And it certainly made a difference – all the startups who took part in the prep day worked very hard and I could see the results when they went on stage!  It was a good reminder that while a lot of startups don’t prepare properly, the ones that do will see the benefit.

But, back to the main event.  I missed most of the keynote presentations because I was so busy judging and mentoring startups, so I’m going to focus on them (and for me, they are always the most interesting aspect of these events anyway).

Tawkon, SnowCiety, ZapStreak, PlayerDuel and AppMotion made up the First Round on Day One and what a diverse range of ideas they presented!  Twakon helps people minimize exposure to radiation, while Snowcity connects ski-ing and snowboarding friends on the slopes.  ZapStreak offers a mobile SDK for pushing content to Web-connected TVs(no extra hardware needed) and Playerduel can turn any single-player game into a multi-user game, with minimal effort.  Last but not least, Appmotion builds a framework that streams motion-based content to your smartphone, effectively turning into a games controller.  How cool is that!  SnowCity took winning position (the giant video screen showing ski-ing and snowboarding was definitely a crowd-pleaser).

Round two brought BellaDati, Tripl, Waytag, Babelverse and Shelby.tv on stage.  There’s not enough room here to describe everyone, so I’m going to call out just two Shelby.tvand Waytag.   I admit that Shelby.tv is  BizSpark member but I can’t be accused of bias, because my fellow judges also agreed they were the winner of this session. Shelby is your place for video. It’s all the video your friends share, in one place… then Shelby gets smart, to give you personalized video on web, mobile, and smart TV.  Clever stuff.

My other favourite startup from day one was Waytag is to GPS coordinates what DNS to IP addresses.  It is so much easier to share your waytag than trying to share a street address or GPS co-ordinate. You name it, your control it and you choose who to share it with.  I love it!

First up on day two was Robin, also a BizSpark member.  Consumers are looking for trust when shopping online and Robin is today’s retailer’s sidekick for delivering that trust, helping to ensure great service, both online and offline.   Other startups who presented on day two included Between, Six3, Hojoki and Nuji.  Again, what a diversity of ideas!  In brief: Between provides a secret online service for lovers to communicate intimately.  Six3 makes it incredibly easy & fun to create and reply to video messages on any device.  I liked the idea behind Hojoki, which is to make all cloud apps work as one, by building one newsfeed that basically creates a productivity dashboard.  Nuji is doing well for itself: with over 250,000 stores and 300,000 products, it is creating a new type of social retail platform/

So much choice, so who were the ultimate winners?

-       Overall winner (jury) – Shelby.tv

-       Best Mobile Startup –  Between

-       Best Web app – Nuji

-       Most remarkable pitch – Frommees

-       Best B2C – snowciety

-       Best B2B & Public choice – Babelverse

I’m happy to have been involved in an event that shows what a great collection of startups there are in Europe today.  I’m looking forward to “The Next Web – The Next Year”.

–mark

What they offer: coaching by 99 mentors (successful entrepreneurs, CEO’s and experts in the field of finance, legal and IP), up to €15.000 of seed investment (plus a sponsorpackage that is worth over €30.000  euro’s), 6-months of inspiring office space in downtown Amsterdam, Demo day (pitch in front of 100+ investors, journalists and VIP’s) and a business trip of 25 days co-working in Silicon Valley, where you met successful US entrepreneurs, pitch in front of VC’s and explore different partnerships.

The deadline to apply closes on the 31st of January. The programm starts on the 23rd of March, 2012 in Amsterdam.

If you want to know more, have a look at their website:  http://rockstart.com/accelerator/

mark

But, when I could be torn away from mentoring, I did manage to catch some of the conference, including our own Chris Capossela, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Corporation, talking about the enormous opportunity for startups and developers to make an impact in the world.   As he said, given the devices running on Windows, can you imagine the potential if you land your product or service on them?  Of course I’m biased

So back to why I’m really here – to meet more cool start-ups, one of my favorites today being sponsoringsolutions.com.  This French company is working on a platform that helps companies find the right event to sponsor or use as a Launchpad for new products, as well as match-making event organizers with potential partners.  Given how much time I know some people – including myself! – spend researching the best events to support, this could be a great time-saving solution.

Looking forward to day 3!

–mark

So, with day one almost over, what do I think so far?  Certainly, in the conference, I’m very happy to report that the importance of design in slowly getting the recognition it deserves. As many people who know me already know I’m a real believer of design as it is equally important as the underlying technology and the business case in a good startup (and yes in any enterprise too ). After all, if an product or service isn’t easy and fun, then people won’t want to use it.  Right? Right.

With that in mind, it was great to see LeWeb kick-off with keynotes from Karl Lagerfeld (no introduction necessary) and Dave Morin, Co-Founder & CEO, Path, both  elaborating on the importance of design.  So it was very apt that my next appointment was at the startup competition where I saw a great pitch by 23minutes.to (BizSpark member) who when I talked to them afterwards,  also talked about the importance of design – even though they’re small, they already have one person focusing solely on the product design.

Just to put it out there once more before I wrap up for today “We are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the “things” that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have” – Bill Buxton (Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research).

