Seedcamp 2012-05-31T16:11:44Z http://www.seedcamp.com/feed/atom WordPress Kirsten Campbell http://twitter.com/#!/k1rstc <![CDATA[Berlin – Meet the 2 winners]]> http://www.seedcamp.com/?p=4275 2012-05-31T14:01:41Z 2012-05-31T08:55:14Z Read More]]> Berlin is certainly one of the hottest centers for entrepreneurship in Europe right now. And at Seedcamp we have a long history of being part of the Berlin ecosystem. From backing new startups to having Germany based investors in Seedcamp itself our roots run deep in Berlin and Germany. This year we were all the more excited therefore to be hosted by BDMI, one of our key investors. We had the whole building to ourselves, a luxury we generally don’t have and we think all the startups and mentors made full and good use of it.

One of the standout aspects, covered well by Silicon Allee, of this year’s Seedcamp was that teams literally came from all over Europe and particularly from Eastern Europe. There was a real sense of feeling that as welcoming as London is to startups far and wide, Berlin is building itself in the same way. We hope indeed that in meeting the awesome local mentors, startups were inspired to perhaps move to Berlin to kick off their businesses. As usual we had a stellar mentor attendance from Germany, UK, France, Nordics, and beyond. Many of the local mentors commented on being happy to have met so many foreign companies all at 1 event. As well everyone commented on the high quality of the startups and their pitches.

After the lightning fast 3-min presentations were done we had a candid and educational panel with the early investor, lawyer, and founder of Daily Deal. We always aspire to have this intimate and candid of a talk as it benefits the startups in the audience the most and we most certainly weren’t disappointed in this case. We then moved on to the mentoring sessions, which were abuzz, and mentors feedback was especially positive on the final 2 sessions being wildcard sessions. Both teams and mentors found a lot of value out of the day and a lot of follow-up meetings set.  The day didn’t end there as we had the live band Pickers playing in the upstairs bar and a bit of food to nourish us after a hard day’s work.  The band was awesome and rumour has it the party didn’t end till around midnight! Having the event end-to-end in one place really made Seedcamp Berlin all the more special and fun to put together.  We just hope our hosts at BDMI will have us back :-)

 

The winners

We’ve always been a huge fan of Dave McClure and 500 Startups and formalized our working together at Seedcamp Week last year were we announced our partnership.  We already knew each other well having jointly invested in ERPLY, Brainient and LOOKK, since then we’ve teamed up on; Bluefields, Fameron and Rentlord. This has been fantastic for the teams, giving them the opportunity to explore the US market simultaneously with Europe getting the best of both worlds.

At Seedcamp Berlin we took it one step further and jointly invested in two teams at the event itself. This catapults them to a whole new level in very short space of time, they can now benefit from having both Seedcamp’s nextwork, support, and programme plus all the benefits that come with being a 500 Startup team in the US, truly invaluable as Andrew Crump CEO of Bluefields discribes here.

So without further ado the two awesome winners are:

The team realized that the automotive industry is lacking simple cloud-based management system for small and medium automotive repair shops so they decided to build Repairy. A tool that allows fast processing of any incoming requests by phone and email, like registering contacts and vehicles, booking service works, ordering spare parts in one page.

Measures people’s traits to create a global ranking of people. The ‘credit rating’ of people’s goodness, using comparative peer evaluation. Their search engine allows peole to check upon the reputation and traits of others.
We can’t wait to be part of these two teams exciting journey ahead!
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]]> 0 Kirsten Campbell http://twitter.com/#!/k1rstc <![CDATA[Seedcamp returns to the Big Apple – 10 July 2012]]> http://www.seedcamp.com/?p=4225 2012-05-21T17:06:18Z 2012-05-21T16:52:15Z Read More]]> We have been huge fans of New York’s dynamic and thriving tech scene for some time now so it won’t come as a surprise to many that Seedcamp is venturing across the Atlantic again – this time to host Seedcamp New York on 10 July.

