The winners of Seedcamp, the new incubator-style event for European startups, have been announced. In an extraordinary decision the 36 judges (made up of Seedcamp investors including nine of Europe’s top VCs, mentors and Seedcamp board) have decided to fund not five but six of the companies out of the original 20. They are (in no particular order):
“Project Playfair”
Currently still in development, Project Playfair – coming out of Scotland in the UK – is about “hypernumbers”. What hypertext did to text, they want to do to numbers. It’s a bold and fascinating idea, one application of which could be collaborative spreadsheet working were each cell talks to another cell on another spreadsheet held elsewhere. Chair of the judges and Seedcamp founder, Saul Klein said: “This team had a night and day improvement from Monday to Thursday. Its almost a classic seed investment. It’s a massive leap of faith, but you have got to want to encourage people who want to do for numbers what happened to text. It’s Excel 2.0. This is an extremely technical team who have solved tough technical issues in their space.”
Zemanta (from Slovenia) has created a ‘content intelligence’ platform to automatically enhance content, making it web-ready. The upshot? Paste in some text and Zemanta looks at it and then starts to add the most likely links to the text, which you can then edit (something a lot of bloggers would kill for no doubt). This kind of application exists a lot in academic and enterprise content management systems but hasn’t appeared on the Web very much to date as these tend to be very CPU/resource intense technologies. It’s a web service API not unlike Akismet in its ability to look intelligently at content and decide what to do with it. Saul Klein said: “We loved the founders, these are passionate, smart guys. They have even got a working application and a customer (albiet in Slovenia, where they are based). This is a great value proposition for publishers. And how many bloggers would like this tool? We also liked the fact that they were coming out of Slovenia [where Seedcamp had lot of applications] and Seedcamp really is about getting to all corners of Europe.”
(site in development, but it has a working application)
Kublax syncs with all your bank accounts, utilities, even loyalty schemes like Air Miles and presents all the information in a user friendly format so that you can track your incoming and outgoing cashflow and start to really analysise your personal finances. All the key information (log-ins etc) stays on the desktop in hyper-encrypted files, they claim. It also creates a social network around your personal finances where key information is not revealed but the “crowd” can source intelligence on investments, savings accounts, mortgages, you name it. Saul Klein said: “The consumer proposition is killer. I would love to see with one click all my spending information in one place and visually graphed. We have not had a desktop publishing revolution in the personal finance space. Now personal finance handling doesn’t have to be a desktop application but live and networked. You can even benchmark your spending habits against other people. Sites like Mint are venture backed in the US but this business is very local and can be integrated with local markets. Even though there is a US model the US sites have not been out long. The team has done a lot with nothing. Plus, they are Open Coffee alumni who have really gone all out to get into the entrepreneurial space.”
Coming out of Sweden Tablefinders’ mission is to aggregate the world’s online bookable restaurants. It’s a marketing platforms for restaurants, but more than that. Normally restaurants use one of two global booking systems, OpenTable or LiveBookings. Tablefinder will aggregate those systems, allowing them to compete on a level playing field. The payment goes from the restaurant to one of the systems and Tablefinder is a partner, so will make an unspecified commission on the restaurant booking. Funding to date has been via a small VC in Sweden. The aim is to partner with LiveBookings and OpenTable, so expect an announcement on this soon. Eventually restaurants could place bids for table bookings in a similar manner as one would bid for Google Adwords and even – eventually – creating a sort of Last.FM style network which learns your preferences for restaurants. Saul Klein said: “They mad a massive improvement over the week. They started off as not a standout idea. But now it’s a search engine and booking engine. We really like the entrepreneurs, they are very focused and passionate. When they weren’t pitching to us they weren’t sightseeing in London – they had a business meeting instead. They had local funding in Sweden but decided that the investment of 50,000 Euro for the 10% was worth it for the Seedcamp experience. Scandinavian entrepreneurs tend to think big, are ambitious and serious, but not arrogant. They are cut from the same cloth as the Skype founders, it’s an amazing zone of innovation.”