–mark

Whatever the reasons behind that (are fewer women pursuing career in ICT, or starting their own businesses?) there are an increasing number of organisations worldwide focusing either on female entrepreneurship, or women in technology, or both.

Interested in reading the rest of this post? See my guest blog on the BizSpark Team Blog: What’s Next for Female Entrepreneurs in Europe?

–Mark

As a rough estimate, I’d say that 99% of all monetization models I saw so far are not innovative at all. In the contrary they are all very ‘1.0’ – such as licensing modes, freemium/premium or depending on subscriptions, and advertising.

Luckily I also talk to the 1% and there is great upside potential for the startups who extend their innovation to monetization. I’m not going to give away the brilliant innovative ideas of the guys and girls but here’s one example:  the traffic to your product or service might make interesting business intelligence for other companies to make a heatmap of usage of products, services, interest, etc. (and no, not selling your user database of course!). I could tell you about others, but I don’t want to give away other people’s secrets!

I hope you get what I’m trying to say here and I challenge you to go and think out of the box on monetization of your new business and try to find innovative ways to get that revenue coming in. For example, take your kids for a walk, start brainstorming with them. . Or invite a bunch of creative friends, give them a few beers and pick their brains. I’m pretty sure you’ll get great ideas and directions you never thought of before that might actually work!

Thoughts? Feedback? Bring it on!

–mark

Applications are open and close on January 6, 2012. The program starts March 1, 2012 in Amsterdam. Got your interest?

Find our more about Rockstart Accelerator here: http://rockstart.com/accelerator/

–Mark

Here’s a little more about the 7:

footTraffic @maxFootTraffic- Maximizes foot traffic to your business and allows you to only pay when real offline purchases are made!footTraffic has pioneered an innovative location based performance marketing platform based offline Pay per Sale. I’m going to keep a close eye on them, because if they can deliver what they promise it’s gonna be good!

Ilustrum @ilustrum is an online collectible social game. Users can play, answer questions, win ilustrums (stickers) and exchange them to be the first to complete the collections. What is more, ilustrum let the users create and share their own collections as well as contribute to already existing ones. So this is me collecting all the Dutch soccer cards online instead of in paper, nice idea! Humans are collectors so this could be a potential big thing. Watch them!

Medopad’s @medopadLtd- The best way to think of Medopad is as a breakthrough mobile health communication platform. The old world? You had to go to find patients data. The new world? Patient data comes to you. If a mentor has a favorite of the day…. this would be one of them, huge potential and a simple concept of User Experience design and super important information into one app.

musicplayr @musicplayr_com- Think of it as twitter or tumblr or delicious for music links with an integrated player. Music lovers manage their musical DNA at one single place & opt in for premium tools.If you’re a music addict you should have a look at this!! Makes music live so much easier!

And saving the best for last?

Outline @outlinedotcom- solves the problems of process and email overload in enterprises by giving them a social tool that works just like email and excel. Like Yammer meets Gmail meets excel. Certainly going to try the beta and experience how it works for me, from I’ve seen so far this might very helpful in my daily job J

Oh and please startups and entrepreneur as much as you value my input, feedback, advice, etc. as a mentor you give me new inspirations, ideas, thoughts and much more so I can do a better job in mentoring. As I said just pretending I’m Spongebob.  I hope more people will follow!

Thanks Seedcamp and all participants for a fantastic day full of Sponging!

Thx!

–mark

Today, Microsoft provides valuable assistance to more than 45,000 startups worldwide. BizSpark partners range from traditional VC-funded startups, to garage-style startups with limited resources, to the entrepreneurial small business person growing their business through technology.

Read more here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/default.mspx

mark

Our Western European BizSpark team have thrown themselves into supporting GEW 2011.

The Portugal team is sponsoring two GEW events: Startup Pirates Battle – a conference and Startup competition on November 19^th in Porto and Startup Weekend Lisbon.  Attendees should say hi to my colleague Diogo Nunes , who will be offering AppHub accounts and Azure Passes to the top 10 Mobile and Web Startups at both events.

Denmark is also a strong supporter of StartupWeekend, sponsoring three events in a row: Aalborg, Århus and Copenhagen, where my colleague Anette Nørgaard will also be mentoring start-ups.  Likewise, UK BizSpark lead Bindi Karia is mentoring at  London’s Entrepreneur Festival in London this week, while you can find me mentoring start-ups at Seedcamp Barcelona on Wednesday 16^th November.

Giving startups this kind of support – whether technical or business advice – is an integral part of BizSpark.  In today’s challenging economic and competitive world, startups need more than just free access to technology.

But back to GEW – here’s a potted history and why I think it’s so important.  It roots stem back to the UK’s Enterprise Week launched in 2004, where it’s phenomenal success in showcasing great ideas inspired other countries to follow.  In 2008, Enterprise UK and the Kaufmann Foundation founded GEW.  It matters because it provides a much-needed focus on entrepreneurs.  These individuals are the business leaders of tomorrow, fuel for local economies and future employers.

But let’s not restrict this focus to one week a year.  Let’s celebrate entrepreneurs every day and, in the words of the GEW organizers, help them to ‘unleash enterprising talents and turn their ideas into reality’.

–mark