Plugg Startups Rally 2009
If you are a European web or mobile start-up looking for early-stage funding, you still have a few hours for registering at Plugg Startups Rally.
The competition is part of the 
Plugg Conference taking place on March 12, in Brussels, Belgium. The conference provides an overview of how the web is changing from a European perspective, and will feature a host of top speakers, and a competition that aims to showcase what Europe has to offer when it comes to early-stage web and mobile startups.
Any European early-stage company with a maximum of only one round of institutional funding can sign up for the competition by entering details about their team. All submissions will be evaluated by a professional jury of entrepreneurs and VCs, and twenty will ultimately be invited to pitch at the audience from the main stage at the conference.
Is anybody from Eastern Europe registering?
Next Week Event: NetCamp
If you are interested to know what is next on the Romanian internet market, don’t miss NetCamp on December 3th, 2008.
The conference will have a special focus on the following topics:
• user-generated content
• The concept of social web
• New types of communities
• New business models
• blogs and wikis
• New media
• The measurement of the audience, traffic and profit
• challenges and opportunities on the Internet
NetCamp will host Net Start-Up: An online competition of ideas and projects. The purpose of this competition is to showcase the most interesting and promising new web projects in Romania. You can check the competing projects in a kind of video elevator pitch right here. Unfortunately, it is just in Romanian, but I will review the most interesting projects after the event.
SeedMoney invests in 4 start-ups
CaptainGo.com, Zazazoo.ro, 2Parale.ro and strada32.ro are the first projects funded by SeedMoney, an investment fund for seed-type online business.
SeedMoney was launched by Vlad Stan, along with two real estate entrepreneurs, Victor Anastasiu and Pablo Rodriguez Gonzalez. The 500,000 euro fund offers between 10,000 euros and 50,000 euros for up to 20% of the business. Details of the four transactions were not disclosed, but fall within the limits mentioned above.
“We are not just looking for projects, we are also looking for people, very smart people.The experience, the knowledge, their set of skills are the most important reasons that makes us invest in the project”, explains Vlad Stan. He adds, “We will help them achieve their goals, and we will offer our experience and our network to talk with other investment funds and provide connection shortcuts for the next round of finance”.
It is interesting to note that 2 of the 4 projects had Vlad Stan involved as a shareholder prior to the SeedMoney investment, while the other two have in common Vladimir Oane, a promising online entrepreneur that won at SeedCamp in London last September with his www.uberVU.com project.
Here is a short overview of those projects:
www.2parale.ro: Developed by Radu Spineanu, including partners Vladimir Oane and Lavinius Marcu. Affiliated marketing solution.
www.Zazazoo.ro: Launched in 2007 by Catalina Rusu, then Octav Druta and Vlad Stan followed as partners. The concept evolved from an online store targeting women to a women social network platform, with a twist as developer Octav Druta explained.
www.CaptainGo.com: Launched in 2007 by Lavinius Marcu and Vladimir Oane. Online travel booking solution designed for the tourism industry.
www.strada32.com: Managed by Mirela Ciucur and Liviana Mustafa, includes Vlad Stan as a partner. The project targets Romanian living abroad that want to buy gifts and send them to relatives or friends in Romania. Wants to offer a social network platform with facilities and services for its members.
Report From The Future: AdTech London 2008
I always found AdTech events as a leap forward the future, a way to understand what’s next in the online marketing business. That’s why I have asked Mihai Dragan - who have attended this years’ event in London - to share his impressions regarding major trends. Here below is his report:
I’ve spent two days at AdTech 2008 looking for answers regarding the online marketing industry. And I’ve found some.
The rise of mobile
The mobile marketing rises and rises. I’ve noticed deprecation in SMS Marketing (it was bound to happen, with all the possible spam usage) and a huge growth in online-mobile convergence. The interesting thing is that even big companies are starting to enhance their users’ mobile internet experience. Orange UK for example was offering an interesting subscription. It included voice, SMS, MMS but also access to Facebook and MySpace accounts.
The downfall of email marketing
Who would have thought that email marketing, once one of the most talked about services on the market, would become so unpopular to marketers worldwide? The companies that presented email marketing software/services were practically invisible in the exhibition area.
Pay per click advertising
Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, MSN adCenter were the most talked about advertising programs. Google, of course dominates the market. There were countless companies posing as experts and trying to gain new market share and new clients. This is probably normal. An increasingly ROI conscious market (due to financial recession news) was bound to look for better accountable marketing expenditures. The PPC experts I’ve talked with weren’t complaining about loss of business or market share problems.
Social Media
As for Social Media the question on every one’s mind was “how do we use it”. By now agencies and marketers alike have understood there is a rather large potential in this new user-centered media. I found one answer in Rob Marcus’ seminar on “Extracting value from user generated content”. One of the future uses of social media seems to be the niche commercial oriented social networks, centered on reviews, social shopping etc. due to their easy monetization.
On the other hand I was amazed when famous digital agency AKQA presented one of their last year’s best ran social media campaign – the Nike PhotoID, a campaign combining social media, mobile advertising and web collaboration to promote the Nike Dunk, a classical basketball shoe, originally launched in 1985.
All in all the good news are that internet expenditures will rise and rise, with TV, radio and print going down. It seems that 2009 will be the year that Internet will overtake TV in the UK. Amazing as it seems – we are living historic moments. The emerging new media is taking over TV.