Last year’s inaugural event was a huge success; we saw the best of the best startups from Europe apply, all of which wanted to be part of the action across the pond. Seedcamp proved to be a perfect platform for this, offering international teams a day of face time with some of New York’s super mentors who have the knowledge, network and a wealth of experience in starting and growing hot startups. Seedcamp New York is also great for North American Teams wanting to expand into Europe and benefit from our huge network here.

Last Year’s Winners:
As a result of the super high quality of teams selected we welcomed four out of the 20 to join the Seedcamp family. Each of them has shared their experience from the day itself and what Seedcamp’s impact has been since:

Patrick Hankinson – Compilr
Seedcamp New York was a platform for us to make great key contacts from various angles of our business, we’ve even worked on a product with Google at one point as a result. Post the day itself, Seedcamp has kept us grounded in spite of our tendency to be all over the place. We have also achieved the following:

  • 100k users (as of today – w00t)
  • Beautiful new website
  • Users are 2x as engaged with our product, 4x as happier with the product, and 2x more people now recommend our product.

Alexander Dresen – Zingl
Over the past year the Zingl team has made numerous iterations and pivots, most of which were inspired by the feedback we got from the Seedcamp mentors and fellow Seedcampers. Seedcamp is really instrumental in shaking up your ideas/visions so you extract what is really important. Being part of Seedcamp gave us access to a huge network and possibilities we didn’t have before. We just moved to San Francisco and will soon be launching in US.

Sanjeev Chhugani – Bilbus
Seedcamp NY was exhausting, exhilarating and inspiring. Meeting entrepreneurs tackling different problems and with completely different perspectives was both refreshing and humbling. We learned how critical messaging is, and how quickly one can lose the audience, whether it’s 1 person or 50.
Since becoming a Seedcamp company, we have focused more on product and design, moving from prototype to beta with a new team. Being able to interact with the startup community in Europe and the US gave us the opportunity to bounce ideas off some very talented people and make some excellent connections.  Having a cadre of fellow entrepreneurs we can share war stories with is also quite helpful while trying to navigate the early days of traction, investment and eventually, growth. Bilbus is now in beta with a growing commercial lender base, two accounting platforms connected and live invoices and financing requests flowing through the working capital hub.

Dalia Lasaite – Campalyst
Seedcamp New York had a huge impact on Campalyst. During this event we received our first investment from Seedcamp and met our seed round investors HENQ. We also received tons of excellent feedback from mentors from advertising, tech, and the social networks themselves – and we continue to work with some of these mentors to date in advisory roles. Seedcamp New York also helped us learn about the New York market, get the first connections there – and ultimately choose New York as a base for our startup.

Fantastic Sponsors:
Our sponsors Google have once again offered to host us at their offices and will no doubt follow their usual great hosting style of supplying us with great space, expert mentors, copious amount of food and a great premise for post-event networking. 10gen; Commercial Support, Training, and Services for the NoSQL Database MongoDB are our generous Event Sponsors who help make all of this possible.

Who should Apply:
If you are a European technology startup looking to meet the creme de la creme of the New York tech scene as mentors, or an North American based team looking to build bridges to Europe, this is the right event for you – apply now and let us know about your company. We are looking for innovative internet tech, software, media, and mobile focused businesses, great teams with awesome founders, and slick products that add real value.

If you are as excited about our one-day Seedcamp NYC as we are, apply and let other founders know about Seedcamp too. Deadline for applications is 17 June – we look forward to seeing what you are working on.

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]]> 0 Kirsten Campbell http://twitter.com/#!/k1rstc <![CDATA[Meet the Teams – Seedcamp Berlin]]> http://www.seedcamp.com/?p=4204 2012-05-11T15:47:48Z 2012-05-11T13:59:06Z Read More]]> Next Tuesday, we’ll be gathering with over a hundred of our ‘best of the best’ mentors and 20 truly awesome start-ups for Seedcamp Berlin. Our investors, BDMI, are hosting us at their beautiful Unter Den Linden building in central Berlin.