Buildersite is designed to be a web-marketplace for construction services, providing homeowners and tradesmen with a trusted venue for transacting business. The domestic construction market in the UK is worth £10bn. Competitor sites tend to be about lead generation but Buildersite instead charges a success fee which is 5% of the project fee. This means the whole service can be free to the homeowner, and it can track bad builders and bar them from the system. Buildersite launched in mid-2006 and now has 3,000 tradesmen on the site. Saul Klein said: “This is a superb proposition, brilliantly communicated. The founder, Ryan Notz, has domain expertise having been a builder himself. It’s a solid idea. This is a market where, when you are told how big the market is, you say I can’t believe it’s that big. And it’s hard to believe how big just the addressable market – alone – is worth. He presented the business well and has already signed a lot of tradesmen. He’s a brilliant bootstrap entrepreneur and is also one of those who has taken advantage of Open Coffee meetings.”
This site connects owners and renters, through an online market place providing goods for the renter and capital for the owner. The idea resembles eBay but instead of purchasing, the model is based on renting. Saul Klein said: “Ed Spiegel, the founder, started his first business at university. He went from there to Silicon Valley to be in business development which shows his tenacity. He went from Silicon Valley to be a senior associate in venture funds. He’s seen startups from the inside as an investor and employee. He’s been doing all this so he could do his own thing. He left, went to business school and used his time to find the right software firm in Bulgaria. He moved to Amsterdam to set up the business and bought a boat to run it from. He launched his site this week based on the advice here at Seedcamp. Although it’s a proposition that some might describe as ‘Web 1.0′ we’ve all seen that there have been business opportunities that tried to launch in the late 90s but the market wasn’t there. But if you get the timing right it can really take off. Ed is tapping into trust networks and by integrating with Facebook he has a trust network of 37m people. He’s tapping into a big trend. This notion that it has to be a novel idea is nonsense, it’s the right idea at the right time with the right people.”
Just read all the winners descriptions. All ideas are innovative and deserved the award.
Hypernumbers appear to be a combination of Desktop App Software that incorporates AJAX & Web Services – that could all be applied to Excel
>> Saul Klein said “It’s Excel 2.0″
Err, Excel 2.0 came out twenty years ago! ;-P
Lot’s of US biz Model “Me-too/copycats” projects in this list…Especially KUBLAX, , you mentioned mint ok but what about YODLEE.com that is operating in the US for more than 10 years now!!!!
Glad to see PlayFair in there. Good idea. Nice guys too.
I thought these were all great ideas. Personally, I think Zemanta and Kublax show the most promise. Both teams will find fast and easy ways to monetize their service, and certainly should be profitable faster than the other companies.
Great coverage of this event, TechCrunch. Thanks!
Rentmineonline looks like a major disaster to me. How does it compete with specialized sites in its key verticals (homes, autos, jobs)? Check out moseskagan.com to see its grade (hint: it should probably consider community college).
pretty much the ones you thought would get picked.
congratz to the winners.
Project Playfair is the one I am most interested in, Zemanta looks interesting too.
Super! Go Tablefinder!
Regarding Project playfair – this is what I did with Numbler 16 months ago, that is the idea of having an online collaborative spreadsheet that could reference cells in other arbitrary spreadsheets in the system (or cells referencing a web service).
I bet that editgrid and google spreadsheet have this kind of functionality. The problem of course is taking a very cool technology and trying to convince average Joe’s to use it
Good luck to them.
Surprised to see no Mobile (2.0 ?
) company on the list. And I thought Europe was the hub of all Mobile related activities.
Zemanta looks promising.
Congrats to all the Seedcampers and especially to the winners.
