IDCEE 2012 - the first day

On October 18, the international IDCEE conference started in Kiev. This year, over 2,000 participants arrived on the Investor Days of Central and Eastern Europe, among them 150 startups, 300 investors with bags of money worth $ 30 billion. It turned out so-so TechCrunch, almost with home delivery, that is, in Ukraine. The event turned out quite pretentious, very noisy, but interesting. His main goal, of course, is to establish contacts between startups and investors, or as they say in common people - “networking”.

What happened there interesting read under the cut.
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In fact, IDCEE had three zones: a relax zone with lulling speakers and color music, an open space for negotiations where the start-up stands were located, and a business party in the buffet.

The main scene of the conference was the very relax zone. It was dark in the hall, beautiful gears swirled around the walls, various reports and panels with the participation of investors, businessmen and start-ups alternately took place. The conference was opened by the Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine Sergey Tigipko, part-time husband of the conference organizer Victoria Tigipko. Out of habit, he told the audience how good it would be when the tax system was improved in the country, and then went to the people, where he immediately spoke with the startup Jelastic .



About Jelastic much was written on Habré, and the company does not need additional representation. I don’t know what the vice premier told them about new taxes, but the guys already have offices in Moscow and San Francisco, so the question of taxes for them is no longer so fundamental. Following Tigipko, I approached the stand to learn more about the company and its plans. First of all, I was interested in PHP recently announced for cloud. As I was informed, beta testing will be open in a month, for this period the use of the cloud will be completely free. And this period will be quite long, maybe even a year. Sow what will be useful service. With it, you can through the web interface (or svn / git) conduct instant deploy on several machines at once. It will be easy to deploy the project, while developers will be provided with standard storage options: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Memcached. But I didn’t understand about storage scaling, most likely, the system will not help us with replication of the same MySQL (I hope for a refutation). What else interested me: will some lightweight console utility be made to perform deployment from the local machine (like capistrano, or webbynode). It turns out that such a system is already working for projects on the Play Framework, but is not planned for PHP.

Then I got lost in the stands of startups. I will list those with whom I managed to communicate:

TicketForEvent is a system for selling e-tickets. You can pay for tickets in any available form, get a ticket with a QR, or a barcode. And most importantly, you need to pay for such a service only 7% from each ticket, without a monthly fee, or a connection fee. The company has offices in London, Russia, Ukraine, a month later an office will be opened in Turkey.

Two startups were targeted at the movie industry. The first is Kinolife , a social network like LinkedIn, but only for film amateurs and professionals. How this service is useful - the ability to find a team through it, the necessary equipment, and find locations. The second movie startup is TheTakes - project management system for filmmaking. Scenario, production, shooting list, all inclusive. When asked what their service for $ 30 per month differs from the free Celtx, one of the founders showed me many useful features that were simply absent from Celtx, but were extremely necessary. In addition to the web application will be an application on the iPad, which will replace the famous duplicate crackers, and will also work as a prompter. The project will be launched in the near future on the American market in the near future.



The applauded Noosphere project, offering a platform and service for branding and promoting TV channels on mobile platforms. Now they have six clients in Ukraine, among them one national television channel. The project is only 7 months old, and an investment of 500 thousand dollars has already been received for it, the next round is expected. They plan to develop into European markets. The guys have a lot of experience in the media segment and I hope they will succeed.

There were also projects at earlier stages, which I will mention in passing. Skwibl - positioning itself as a basecamp for web and video designers. There are three designers in the team, they say what they need, and the team makes their wishes come true. At the presentation of the startup Sergey Belousov from Runa Capital, (playing the role in the judicial chair, which once belonged to Yuli Gusman in KVN), he rated the project as incomprehensible wunderwatch (my wordless translation). To the credit of the project, I can say that in this way he evaluated most of the projects, looked gloomily at the speakers, worked with a smartphone and periodically shook his head, as if telling everyone “what am I doing here”.



Only one startup from Poland, Sotrender, was able to remove him from melancholy. It was really the best presentation for the first day of IDCEE. The speaker even jumped on the table in front of the judges to show the growth of his project. The idea came to him 3 hours before the performance and he had a long time to decide, but it worked out effectively, and probably effectively. But this did not convince Yuli Gusman Sergey Belousov. He inquired about how this social marketing startup is different from its competitors, having heard “in general, and we and they have similar features,” Sergey made the conclusion: “well, it means nothing.” What the Pole recalled was that the whole presentation was built on his differences, and he briefly repeated all of her theses, almost shouting at the judge. After that, the face of Sergey Belousov was subtle, and a smile suddenly appeared on his face. Perhaps that was what he lacked for the whole day. Under the applause of the audience, the Pole retired from the scene.

From the early stage of the projects, MyTeamVoice was also an analogue of TeamSpeak with an unobvious competitive advantage, Best.ua is a catalog and rating of the best institutions in Ukraine, Casual.io is project management with mayndmep where tasks can be connected to trees and even graphs. Interesting open-source shop Taberna , where the authors do not want to take money for the platform and for the support (fundamentally).



I also talked to investors. On the whole, they positively evaluated the projects, some are already ready to invest in them (and I have described far from all), but some still look skeptical. Many are interested in real indicators, and not the fact "we started yesterday". There were a lot of angels, there were a lot of venture funds, so startups were not deprived of attention.

The event was closed by singer Jamal with her jazz band. For tired long-term networking guests were offered ice cream, brandy and wine.