We have a great panel lined up to speak about the build and sale of DailyDeal. Nicolas Gabrysch of Osborne Clarke together with Fabian Heilemann, co-founder, and Michael Brehm, their first angel investor, will share their thoughts and emotions on the entire life of Dailydeal. They may even be able to divulge some insights into the deal that haven’t been made public yet. We’re very flattered to have them join us.

BDMI is very obviously keen to show everyone a good time, and what a great host they are! They’ve booked the band Pickers for the after-party, so it’s sure to be an epic day and evening.

So, who are the 20 start-ups making waves in the start-up community?

Meet the Teams:

  • 8pen, Copenhagen, Denmark – developing a natural, fast and fun way to write on mobile devices
  • agentbird, Budapest, Hungary – is a smartphone based tool for the real estate agents
  • Autosprite Saint-Petersburg, Russia – provides a platform simplifying interaction between car owners and service centers, shops, insurance companies
  • Brian Industries, London, UK – location based search and recommendation engine for events
  • Cartogami, London, UK – leverages big data to provide tailored property recommendations to Londoners
  • CHAKKR, Oberhausen, Germany –  is a courier-transport booking platform, providing efficient logistics and cost-savings for businesses and consumers
  • easyOwn.it, Zurich, Switzerland – cloud based eCommerce technology for selling and purchasing on the internet with a unique simplicity
  • EnergyDeck, London, UK – is an innovative, web-based platform that helps organisations save energy, resources and costs
  • FOUNDD, Berlin, Germany – is a personalized discovery engine for digital entertainment
  • Mighty Deer UG, Berlin, Germany – we create location-based, social browser games running on HTML5. Handcrafted and with style
  • Open Procurement, Tallinn, Estonia – Liitu is an web based e-procurement/e-tendering tool for business users
  • Outitude, Lisbon, Portugal – outdoor activities marketplace, you can book outdoor activities worldwide in a fun and easy way
  • Repairy.com, Riga, Latvia – is a cloud-based automotive dealer and repair shop management system.
  • roomd, London UK – helps you to find new friends to live with
  • Sharegift.com, London UK – is a platform that helps groups of friends collect money online
  • StorPool, Sofia, Bulgaria – is a software for distributed data storage. It consolidates all your servers’ hard drives into a single distributed shared storage
  • T Dispatch Ltd, London, UK – is a cloud-based booking & dispatch system for cab offices
  • TraitPerception, Madrid, Spain – measures and ranks people so you can check the reputation and traits of others
  • Ultrasonic, Ljubljana, Slovenia – taking sonic interaction to the next level
  • Webee.co, Budapest, Hungary – is the social searcher and diary for life, a real-time review and tracking tool

If you’re a startup and you missed out on Seedcamp Berlin, applications are currently open for Seedcamp Zagreb until May 20th – make sure to apply!

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]]> 2 Kirsten Campbell http://twitter.com/#!/k1rstc <![CDATA[From Tel Aviv to Tallinn]]> http://www.seedcamp.com/?p=4161 2012-05-09T12:34:20Z 2012-05-09T12:34:20Z Read More]]> Seedcamp Tel Aviv – 29 March
We were in Tel Aviv for the fourth time this year – and the Seedcamp events in Israel just seem to get better every time. We had the highest number of mentors ever at a Seedcamp event in Tel Aviv (matching the record number of applications and the participating teams – 18, eight of which travelled from as far away as Finland).

The morning kicked off with the well-prepared presentations and made everybody look forward to the mentoring sessions. Saul Klein gave a master class on telling stories and engaging the audience via narratives, which was a great journey through not only the history of startups using these techniques for their marketing, but also through the application of storytelling in many other settings like world-leading brands, politics, and of course media.
After a tasty lunch the teams scattered to their rooms for mentoring sessions and the mentors lined up to share their feedback and input with them. As usual it was hard to break the groups apart after the intense discussions, especially after allowing mentors to pick some of their favourite teams for the last mentoring sessions.