I find Kublax interesting. My only concern is about security. Or, said in another way, how many average internet users already worried by the hype around frauds and identity theft would give away their sensible data to a new and not yet established website? “Hyper-encrypted files” means everything and nothing at the end of the day and I’m afraid that the service will struggle with skeptic people. I’m not one of those, so I’m looking forward to test it!
My best wishes
“Hola’ mis amigos, El Comandante en Jefe, Fidel Castro dice que él ama panorama y que pedirá la nación entera para utilizarla!!”
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
Rentmineonline resembles rentley.com (a U.S. based rental marketplace) that never took off. I’ve thought a lot about a rental based marketplace and it’s difficult b/c you basically are asking consumers to change their fundamental behavior. We have always bought and sold things to each other, but when’s the last time you rented something to a complete stranger? I wish them luck. This would be a win for social effeciency if they can pull it off.
Awesome, Tablefinder! We’re proud of you guys!
Champagne on Monday?
Dear Mike.
I already express my opinion when you published the nomines: Very poor in creativity.
I hope this does not represents Europe in any sense.
You may want to look a technology call “Image Metrics” from and English company. This is more likely.
Mario Ruiz
http://www.oursheet.com
It looks like kublax took a play out of wesabe’s book by including social features with regards to financial management. There are ton of these services besides mint: moneytrackin, mvelopes, buxfer, geezeo, yodlee, etc.
Not to be negative but doesn’t this seem like a real paucity of new ideas? I don’t see the business in any of them, just a bunch of little apps that will almost certainly disappear shortly after their beta launch.
I’m East coast so maybe I haven’t drank the koolaid, but it increasingly seems to me that the vast majority of start-ups covered by techcrunch have no business model or are me too versions of stuff that’s already out there. Rather than just displaying the application, how about doing a little more questioning of why anyone, in the real world, would care? You’d be doing a lot of these people a favor.
can someone explain the whole hypertext for numbers concept? i don’t get it. at least i’m hoping i don’t get it, because if it is what i think it is, it’s dumb!
not sure how the first one suppose to work.
Today I find TC coverage is really good. After long time, I felt I got really nice information from TC.Thanks.
Champagne on Monday?
Hypernumber as I learned it is a type of algebra that formulates sets of numbers that are interconnected. The concept is kind of like a big soduku board. What Project Fairplay is trying to do; I have no clue. To me it sounds like Lotus Improv’s n-dimensional modeling but web based. And if that’s the case, then that’s a pretty stupid thing to pursue considering there’s plenty of enterprise level companies that offers software solutions. Not only that, n-dimensional spreadsheet modeling is more applicable in a financial environment than for consumer use.
The rest of the other sites all sound pretty lame.
To #4 above…
Yes, yodlee has been around 10 years now and most people have never heard of it, is’nt that just making the point.
Alot of the successful things out there were not FIRSTs, just look at flickr and digg, I mean come on ! pictures and news had been done like 100 times before.
But for some magical reason, combination of timing and features and look and the illusive viral nature made Flickr and Digg stand out from the crowd.
Does kublax or whatever it’s called have it ? doubtful but possible
Someone in this mix will win, mint/wesabe/expensr/geezeo/kabamo/kublax/yodlee. My money is not on yodlee.
Good post, Mike Butcher.
It would be awesome if tableFinder could integrate the Zagat restaurant guide as well (”show me all open tables with Zagat food score of 25 or better…”).
@26, Zagat licensing is over 6 figures a year. Pretty sure tablefinder isn’t going to get anything. I’m even surprised they have any juice with OpenTables.
It is interesting how many people in the comment stream are willing to throw mud at these startups, in most cases without even giving their application(s) a whirl. These are organizations at seed financing stage — i.e. very early. Be critical, yes, and subject them to scrutiny, but the MBA-lite analysis of their business models gets a little tiresome.
As per bankblast’s comment (#25), being the only one in your category, or being first in your category, is not a prerequisite for success.
What has been proposed by Project Playfair is not a novel idea. In reporting and analysis (aka Business Intelligence) tools, “drillable” charts and graphs are very common, as is native connectivity with Excel. And, doing all of this over the web is also not new.