AdTech 2008 was great. I was happy to find out that we came a long way in the last two years. The Romanian market is closing the gap between eastern and western online marketing strategies. Although we have a long way to go, I’m optimistic. The future will probably bring more and more innovation, professional services and better online marketing.
Smartphones usage in Romania
It seems there are around 70,000 smartphones in Romania using Windows Mobile. Does anybody knows the number of the total smartphone users in Romania?
Maybe the local market has reached a critical mass, for mobile marketing, for local content providers as well as for local applications developers. I like for example how the New York Times, CNN or www.style.com have developed their mobile platform for their content. Any similar platforms for Romanian content?
11 minutes interview with Vladimir Oane
I had a chat with Vladimir Oane, after he won last week at SeedCamp, with his project uberVU.com. Seven people are working full time on the development of the project, but more hiring is on the way. Here are some highlights of the interview:
Describe the evolution of your project and your team, from when you won the 11minutes Award 10 months ago, then your participation to Next Web in Amsterdam and finally your presence at SeedCamp in London and winning the big prize of 50,000 euro.
When we won 11 minutes we only had an idea. That’s why it was called Big Bang… it was a codename. But 11 minutes gave us the validation of that idea. Enough to make us start building it. We developed the first prototypes in 2-3 months working with some of the people from Metromind team (my first company that I am not involved in on a daily basis). Now we have a dedicated team and we focus on uberVU only.
How was the Seedcamp experience?
Amazing. I have met a lot of great people and I was blown away by their modesty and their down-to-earth approach. I’ve learned so much in terms of product, marketing etc. I still have troubles to put everything together.
What do you feel you learned?
Seedcamp week was an intense mentoring program followed by a pitch in front of 40 of the most well-known VC’s from Europe and USA. Intense means that you have firechats and mentoring sessions with very qualified people all day, from 8 am to 8 pm. And in the evening cocktails where the discussions continue. It is very exhausting but also very rewarding as all the people you meet change your point of view and you begin to see your app and your market in different shades and colors. I have a notebook filled with ideas, connections and strategy ideas.
What can/will you do with 50,000 euro? How much shares did you give for this amount? Who are the investors?
One thing first: Seedcamp is not about the money. It is about the validation of your team and business, access to an amazing network of qualified people and third, access to capital. It may be just 50.000 euros but we are speaking about very smart money for a very short period of time. We are pretty advanced with the product and we hope to go to market until all the money are spent. Some of the investors can be found here. In terms of shares: we can not disclose anything for the moment.
How would you describe your project ubervU.com?
A platform for tracking and participating in conversations that take place across a variety of platforms/services on the social web.
For example when you post something (blog post, video, picture etc) you get responses on a variety of other services (Digg, Twitter, Facebook etc). It is hard to track all of them and respond to all of them, especially if you lack context. We gather all those responses and we build a structured and unified conversation that you can follow and add you own responses to.
How did it evolve from last year? Who are you competing with? And… What is the business model?
It evolved a lot. Paul Graham said you have no idea what you are building until you build it. He was so right. We changed the product many times since we started working on it. From mainly a distributed publishing platform we evolved into a conversation aggregation service. We have a lot of competitors in this space but none of them are really doing what we are doing. The exact business model is still work in progress but we will go freemium as a monetization model.
What’s next?…:)
Making uberVU big. Really big.
Back on Track
After almost 10 months in hibernation, I am back blogging on 11minutes.net. Things are moving on the Romanian Internet market, and I think it is worth talking about it to an international audience, as most of what is happening now is reported only in Romanian.
Also, the second edition of 11minutes Awards will take place on November 26th, 2008, during BizDays event, so who is ready for a pitch in front of International and local investors, is more than welcomed to contact us. More details soon. By the way, last years winner of 11minutes Awards Vladimir Oane presented his project at SeedCamp in London and was one of the winners, including an investment of 50,000 euro in the project.
This Week: Le Web 3
At the last moment, after a short conversation with Dragos Novac, I decided to go to Paris for a few days, to be at Le Web 3, THE place in Europe where all the Internet glitterati meet once a year…:) I hesitated, as at this time I should be working with my partners and team on next year budgets, objectives, strategies, etc…. But this is a kind of “Back to the Future” kind of event that I would not want to miss…
Interesting, they have in parallel with the event a Startup Competition on December 11th, and an Entrepreneur’s Investing Workshop - in partnership with SeedCamp, on December 12th.
I’ll tell you more from there…
Last Week at NetCamp
Great conference, with a lot of positive energy coming from all those web entrepreneurs, and a great line up of speakers. Interesting was also NetStartUp, a section of the event dedicated to a contest of the best web project.
It was revealing to see that from the 5 finalists, 2 were also finalists at the 11 minutes event (but with different projects), and still more interesting the winner was… Vladimir Oane, the same entrepreneur that won the 11 minutes contest was the winner at NetStartUp… What should we understand here? That we are in shortage of entrepreneurs, or that those are the best web entrepreneurs revealed this year?…
Mircea Scarlatescu- Imobiliare-Rezidentiale.ro
Imobiliare-Rezidentiale.ro is an interactive tool for browsing trough new real estate offers in Bucharest and nearby towns. It pinpoints the best buildings, surrounding facilities and access to town resources, all visually present on an interactive map.