Thanks – to our sponsors and mentors!
We were hosted at Afeka College of Engineering, who were our gracious hosts for the third year running. Alon and Lior and their team show us great Israeli hospitality time and time again – an incredible help when running an event so far from home. Our partners at lool ventures were also crucial, helping with local outreach and mentoring and of course ongoing support for the local teams. We also would like to thank our sponsors at the Microsoft Azure Accelerator in Tel Aviv, of course our mentors in Israel, who have been loyal and gracious with their help and support, and the annual Seedcamp Sponsors Google, Microsoft BizSpark, Paypal, Qualcomm and Facebook are not to be forgotten – making what we do happen.

Seedcamp Tallinn – 18 April

On the heels of our Tel Aviv event and with some of our hottest Seedcamp members originating from Estonia it was only ever a matter of time before we would host Seedcamp Tallinn – and what an event it was! We’ve never received a welcome quite like it, with none less than President Toomas Hendrik Ilves opening the event.

 We were joined by a strong force of local mentors as well as people travelling in from all the Baltic and Nordic regions. Team-wise there was a strong local presence, with eight out of the 20 being Estonian.

Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of TransferWise chaired a great panel on ‘How to make your business international from day 1’ and was joined by Christian Thaler-Wolski of Wellington Partners, Harry Briggs from Balderton Capital and Kris Hiiemaa, CEO of ERPLY. Mentoring was a lively event, with both mentors and teams commenting on how much they got out of the day. Advice was given, connections made and introductions followed. Hopefully these will be lasting relationships adding great value further down the line as the teams keep growing and developing.

Once the ‘official’ day was over everyone hopped on a bus and was taken to the industrial-chic F-Hoone bar for some well-deserved food and drinks. Many of the teams said that the evening networking was a key value-add for them, making further connections in the relaxed atmosphere. We ended the day with a ‘must-have’ local drink – a millimallikas, apparently made famous by Steve Ballmer of Microsoft.

Sponsors and Partners
We were so fortunate to have tremendous local support from so many people; we’d like to extend a huge thank-you to our event sponsors – Enterprise Estonia, Skype and ERPLY; also to our event partners – Garage48, Tehnopol and the Estonian IT College. Finally, we’d like to thank all of our local teams who were a great help in introducing us to the right people, and Sander Saar our old intern who showed us many of Tallinn’s great sites besides being a crucial ‘right hand’ for the event.

On that note we are very excited to introduce our four latest investments.

Our Four new investments

  • Antavo: travelling all the way from Hungary, this ambitious team showed an impressive promotion building platform for SMEs to market their offerings on various platforms – a slick product with big potential.
  • Bukit: Sarah lived through the bad experiences of having personal debt and was fed up with the status quo. That’s why she founded Bukit, which allows consumers to settle their debts through a new platform.
  • MightyFingers: absolutely rocking HTML5 gaming engine performance; our first 100-per-cent Latvian team is certainly going places.
  • Sayduck: a fantastic usage of Augmented Reality bridging the gap between online and offline retail experience by helping customers visualize real world items in their environment (Via Sayduck’s app, Carlos is able to hold a virtual table below). This Finnish team impressed us with their dynamic approach to rolling their solution out to market.

We’re more than excited to work with these four teams going forward, a very strong crop from two of the most interesting startup communities on the planet!

]]> 2 Kirsten Campbell http://twitter.com/#!/k1rstc <![CDATA[Seedcamp returns to Zagreb – 12th June 2012]]> http://www.seedcamp.com/?p=4108 2012-04-27T08:46:35Z 2012-04-27T08:46:35Z Read More]]> Zagreb skyline

Zagreb skyline (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We are happy to announce that we will be returning to Zagreb on 12 June in search of the best local and European startups. Our second event after the 2010 Zagreb-based Seedcamp will be hosted at the University College for Applied Computer Engineering.