Google “web-based business intelligence” to see what I mean.
Shame there’s no info on why the others didn’t make it. Were they bad ideas, badly executed or both or was the team in place not right?
Its good to be able to learn from the lessons of others.
Congratulations to the winners. Only innovations will survive and really deserve the awards.
Rajesh Shakya
http://www.rajeshshakya.com
Helping technopreneurs to excel and lead their life!
Congrats winners. TableFinder looks promising.
Fantastic to see European startups getting more visability on TC – well done Mike B.
Daniel (#28): Thanks for providing us with the alternative to the “MBA-Lite analysis”. Perhaps you should read #25 again, as you seem to be saying similar things. Way to help out this “tiresome” commentary.
Doh – visibility
‘Techies who can’t spell’ Facebook group anyone?
Steve: Perhaps you should read my comment again, in which I was clearly agreeing with comment #25.
My point, though, was that it’s easy to sit on the sidelines and trash new companies and ideas, and in most cases the comments are full of observations from people who haven’t even taken the time to try the services about which they’re making grand predictions of failure.
Who on earth did the spell checking for this? Wait, no one.
Great ideas though. I particularly favor the hyper numbers.
Zemanta is good. Its interesting how my mashup almost resembles the core idea of Zemanta.
Check out the BMash module of StuffABlog ( http://stuffablog.com )
Congrats to those selected. And great choice in partnering with Hummus Bros for the food. Get those guys into the American fast casual segment and they will be as big (bigger than) as any of these businesses.
Good summary. I enjoyed it. However, can I get a job as an editor? I don’t like re-reading my blog posts and I am sure there are lots of grammatical/spelling errors, but I read TechCrunch anyways so why not have me handle some editing?
What a great thing it would be if this type of getup continued in the web community — Seedcamp, Y-Combinator, etc — to encourage individuals to take the plunge and try to create their own companies instead of just taking the safe route with a 9-5.
@ 41 Ted:
This type of getup is not necessary to encourage individuals to take the plunge. I have nothing against these programs, but I truly believe that when you remove the risk of personal failure, you remove the most important incentive for success.
Usually (not always), true sacrifice separates the wannabes from the real deals…imho.
I hope all of the guys/gals in this program do great and I wish them luck.
@ 42 Dave: Having funded my own startups I tend to agree. I’m a pretty strong believer that in most cases you should seek funding quite a bit later than the idea stage.
However with such programs it’s often the case, particularly with yCombinator, that very young entrepreneurs get their first kick at the can. In my very early 20s I remember having seemingly unlimited tolerance for risk but need some structure and guidance to direct the good ideas. I think the yCombinator model is more about providing the structure that’s necessary for the ideas to flourish than it is removing risk.
I agree with a couple of the earlier poster that Zemanta does indeed look promising.
Once the Zemanta algorithim is converted to English for example the use of the product will take off.
Zemantra should be a google/firefox plugin based on Im Feeling Lucky data.
“… and Zemanta looks at it and then start to add the most likely links” … “This kin of application exists a lot in academic and enterprise content management systems but hasn’t appeared on the Web very much to date as the tend to be” … “in its ability to look intelligent at content and decide what to do with it…”
“… so that you an track you incoming and outgoings and start to really analysis your personal finances…”
“… It also create a social network …”
Can’t — stand — to — read — any — more — typos.
You’re an editor, man. Either slow down or look down.
(Apologies for the typos people – I’ll tidy it up today – wrote it on 3 hrs sleep after a very fast briefing by the judges)
Didn’t read the article, but it dosen’t matter because my opinion is the only one that really matters.
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
Daniel (#28): Thanks for providing us with the alternative to the “MBA-Lite analysis”. Perhaps you should read #25 again, as you seem to be saying similar things. Way to help out this “tiresome” commentary.
Thank you.