English Startup Crash Test. Results

For the first time in the Internet week, RIW 2010 passed the English-speaking Startup Crash Test, confirming: SaaS, mobile development and “exploding helicopters” are still relevant.

In addition to the global task - to help interesting projects “to cut a window into Europe”, the English-speaking SCT had to answer the question: how well do our startups speak a foreign language? After all, not only Russian, but also Western experts were supposed to participate in “crash tests”.

Since the conference already brought together a lot of speakers, SCT was reduced to the main part, in which four projects spoke. The organizers from the GreenfieldProject team met each one in advance to finalize the presentations in English.

CloudBudget is a SaaS financial planning tool for small and medium-sized companies that have outgrown Excel and have more than one office. The project plans to win a share of the American market, primarily in the hi-tech and construction industries. The team relies on the necessary minimum: selling the instrument itself without imposing advice on its use in the financial life of the organization.
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The SCT experts rightly noticed that it was impossible to do without the consulting part - at the very least, those services would be needed. support In addition to the details of sales, they recommended the project to work out customer rubbish and positioning; in particular, to expand the functionality so that the client could not only tamp down the results, but also make preliminary calculations. Still, to enter the US business-rich CloudBudget market, it is desirable to stand out against the background of analogues.

The following were Syntacto - a service that will easily allow you to transfer contact lists when replacing a mobile phone, as well as synchronize them with your mail address book and profiles on social networks. Now the project team is working on a prototype. They plan to combine the most successful of existing solutions, as well as add new features: for example, Syntacto will compile binder contacts by year of addition, which will help you remember when and where the user communicated with a particular person.

“Crash-tested” experts immediately identified a possible problem - the audience would have to “pull out” from the existing services. And then Syntacto was advised to pay attention to fans of Apple products. They also noted that one of the ideas of the team is multilingual, which allows avoiding duplication of contact in, say, Cyrillic and Latin, can be the key to success.

Mobiety is a platform that allows you to conduct polls via sms and wap profiles. It is designed for both public opinion research centers and marketing departments. The main advantage of Mobiety seems to be efficiency: from compiling questionnaire-questionnaires to processing them.

The feasibility of conducting surveys on sms, when the mobile web develops, has raised doubts among experts. Nevertheless, the author of the project, Mikhail Zarin, convinced that there is a niche for such things in Russia. Is this so, we will understand in the near future: the launch of the alpha version of the service has already been announced. From the end of October, Mobiety will begin selling services to customers with their own database of numbers.

Closed the line of projects SpeakToIt - speech on Startup Crash Test was the first public presentation of their virtual digital assistant. The team that ate the dog creating chat bots for web, PC and mobile platforms decided to go ahead and develop a personal secretary for smartphones. To release a beta version of the VDA-service , which will recognize natural speech, respond to user requests and remove part of their daily activities, SpeakToIt is scheduled for April 2011.

The authors of the project want to attract an audience due to the gaming component (the possibility of “chatting” with the character assistant, etc.) and the visualization of the digital assistant. This approach did not find support from the experts. They advised startups to decide whether they are betting on "fan" or increasing user productivity.

The most realistic and unplanned strength test put an impressive point on the project presentation - a radio-controlled model of a helicopter launched by one of the companies exhibiting at RIW flew into the hall where the crash tests took place, lost control and collapsed right on the stage. Naturally, without hitting anyone.

So ended the English-speaking SCT. The startups proved that they were quite ready to meet with the West, and the experts were not very harsh on the projects - the latter, the second, virtual part of the crash test. With the help of StartupIndex, the video will be sent to specialists of foreign venture capital funds, who will give their own assessment of the quality and readiness of ideas for the international market.