Who should apply?
In the past few years we’ve had some very strong teams from the region join the Seedcamp family such as Zemanta, Vox.io and Oust.me from Slovenia, Brainient and uberVU from Romania, and of course Croatia’s own Fameron and GIS Cloud. While we strongly encourage talented webtech, software and mobile startups from Croatia and its neighbouring countries from Slovenia and Turkey to Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania to apply, our open door policy means that any startup from across the Europe, the Middle East and Africa – and beyond – can apply.

What are we looking for?
If you’re new to Seedcamp, we like teams with ‘bags full’ of talent, drive, ambition and the capacity to fully embrace the opportunities that participating in a Seedcamp event brings.

What can I expect if I’m selected?
A lot! You’ll meet, network with and be mentored by top industry leaders, international investors, seasoned entrepreneurs and product/biz dev experts. A day at Seedcamp can propel your startup forward in terms of relationships that normally take years to build. Seedcamp events are not a conference but an entrepreneurial ecosystem of support and a programme designed to strengthen and catapult your ideas to make you a world-class company.

How do I apply?
Applications are now open until 20th May, so get going and tell us about what you’ve been working on. We look forward to pouring over your awesome ideas and being blown away with what the talent for Seedcamp Zagreb will bring.

Application page.

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]]> 0 Philipp Moehring http://www.pheelmore.com/ <![CDATA[Seedcamp Berlin – Mentors, office hours – Deadline April 25]]> http://www.seedcamp.com/?p=4081 2012-04-20T11:02:33Z 2012-04-19T11:00:21Z Read More]]>

The view from the Bertelsmann Roof Terrace

We’ve been busy in the past weeks preparing Seedcamp Berlin – happening on May 15 – with our friends and investors at BDMI, who are kindly hosting us this time around. We held a small office hour session last week in Berlin, and are doing the same again in London this Friday – see here for details. The idea behind these session is to allow startups to meet the Seedcamp team, openly ask any questions they might have about us or the Seedcamp process, and learn some tricks about how to submit a better application.

Our best mentors, for Berlin!

Also, we have selected some of our best international and local mentors to join us for the day, giving advice and input to the startups that we’re ultimately looking to select. Check a small selection of that list below – these are folks who have been rated especially high by previous Seedcamp teams, and we are excited to have them as mentors again:

We look forward to these and more than 50 other mentors to spend the day with us and the startups. Based on the current applications, it’s going to be an amazing selection of teams from all over Europe.

A special program, just for Berlin

On top of the usual Seedcamp program, we are proud to also announce that BDMI has moved mountains to make it possible to not only host the event at Bertelsmann’s beautiful representation in the middle of Berlin, but also have a live band for the evening event! It sure comes in handy to have investors that own a record label, and we are looking forward to enjoy some tunes from The Pickers, a Berlin local indie rock band. Seedcamp Berlin will feature a master class with the founders of DailyDeal, who sold their company to Google late last year. We are looking forward to hear stories from both the founder and investor side, moderated by Nicolas Gabrysch, Partner at Osborne Clarke.

Some frequently asked questions

Based on the feedback at the Berlin open office session, we want to reiterate a few details about applications that might be helpful for those looking to apply:

So – apply now to be part of Seedcamp Berlin. The deadline is April 25th, so you have all weekend to prepare an amazing application!

Don’t forget – we are looking for interns!

In case you’re still working out what you want to do as a startups, but really want to work with, at, and for Seedcamp, you’re in luck: we are looking for an intern to join our team in London as of now, and the applications are running until this Friday.

]]> 0 Philipp Moehring http://www.pheelmore.com/ <![CDATA[Seedcamp Office Hours in London on Friday, April 20]]> http://www.seedcamp.com/?p=4074 2012-04-17T16:18:10Z 2012-04-17T16:03:46Z Read More]]> Are you an early stage founder in London? Do you know someone who is?

After our first office hours session in Berlin last week, we decided to host a second session in London. Seedcamp Berlin is on May 15, and the application period for the event is running until April 25th. Thus, it’s the perfect time to meet us and ask a few questions if you are planning to apply. Come by to chat about Seedcamp, ask us anything you’d like to know about Seedcamp, and meet fellow founders.

