Winning startups at the 2008 Seedcamp competition

If you follow various network conferences and events where representatives of the on-line world “hang out”, you probably heard about the recently held, probably correctly said, festival or conference Seedcamp 2008 in London on September 19. There was also an entire part devoted to startups and the search for investments, there were a lot of venture investors and fund representatives. The event itself was focused on European companies, and this is doubly valuable - despite the formation of a trend across the ocean, Europe is also not lagging behind, and many were just curious - has a culture of startups already formed in the Old World or what? It turned out that everything was in place, and as a result of the competitive selection 7 winners were revealed - the most interesting, promising and market ones. Next, we briefly review each of them.


BaseKit is an online platform for visual development of web applications, or rather, judging from the available presentation, it’s rather visual design and editing of sites with application elements or additional functionality. The editing of the pages and the elements placed on it is not new - many startups do something similar, and there are similar tools in every modern CMS. The main functionality is to add and edit software components, for example, adding map functionality (based on Google Maps), widgets of popular social services (for example, Twitter). The service provides a graphical and intuitive shell so that you are distracted from the nuances of the API of specific services and focus on external design. Other companies in this market also profess such an approach, for example, a representative of a more powerful type of application, WaveStudio, intended for the visual creation and programming of more serious web applications (by the way, the Dojo Toolkit system is based, and although it is distributed as an impressive installation file, functions directly in the browser).

Kyko is a mysterious startup that is missing links and even Google doesn’t find anything like it. It is only known that the company from Oxford (UK) and is engaged in services for multiplayer online worlds and games. This topic is quite interesting, although unfairly forgotten by startups - honestly, very few, for example, compared to social networks, video hosting and office applications, representatives of the game business among startups. And in vain, this area is very promising. For some reason, this project is called similar to another, Babuki , which allows you to work with applications for facebook and supports software for integrating Facebook chat and contacts into one IM client.

Mobclix is the only start-up from the USA, at the same time “titled” - at the same time it is also the finalist of another very famous and serious event, TechCrunch50, which already speaks about the interest to the service of potential investors. And the service is simple - it provides statistics and analytics on the use of applications (or your application) on the Apple iPhone platform. The service provides an opportunity for a detailed analysis of the performance and conditions of use of your application (for this you need, as I understand it, to add the supplied library to your application), analyze dumps and crash reports, user reviews and their needs. The second functionality is to collect statistics and build a rating of the programs used, which will help in researching the market of applications for the iPhone, if you are faced with a choice of what to write, so that it is also in demand. And the third function is to help in monetization - there is an opportunity to conduct and manage advertising campaigns with targeting and other options. As we see, the creators have seriously approached their project and it is aimed at an ever-increasing and profitable niche in the market, therefore the project will not need investments.

Soup is a more traditional service, positioned for those who are too busy to run a full-fledged blog. Therefore, the service provides you with a simple and convenient page where you can add new notes or links with one click, as well as any content (audio, video, etc.), except that the service can aggregate in one place everything you do on the network ( For example, your comments, posts in other blogs, social networks, bookmarking services, etc.). It’s nice that testing doesn’t require registration — this is even written on the site itself, as the need to register everywhere is already pretty weary. However, the service leaves the impression of some “clumsiness” and I personally doubt that those who do not have time for a personal blog will use such a service, although it is likely that a certain circle of users may develop from among those who simply don’t want to deal with functionality of your blog or popular services. But to win such an audience, we need another service both in terms of design and even design, not to mention convenience or simplicity.

Stupeflix is a startup from Paris that helps to make a beautiful video from a regular photo show or a set of photos, in particular, for distribution to mobile devices. So far, only a few examples are available on the official website, but it looks pretty. Both free access and pro-accounts are planned, which also include an external REST API, which may be interesting in terms of various applications (this suggests, first of all, the idea to create such widget applications for the OS, the same Vista, as well as social networks, the same facebook).
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Toksta - provides online chat service, audio / video communication in addition to plain text. The service is intended both for social networks and for any websites and does not require any installation of any plug-ins or software from users (except if you don’t have Flash, but you don’t have them any, right?) also having accounts in ICQ / Jabber or other IM networks. The site has a simple chat designer, where you can set the background color, specify your logo and other information, and integrate the chat code into your project using the instructions. As I understand it, chat itself is a small social network - you specify the theme of your site and the target group of users (by age / sex / status). Libraries are available for embedding in applications in different languages, as well as plug-ins for Wordpress and joomla, so there should be no difficulties with integration. I plan to try out this service in one of my projects, let's see how it integrates into third-party applications. While it looks interesting, but paid - depending on the number of simultaneous users, it is strange that there are no free plans.

uberVU is an interesting service for tracking the response to a post you have posted, for example, a blog post. Allows you to analyze and show visitors' reactions to posts, comments, Twitter messages, bookmarking, recommendations to other users, similar pages or posts, etc. Perfect for professional bloggers or advertisers to analyze the response from the publication of this or that information. According to the statements of the developers, they monitor most of the popular social networks and services, so that wherever your information is noticed, you will be immediately informed about interest. In some ways this is similar to Google Trends, and it seems to me that it would be great to fit into both the blog platform and the AdSence / AdWord managers, that is, in addition to the advertising management tools. The service will have a future and you should expect to buy it or make a serious investment, especially if it really will monitor most services with high quality. In the meantime, I am waiting for an invitation to beta to try it out live.

findings

As you can see, there are creative teams and start-ups in Europe, ready to enter the global arena and be competitive. This gives strength - it means that not everything is so scary, and even if we do not have such a culture and tradition of investing in start-ups, there are people and opportunities to make really interesting projects that will be on the edge of the global IT market trend. I already do such a project, and you?