for Small Small Office and Home Users (SOHO).

Catch up with SOLO Gateway's latest publications in greek magazines presenting SOLO's four flavors :

The Economist March 2008, issue 49, pg. 31 read more...

KEFALAIO April 2008, pg. 45 read more...

SOLO Home Gateway is the ideal solution for home automation, security and entertainment, including all necessary tools for managing your files, even from a mobile phone. Also, it offers VoIP services, video-conferencing, and wireless access management (WiFi). It provides an easy and flexible environment for surveillance using digital video streams, accessible either through mobile phones (GPRS / 3G), or through internet-connected computers, while including video recording, burglar-alarm connectivity, and sms/phone notifications. SOLO Home Gateway, also, includes a simple-to-use application for storage, retrieval and direct access to multimedia content (images, audio, video), either locally or remotely, or even through mobile phones.

SOLO Small Business Gateway is the answer to the need for secure, reliable and flexible infrastructure for small and medium enterprises. Between the services offered are Email, File & Web Server, Back-up, Proxy, VPN, Firewall, IDS, Anti-spam & Anti-virus. Additionally, a full-fledged Fax Server is provided for fast and easy management of all incoming and outgoing faxes, along with an innovative VoIP PBX, through which SOLO Small Business Gateway implements a complete telephone exchange of up to 50 extensions, without special equipment. This makes it the most affordable and reliable solution on the market for communicational and computational infrastructure.

In order to meet the growing needs of large enterprises established in with more than one placed, we designed SOLO Enterprise Gateway. It provides high availability and high performance characteristics, like replication between two or more SOLO Enterprise Gateways and hot-stand-by for uninterrupted service. Additionally, it offers advanced bandwidth management for all broadband internet connections, network traffic shaping and advanced security technologies (firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, IDS και IPS).

Moreover, SOLO Telecom Gateway is suitable For all DSL broadband connections and is a brand new form of CPE (Customer Premises Equipment). It can be fully integrated with any ISP infrastructure, re-using datacenters by, e.g., hosting Web and Email services centrally.

Virtual Trip & MVNS at the Telecommunications Management Conference

Virtual Trip and MVNS, companies-members of the V. Trip Group, participated at the Telecommunications Management Conference, which was held on April 17, 2008 in Greece.

On behalf of the V.Trip Group of Companies, Mr. Dimitris Tsigos, Group Founder and CEO, presented, among important speakers from the international community of Telecommunications, the views of the Group on «Innovation in Telecom-VAS based on Innovation in IT» . Take a glance at Mr.Tsigos' presentation here!

V. Trip Group introduced innovative value-added services in the telecommunications market implemented on the mVision and SOLO Gateway platforms.

Specifically, we launched mVision Surveillance II, which turns remote surveillance to commodity, allowing inexperienced

users to acce

ss surveillance cameras at home or office in a very easy & flexible way, without any requireme

nt for specialized infrastructure,

connectivity or handheld devices.

mVision Surveillance, fully integrated with SOLO Home Gateway, offers additional features like video recording, sms / phone notification, 3G Video-Call access, integration with alarm systems and event logging. The mVision Surveillance platform is already the technological underpinnings of the Conn-X View service of OTE and My Show of WIND.

Both platforms are flexible and scalable. The mVision platform also offers Mobile Marketing and Mobile Social Networking services, through a unified access from Web, Wap and 3G Video Call, while the SOLO Gateway platform is distributed in Small Business and Enterprise versions, providing user-friendly, secure ICT infrastructure.

mVision Network Solutions exhibitor at ExpoSec 08!

mVision ® Network Solutions, Spin-Off company of the V.Trip Group, is pleased to announce that the second edition of mVision Surveillance™ platform was presented at ExpoSec 2008 which was dedicated to "Homeland & Corporate Security". The ExpoSec 08 was held on 1-2 April 2008 at Zappeion Megaron, Athens (Greece).

The first international event of its kind in Greece, ExpoSec is an annual Security Conference and Exhibition staged in Athens since 2002, aiming to examine the most recent views, findings and technologies regarding security and safety issues.

The mVision Surveillance™ service allows everyone to effectively surveil their area even if they are absent, by delivering real-time video to handheld devices. For the safety of your private area, security companies may not be enough as they cannot provide the best and safest solution. MVNS has already launched WIND My Show and Conn-X View along with OTE providing local recording via 3G Video Call.

On behalf of MVNS, Manos Moschous, Technical Director, presented the Remote Mobile Surveillance in the 7^th Security Conference on Wednesday 2^nd of April 2008.

Deutsche Welle at our Stand at CeBIT 2008!

Today, Dimitris Tsigos, CEO & Founder of VTrip Group, was interviewed by the Greek Service of Deutsche Welle. Mr Tsigos presented SOLO Gateway and our overall presense in CeBIT Hannover 2008. Also, he analysed the profile of strategic partners that could join Virtual Trip on a joined venture around SOLO Gateway.

After the initial talk on our activities, Mr Tsigos commented on the current situation of Research and Development activities in Greece. He emfasized on the role of the State on motivations for corporations to commercially exploit outcomes of High-Tech Reasearch and compared the current status in Greece with that of Spain.

The interview will be posted when it is made available by Deutsche Welle.

Virtual Trip exhibitor at CeBIT 2008, presenting SOLO Gateway

Virtual Trip presence in CeBIT has been a complete success so far! We have had many interesting meeting with potential customers and partners, all of which find Solo Gateway innovative and hi-tech.

Located in the "Wireless and Land-line" Hall 13, lots of stand visitors are interested in the telephony capabilities of Solo. Presenting the product to our visitors has proven that Solo Gateway is a indeed a needed solution for the average Small Business, world-wide.



Overall, the stand made a very good impression with the colorfull server-cases being an attraction point. Most of our visitors were interested in the VoIP and telephony technologies that Solo Gateway incorporates. The IT network services that Solo Gateway provides were described by visitors as "complementary with the communications features", producing a complete solution for an SME.