Come by if you:

  • Want to apply to Seedcamp and get insights into how to write a kick ass application
  • Weren’t sure if you should apply and want to find out if Seedcamp is a good fit for you
  • Are all set for applying, and want to just have a chat and put a face to a name
  • Have any questions about the process and outcomes

Let us know you will be there by filling in this short form.

We are planning the event to be very casual and open.

Location: Campus, 4-5 Bonhill Street, Shoreditch

Time & Date: 14:00-16:00, April 20, 2012

]]> 0 Kirsten Campbell http://twitter.com/#!/k1rstc <![CDATA[Introducing the First Ever 20 Tallinn Teams]]> http://www.seedcamp.com/?p=4036 2012-04-16T14:15:48Z 2012-04-16T12:20:19Z Read More]]> Seedcamp Estonia

We’ve been excited for some time now to visit the small country with big talent where a significant proportion of our teams originate. Finally the week is upon us and we’re packing our warm clothes to visit Tallinn on the 18th April. We have a fantastic range of international and local mentors joining us including some great investors. Applications to Estonia were very strong with many of the surrounding countries applying as well as countries as far away as USA, proving that Tallinn has a dynamic startup scene going on. Quality was top-notch and we’re delighted to have a whooping 8 local teams represented and others joining us from Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, and Russia. Also flying in are teams from Sweden, France, UK and Slovenia. It seems to have all the ingredients lined up to make it a great interactive day where hopefully many fruitful relationships will be built and carried forward.

The Teams

  • Arkademy, Tallinn, Estonia – The first live video seminar community in the world
  • Browserbite, Tallinn, Estonia – A service that helps to create web pages that look the same in all browsers
  • CGTrader, Vilnius, Lithuania - is a peer-to-peer platform where designers collaborate and trade 3D models to each other
  • Carfitsme, Tallinn, Estonia – Carfitsme helps to find and buy right car without spending days and weeks.
  • easyRider.me, Tallinn, Estonia – is an online tool helping bands and promoters get technical riders rolling right.
  • Kula Magazine, Moscow, Russia - an innovative multi platform magazine
  • Merkanty, Ljubljana, Slovenia – Our goal is to make Merkanty the best platform for all traders/sellers and advertisers
  • MightyFingers, Riga, Latvia – are making cross-platform game engine on HTML5 to run games on every device.
  • Notif5, Tallinn, Estonia – A location based audio notification platform.
  • Opuss – London, UK – End-to-End Social Publishing Platform. We apply Github to publishing with game mechanics.
  • Pinevio, Vilnius, Lithuania – is a social content discovery platform enabling our users to discover more relevant content.
  • Sayduck, Helsinki, Finland – solves the missing link between the online-offline retail experience using Augmented Reality.
  • Sketchfab, Paris, France – is the first service to publish interactive 3D content online.
  • TaxiPal, Tallinn, Estonia – is the only taxi app that helps you find trusted taxis in 31 countries.
  • Tellyo, Helsinki, Finland – An app and small device converting 2nd screens into TV remotes for better TV experience
  • UtilityCamp, Tartu, Estonia – We will be the RescueTime for the household energy saving.
  • Viewsy, London, UK – is creating Google Analytics for the real world.
  • Warmbreeze Studios AB, Gothenburg, Sweden – Healthy Heroes – World of Warcraft meets health and exercise!
  • WeatherMe, Tallinn, Estonia – boost farming production by combining farming science and weather data in a simple way
  • Zonear, Tampere, Finland – is a startup that focuses on adaptive HTML5 applications and web developer tools.

Partners and Sponsors

We have been very flattered by the tremendous local and regional support shown to us by our sponsors for Seedcamp Tallinn: Skype, Enterprise Estonia and our own Erply. In addition, Estonia IT College has very kindly offered to host Seedcamp Tallinn, Garage48 has supported in many ways and have organized the evening networking drinks. This way, we ensure mentors and teams have a good time whilst in Tallinn and make the most of interacting with the locals and each other. Our own teams at TransferWise and Holvi have also contributed heavily by sharing their mentor network and promoting Seedcamp to the region. Of course, our yearly sponsors are not to be forgotten for their ongoing support; Bizspark, Qualcomm, Google and Paypal.

See you in Estonia!

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]]> 9 Kirsten Campbell http://twitter.com/#!/k1rstc <![CDATA[Seedhack FinTech – 60 hours and 16 teams later]]> http://www.seedcamp.com/?p=4007 2012-04-25T12:46:56Z 2012-04-11T13:43:32Z Read More]]> What does a bank designed for the needs of a six year-old have in common with an iPhone app designed to help you donate money to a religious organization and a system to help spot issues with legal documents? Well, they were all spawned out of Seedcamp’s recent Seedhack FinTech which took place 30th, 31st March and 1st April. We had over one hundred energetic and entrepreneurial hackers register to take part in the event in the purpose-built Campus by Google and enabled by our generous sponsors: Paypal, Domain.me, and 10gen.

Friday night’s kick off was led by a keynote speech from Michael Rolph, Director at Anthemis Group, a leading Financial Technology investment firm. He highlighted how a key part of the financial tech investment opportunities involves bringing additional transparency between those that manage capital and those that invest or use capital. The old model of a few people exploiting inefficiencies in information are over as new startups increasingly democratize the information necessary to make better financial decisions.

After the keynote, we had our API speakers present what their companies did, as well as how their technology could be used within the context of a new project. Our API presenters were:

Following the talks from our speakers, the attendees had the chance to mingle, eat some great food courtesy of @centralworking and bounce ideas off of each other. Once done, the group headed back upstairs to go into a pitch rally of ideas. After the pitch rally, everyone settled in for a late night of hacking away on their respective ideas.

By late afternoon Saturday, 16 companies had been formed and were mentored by our Judges which included:

What’s amazing is that in spite of having little sleep, the companies had tons of energy and were still struggling with how to make certain ideas work and getting their MVPs ready until late into the evening.

On Sunday, crunch time started at 4pm as all the weary-eyed hackers commenced their final pitches. Below is a summary of the top three companies formed (that presented), what the project was about, and who the members were. The best Demo award went to Holy Light, with the runner up position being split evenly between Sayvd and Minipots, both showing how awesome a product can be built in just slightly over 48 hours. The company that was given a fast track to an upcoming Seedcamp event was Business Semantics, which worked on a project to help alleviate the burden of legal document review.

Business Semantics

Using semantically-rich terminological dictionaries/ontologies and linguistic analysis to identify and remove ambiguities in contracts which by their nature constitute litigation risk.

  • Donald Chapin – Business Semantics
  • Finbar Mostyn-Williams – Indenture Analysis
  • Roy Singh – Text/ data mining
  • Samuel Belu-John – Structured Finance
  • Tim Ruffles– Text/ data mining

HolyLight
A CRM solution for churches to manage churchgoers + mobile & social app to allow anyone to donate anywhere via PayPal.

MiniPots
Are creating a casual social game to help friends bet each other about the topics they care about.

  • Haiyan - product innovation, design, backend dev
  • Roy - iOS developer and designer
  • James - Business innovation, service design

Sayvd
Sayvd is a social mobile app giving you an easy way to save small amounts of money and stick your savings in a safe place for bigger purchases later. Save 2,5 on a coffee towards your snowboard.

What’s clear after the Seedhack FinTech event however, is how much innovation still needs to happen in the space. Many of the conversations that the attendees had with each other as well as during customer validation calls circled around a huge dissatisfaction with current payment systems, credit card processing systems, security, and even banking. We truly hope to see much more innovation coming out of this space!

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]]> 0 Philipp Moehring http://www.pheelmore.com/ <![CDATA[Are you the next Seedcamp intern?]]> http://www.seedcamp.com/?p=3984 2012-04-04T16:11:28Z 2012-04-04T13:41:01Z Read More]]> Do you want to work at Seedcamp? We are looking for interns to join our team for spring and summer!

We are looking for a self-starting full time intern who can tackle some of our internal projects and assist the Seedcamp team with operations. The intern will work very closely with the whole Seedcamp team and portfolio companies, on a number of interesting projects and events.

We believe the contacts and experience you’ll gain here will be instrumental in starting your own company, getting into venture capital, or staying with us longer term. This is also a unique opportunity for a more experienced person to break into the European and London startup scene – a great basis to start a new company from or join one of our portfolio companies.

The position is full time, paid, and during the duration of the internship, you will be based at our new office at CampusLondon in Shoreditch.

We want to find a candidate to start as soon as possible and are expecting you to stay with us for at least 4 months.

You are:

  • Literate in web technologies and social media – a web native.
  • Passionate about disruptive start-ups, entrepreneurship, and internet technology – a startup enthusiast.
  • Happy to work on various tasks and projects with different people – an excellent multitasker.
  • Experienced in new jobs, projects, and tasks in unstructured environments – an entrepreneurial nature.
  • Fun to work with and excited to meet new people – personable and charismatic.
  • Looking forward to roll up your sleeves and work in a fast paced environment – a self starter.
  • London-based or able to move here for the duration of the internship.

Your responsibilities will include:

Office

  • Update & maintain content on our website, blog, and other outlets.
  • Maintain CRM and other systems that we use for our daily work.
  • Enable the organisation to run smoothly and efficiently by assisting in various tasks and projects.

Technology

  • Update and maintain the systems we use – our website, CRM, blog, and social media.
  • Develop, or find & implement new services and applications to improve work and communications for our team and portfolio.

Events

  • Assist in the organization and day-to-day activities of Seedcamp events (Seedcamp Days and portfolio focused events)
  • Help run special initiatives and prepare for Seedcamp Week 2012.

Skills we are looking for:

Basic

  • Native or near native English language skills, preferably with writing and blogging experience.
  • Web and computer skills that enable you to update and maintain our systems and website (Office, WordPress, basic HTML and CSS)
  • The demonstrated ability to work in a team setting and professional environment

What will set you apart:

  • Knowledge in design, development, and programming of web sites, or web/mobile applications (current systems are mostly PHP/Ruby).
  • Experience as a startup founder or early member of a startup, a large university project, or similar organisation.
  • Experience in organising and running successful events of any scale.
  • Great connections to your local or even global startup scene.

APPLY NOW – using this form – Deadline is April 20, 2012. 

About Seedcamp:

Seedcamp is Europe’s premier seed stage investment and mentoring program, engaging ambitious startups through its program of monthly Seedcamp events in over 10 cities annually from New York to Tel Aviv. At each Seedcamp, entrepreneurs present their companies, receive world-class mentoring, network and compete for investment by Seedcamp which entitles companies to access to Seedcamp’s worldwide network of over 2,000 mentors and top-tier investors as well as participation in Seedcamp’s unique week of intensive mentoring in London and once in a lifetime month long US road trip taking in NYC, Boston, Seattle, LA, the Bay Area and SxSW.

Seedcamp has invested in companies including Moblix, Erply, Transferwise, GradCad (Estonia), Zemanta (Slovenia), Basekit (UK), Ubervu & Brainient (Romania), Vox.io and Farmeron (Croatia). Seedcamp is backed by some Europe’s top VCs & angels and works closely with Amazon, Google, Facebook, PayPal, Microsoft and Qualcomm among others to give founders the best start in life – outside Silicon Valley. Overall, Seedcamp invested in more than 60 companies this way. The standard investment is 50,000 Euros in return for a 8-10 percent stake in the business. Seedcamp is backed by more than 30 of the best European tech investors, including Index Ventures, Eden Ventures, Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, and many of Europe’s most active angel investors.

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